Swimming…
 

A 45 second video showing diving into the water and swimming. Well sort of the first 15 seconds shows him being bathed by 3 woman (no idea why).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5xoPTGHRX4

I know it's the norm for all of these games, but as much as I adore swimming and underwater exploration - it's a bit silly that he swims around in full armor with weapons on his back.

I guess The Witcher has a somewhat more serious tone, making me wish they'd done something like auto-removing that stuff, at least in a visual sense.

It would be a nice touch if he changed or removed his armor to swim, but it's a nitpick at best. I'm just glad that you can actually swim and dive.

I agree, it's not like they don't have his model without clothes anyhow….

Yea, I also can't understand it… I mean… Where did the fourth one disappear? :D

He is being bathed for the audience with the emperor of Nilfgaard. But why pick it as an intro to a swimming demo? I have no idea either :)

I'm not sure that there is a good solution to the swimming in armour problem, though. Having a convincing removal/donning animation would be a pain in the arse for gameplay, and an instant transition to swimming in his pants would be pretty jarring, too. I can live with the "let's pretend armour floats" solution, as perhaps the least bad solution.

I think they did it well in Guild Wars 2 - which did have "instant change" of armor to mostly scuba diving gear.

It worked and didn't seem jarring to me at all, though others may disagree.

But it's not a big deal, it just seems like an unfortunate standard - now that Witcher 3 has such a "plausible" vibe in so many other ways.

There's no ideal solution, but I think a good compromise would be a reasonably fast fade-to-black transition between armor and something more appropriate. Once you reach a certain depth of water, the game could prompt for swimming transition - and there could be an option to disable the prompt and it would just auto change with the transition at that depth.

Guys… he's a Witcher Jedi. He swims through the Force. Armor is of no concern to a Witcher Jedi. It's like Yoda lifting Luke's X-Wing from the swamps. Size and weight do not matter.

Didn't Morrowind have penalties for swimming in armor? But I agree with Ripper. If players are ok with being able to carry 300 kg worth of objects in their inventory there shouldn't be too much of a problem of swimming in armor.

Actually looking forward to this title, but wish they had not copy/pasted swimming design mechanics from practically every other rpg out there. At least give me some superficial "wet" decals on the clothing.

So the point of that video seemed to seemed that if you swim you instantly get swarmed by enemies that you can't attack or defend against?

I think it's just a clip from an older video. In the original, he was fighting a losing battle with the harpies, and thought he might escape underwater. I think they wanted to show the dynamism of enemy attacks, where even flying foes will dive. I thought it was pretty cool.

Yeah, in Ghoper's vid there is an admittedly short (about 24 seconds) swimming sequence and no monsters in sight.

I hope diving serves more of a purpose than simply escaping enemies. I'm looking forward to (hopefully) finding hidden items and locations that can only be found by exploring underwater.

It has been said it does….as well as boating.

I tried to find a video of boating with nothing else in it but couldn't.

In Two Worlds you could drown if you tried to swim in armour, so you had to remove it actively before swimming. That is the most role-play-like solution IMHO.

If we could play Triss as character I would want this options, since we can't he can keep it all on.

But Ciri is still an option. ;)

To funny, you want me to cheat on Triss…that isn't happening. lol