When you're in the water you can look pretty much straight upwards, but not even close to directly downwards. This makes swimming underwater feel clunky, especially in tight spaces like caves and shipwrecks. More importantly, in water combat (which feels clunky to begin with) it gives a huge advantage to players directly beneath enemies since they can shoot upwards at the enemy above who is left defenseless and unable to shoot directly downwards. Free movement in the water would feel much less clunky in general and improve water combat. It might make deep diving potentially disorienting, but that is fine to me as diving can be a disorienting experience in real life.
Water Movement/Combat
I like that diving below an enemy can give an advantage. Prolonged use of it can risk damage from drowning, so it can't be used forever (even with a ton of food on you you'll eventually die or at least run out of ammo), and it can force players in the water to think about 3 dimensions, which is quite different from fights on ships, which are largely two-dimensional, and fights on islands, which are varied but often only thought about as open sight lines or broken sight lines.
@ultmateragnarok Allowing free movement would make water fights even more 3 dimensional. Locking your movement to a certain angle keeps it somewhat 2 dimensional when it could be omnidirectional.
If you could track someone directly below you in the water, then there would be no reason to try to get there, since it provides you with no advantage and you took time where you could've been firing back to get there. Giving the ability to look straight down would make fights more 2 dimensional, since the ability to stay in place indefinitely is far better than moving to a place where you can still be shot and not being able to fire back in the time it takes to move there.
@ultmateragnarok I see what you mean, but I still don't think it's a good mechanic. It would be less 3 dimensional in the sense that depth would be less relevant because it would no longer provide an advantage, but it would be more 3 dimensional in the sense that your movement would be less limited. The way that it is now limits your movement to be more 2 dimensional by making it unnecessarily clunky to swim downwards since you have to go at an angle. Either way, the dimensionality is not my main gripe, but rather the whole advantage/disadvantage situation. Perhaps my main gripe is not so much that you can't aim/shoot straight downwards but rather that you cannot move straight downwards, which are in a sense one in the same with the way movement works. When someone is directly below you and decently far down you cannot aim at them and you have no good way to move to a spot where you can shoot them in a reasonable amount of time because you must swim at such an angle. Unless they're a bad shot you're essentially screwed. Positioning/strategy are great/important and all, but the player above should not be left completely helpless.
1 out of 5
