Swimming across the ocean?

GethOverlord

I know that Steven just answered on stream about players being able to go to costal nodes immediately and push traffic to populate and upgrade those nodes if that is their goals. But what about swimming across the ocean?
Personally I think it's a fun time waster sometimes to just make a new character and see how far you can walk them. WoW had the Alliance challenge of getting a toon to menethil harbor at low levels. Stuff like that. So you know someone is going to try to swim across the ocean in AoC. My question is that with the right pathing to avoid monsters and death is it even possible?
Is it possible for a player to even enter the ocean when they aren't on a boat? Are the death penalties too harsh to justify it? And will there be mechanics of a shark just coming to eat you after too long in the water? Like Jack and Daxter? Or a stupid fatigue bar, whatever 🙄

Taleof2Cities

Haven’t heard of any restrictions @GethOverlord … other than the ocean areas being PvP-only with no corruption mechanic.

Intrepid has shown swimming in prior development streams.

Enjoy your swims but watch out for pirates! xD

BaSkA_9x2

I hope that you're "easily" able to swim across bodies of water, without aggroing bosses and other big bois. You can fight in water, so even if small mobs attack you, I hope that you are able to defend yourself if your level is high enough.

Azherae

GethOverlord wrote: »

I know that Steven just answered on stream about players being able to go to costal nodes immediately and push traffic to populate and upgrade those nodes if that is their goals. But what about swimming across the ocean?
Personally I think it's a fun time waster sometimes to just make a new character and see how far you can walk them. WoW had the Alliance challenge of getting a toon to menethil harbor at low levels. Stuff like that. So you know someone is going to try to swim across the ocean in AoC. My question is that with the right pathing to avoid monsters and death is it even possible?
Is it possible for a player to even enter the ocean when they aren't on a boat? Are the death penalties too harsh to justify it? And will there be mechanics of a shark just coming to eat you after too long in the water? Like Jack and Daxter? Or a stupid fatigue bar, whatever 🙄

As of Alpha-1, this was possible, but the waters were not populated with mobs.

Generally though, you should probably expect that the only thing that will stop you, is the actual aquatic dangers.

akabear

You could swim completely across in the previous testing.

But would prefer limitations, especially if laden

Sathrago

Im headed to one of those island nodes for sure when the game starts. Gotta get ahead of the curb as the top fishy boi
Ill be hitting that island shore like:

Sengarden

I don’t think you should be able to swim across a vast ocean RoP Galadriel style. I think having some sort of barrier is a good thing for maintaining a sense of immersive weight and scale, and will incentivize the crafting and purchasing of solo vessels. I don’t mind fatigue bars, I think they reflect the most obvious complications you’d face trying to swim across an ocean, but other less obvious barriers like sea creatures who roam the upper levels of the ocean past a certain point would be fine as well. There needs to be an incentive for players to purchase small scale crafts for more reasons other than fishing.

Sathrago

Sengarden wrote: »

I don’t think you should be able to swim across a vast ocean RoP Galadriel style. I think having some sort of barrier is a good thing for maintaining a sense of immersive weight and scale, and will incentivize the crafting and purchasing of solo vessels. I don’t mind fatigue bars, I think they reflect the most obvious complications you’d face trying to swim across an ocean, but other less obvious barriers like sea creatures who roam the upper levels of the ocean past a certain point would be fine as well. There needs to be an incentive for players to purchase small scale crafts for more reasons other than fishing.

Hard disagree. The barriers to entry for areas in this game should be impassible terrain or dangerous mobs/terrains. Invisible barriers are garbage for an open world game to have.

SongRune

Even if you can swim across the ocean, there'll still be a good case for single-player boats and aquatic mounts. Swimming is slow. In Alpha 1 I was miserable when I accidentally dismissed my aquatic mount mid-ocean (you couldn't summon them (or use any other action) while swimming in that build). If it's something you intend to do more than occasionally, you're going to want something faster, or which has some carrying capacity of its own. Not to mention that it's a lot easier to fish while sitting on the deck of a boat than while treading water.

There's a lot of disadvantages to swimming as a mode of transportation. People are going to want boats either way, even just for one person.