Re: Info-Thead zum Game
Verfasst: So 10. Apr 2011, 22:02
mhh.. auto-facing?
There's no rigid wall in the game at this point. You walk in shallow water, it becomes deeper as you progress, and at some point you start getting the message that you should turn back. You can continue on and ultimately drown (then respawn) or move back.GamewizX hat geschrieben:I completely disagree with this. An easy fix to not break the world designs is to add a fatigue system. You swim too far out, you become fatigued and must turn back. It's a wall to keep you from going too far, but at least it's not so rigid of a wall in not being able to swim at all.
In order for swimming to be actually worth the implementation and time, we'd want to do it right - meaning content built around it, maybe a water centric planet, etc. Absent that content - there are no water worlds in this game - we've decided to focus on other things that are more important to us.
I can definitely see why people like swimming (or any other feature for that matter), however, the decision to put a feature like that in the game cannot be solved with a simple yes/no poll. In reality, the question is more like “Do you want swimming or 'feature X'”. In this case, we chose feature X (or Y, or Z) for a number of reasons - one being that just adding a very basic version of swimming without building proper content around isn't something we wanted to focus on for launch.
We'll definitely look at this again later, after launch, but if we were to decide to do it, it'd be accompanied with proper content and mechanics themed around it.
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[quote="Georg Zoeller | Principal Lead Combat Designer on 'Swimming in The Old Republic' ""]
shobu hat geschrieben:This sounds like a very carefully worded way of saying "You walk along the bottom of the water as if the water isn't there, until you either turn around and walk back out or until the game eventually kills you". This is the kind of thing that makes people go "Wow. Can you believe they released the game in this state? That's just plain unpolished."
Which is why you will not be able to walk on the bottom of the sea. You can wade through waist deep water slowly getting deeper and at some point you start freezing/drown/etc.
Additionally, since this is a design decision made a long time ago, there is no reason for you to endlessly walk into the water as well. There's just no content out there that would require you to do that. We don't want you to run around in the deep water, it exists as a soft planet boundary - not as adventuring space.
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[quote="Georg Zoeller | Principal Lead Combat Designer on 'Swimming in The Old Republic' ""]
Realism does not necessarily equate immersion. Sometimes it can help it along, but sometimes it can fight it, and there are definitely different ways for players to get that goal.its not an obsession with swimming, its an obsession with immersion.
A sense of immersion often comes from a sense of flow, from a sense that players are in the experience fully and totally. You certainly can be immersed in the realness of, say, the lush islands in Crysis. You also can be immersed in the pure action of Quake or even a really good run in Tetris. It’s all about how smoothly the experience feeds into itself and into your own perceptions.
My experience with swimming in most MMOs (and in fact, most other games) has not been particularly immersive. They are usually along the lines of "Where am I getting shot from? Why is my map useless? How far away is my target, really? Can I escape this fight swimming at this pokey speed? Why do my combat moves look so janky? Why does my pet look janky? Why is pathfinding janky? Why is navigating my character around tight spaces so difficult? Why does the game let players use jumping in and out of water to exploit? Where is there a designer I can punch in the throat?”
When you’re having experiences like that, you’re not in the game, you’re instead an angry and frustrated person staring at a keyboard. Failures in these areas don’t feel like challenges you couldn’t overcome, they feel like places where the game robbed you. When you start having these reactions, you are not immersed.
Doing swimming poorly is hard. Doing swimming very well (i.e. solving all of the problems above and then building the content to really take advantage of it) is very hard. BioWare is not a company that prides itself on halfway solutions typically. We’d prefer to swing for the fences - if we decide to take a feature, do it well. We don’t always succeed, mind you, but that’s the intent.
We’re not other games. And none of those 'other games' have the same feature set as each other, anyway. Each of them has had a different design philosophy, a different focus, a different set of problems to deal with, etc. And ours will be different still.However, why is it that other games are able to do this, but not TOR?
There are a lot of features that these games have that we don’t have. There are a lot of features we have that they don’t have – and likely never will. Features have a substantial cost – not just a cost to develop, in this case, but a cost to design, worldbuild, build art for, QA and support for years to come. The senior design leads spend a lot of time comparing the various features, and figuring out what will make the best package of combined features – i.e. the experience that we call the game.
Because really, no feature exists in a vacuum. It’s all good and well to say “This game must have Baby Seal Clubbing because game XXX had Baby Seal Clubbing 10 years ago and so this game is going to be like one built by primitive cavemen designers who had no idea of the magic of Baby Seal Clubbing!” But the MMO genre is so established now that the possibility space for features is very large, and no, not all of them will make it in. For every feature, there’s a lot more discussion that happens amongst the designers. Does this feature support or fight the other features in the game? Does the feature highlight what we’re trying to do, or elevate the IP, or serve part of the populace that is currently underserved? Put shortly, is this feature right for the game? Or is there a better place we can spend all those resources to make something truly magical?
Because at the end of the day, we’re not trying to make 'just another MMO but with lightsabers'. We don’t want to blindly include features because some of our competitors are doing so. We want SWTOR to be its own experience and its own identity, and this occasionally means doing things differently and taking some chances.
Does this mean that Baby Seal Clubbing will make it in? Well, I fought for it, but no.
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