You’re playing your new favorite game that was just released today and you finally beat a big boss, then as you get your new objective you making a discovery that rattles you to the core.
The next level is underwater.
You set the controller down, go to get a drink or a snack hoping that you misread something. Maybe the level is instead on a dried lake bed. No such luck. Maybe the water levels in this game won’t be as bad as before. Maybe the developers learned from their previous titles as well as other games on the market. Maybe you won’t flounder about for hours trying to get used to a backwards control scheme as you drown for the tenth time. Maybe…
Ah, no, it’s the same as every other game out there. The water levels, for lack of a better term, SUCK.
Don’t get me wrong, now. I don’t want them to suck. I love water in the real world; watching it, getting wet with it, listening to it, swimming in it… Just every game seems to have countless problems when it comes to water-filled areas.
Swimming in Games – More Complicated Than Piloting a Nuclear Submarine
The most glaring and universal problem to ever rear its ugly head during underwater segments are controls. Two buttons and a control stick do not handle the completely three-dimensional atmosphere of a submerged character’s movement capabilities well enough. Generally, there is a button to go up, a button to go down, and a way to “steer.” There is no way to paddle backwards, there is no way to swim at the same height while maintaining the same elevation, and often there is no way to adequately defend yourself or properly aim your offensive capabilities.
Typically your character is slowed to an unbearable speed, which makes getting anywhere take an hour or more. This doesn’t help the majesty of water any and there’s also the point that usually when you’re underwater you’re timed by a visible (or even worse – invisible) breath limit. I don’t know about you, but swimming in real life does not feel as hideously slow as swimming in games feels. Even when watching other people swim, they seem to have grace and agility far beyond what they do on land. Yet, every video game character seems to weigh more than an oil tanker when exposed to open water, despite being athletic enough to chop of heads in one swing, hang on narrow ledges with ease, and sprint from rooftop to rooftop while on land.
Then when it is time to get out of the water? Guess what! The same button you use to swim further is the button you’re supposed to use to also jump out of the water. Prepare to mash that button several times while trying to aim yourself towards the shore to finally get out of your watery grave. I could get into an entire rant on control schemes with multiple uses for a single button, and I think I likely will later on!
Up Periscope!
Terrible controls are a problem on their own; add in bad camera angles and you get a whole new game. It’s hard to swim upwards when you can’t figure out which way is up, after all. Just as with the last section on controls, I could write an entire article on cameras and displays, so expect more detail on this soon.
However you may think that the camera angle may be the hardest to maintain deep underwater where you have a completely three-dimensional space to look around in, you’d be wrong! The highest numbers of camera conflicts seem to happen near the surface of the water. When you’re right below the surface and try to look downwards, most games lock the camera to the surface and don’t allow you to see just what is swimming upwards to eat you.
Bad camera angles are only compounded by bad layout. Far too many water levels are a vast open sea with few-to-no identifying features visible in several areas. Sometimes when you’re underwater, all you see is your character and blue. When there are landmarks, they’re usually repeated in several places. Is that the same giant clamshell I passed earlier or a new one?
Even when not out in the ocean, there are bad level designs that only compound camera problems. One of the more common water levels in a manmade area is a sewer network. Sewers are often a hive of twisting and turning tunnels that can and will induce claustrophobia on innocent victims. While it might set the mood, it makes a true nightmare out of adjusting your view to see what is around you and the repeated tiles along the walls make it even easier to get lost in the maze.
No, Not That Button! That Button! Only After That Button!
I’m sure many people find it funny how one of the games perpetrated as the best video games of all times also has one of the levels that strikes true fear into any gamer’s heart. There could likely be an article on the Water Temple, but it wasn’t that bad. I’ve played worse, at least.
Yet, Ocarina of Time’s most dastardly dungeon did have a huge pitfall in the form of a rising and falling water puzzle. In order to scale the dungeon, you had to switch the water level between low, medium, and high, but it wasn’t that simple. In order to get to medium from high, you first had to switch it to low, and then traverse half the dungeon to get it to medium. There was one spot for each water level and they were out of the way and could only be reached when the water was in one other level.
Combined with the need to constantly switch on and off the Iron Boots, the Water Temple is the perfect example of a tedious water level puzzle. However, there are times when such a puzzle is taken to the exact opposite extreme of being far too simple. In Pokémon Platinum, the Pastoria City Gym has a water rise-and-fall puzzle, but this time it completely lacks challenge.
In this scenario, you need to raise and lower the water to lift up floating bridges so you can cross paths. This time, there are several buttons to bring the water to different points and all of them work at any time (unless the water is currently at that level, of course!). The thing is though, you follow the path and right before you need a bridge, there’s the button you need. And when you get to the next point? There’s another button! There is no choice, no problem solving, and no difficulty. I’d accept this sort of thing as a tutorial to later puzzles, but the entire challenge is this simple. When a “puzzle” is this ridiculously easy in the middle of the game, it makes you wonder why it was there at all. It was almost as simple as just stepping up to the Gym Leader and saying hello, just it only made more work for the programmers.
There’s Other Fish in the Sea
While there are countless examples of bad design there are several that shine through to be heralded as one of the few good water-based levels.
One of the downsides for Super Mario 64 was the water levels, which suffered many of the problems stated earlier on. However, by the time you get to Super Mario Galaxy, the underwater levels become a breeze due to slightly refined controls, but especially due to the addition of holding onto Koopa shells underwater. The shells take care of the movement and give you a nice speed under the water, and the only controls you really need are steering. While it isn’t a perfect solution, the shell submarines are leaps and bounds over the slow and troublesome swimming in the previous games.
While not an improvement to the specific mechanics that had problems in the earlier games, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker deserves a mention here. After everyone got over the shock of the cel-shaded graphics, they got a new shock as they heard the game took place on a giant ocean. However, the ocean wasn’t just a giant blob of blue. You could see several islands away no matter where you were and the Tower of the Gods served as a prominent landmark no matter where you were. Some of the travel times were long, but the way was paved with various small ships, monster outposts, and even a small mini-game to jump over barrels. The travel time, coupled with the day and night cycle, honestly made the game seem really realistic in the right ways, giving you the feeling of being on an epic journey.
Earlier I mentioned the monotony of a sewer pipe’s decorations and the utter confusion caused by the layout, but the game Batman Arkham Asylum definitely did sewers right with Killer Croc’s lair and the surrounding area. While the lair is a little sparse in detail, the tension is set just right by the layout and the element of surprise from the big bad villain. While intentionally a maze, you are gifted a great hint to the layout in the form of Batman’s radio sensors, which honestly seem to work better than a map in such a sprawling maze. The area directly outside the lair is the only ‘true’ sewer pipe you have to visit in this game, and given that it’s a single line, it definitely doesn’t threaten you with getting lost, yet due to several broken floor panels, it isn’t a single line to navigate and thus achieving a great balance.
In closing…
Many games and gamers have had terrible experiences in the water, but that should not have us shy away from the water completely. Much like a child learning to swim, as the gaming industry grows older, we find better ways to go about the water levels and eventually learn what works and what doesn’t. Still, many players will hold a grudge against the accursed water-based zones for a long time and for good reason. Some game developers have directly mentioned player’s concerns when it comes to the water, and they have certainly proved they are working on solutions.
~B
