Posted June 13, 2015
I am wandering around the waters surrounding Skellige checking out all of the "?" locations, most of which are "smuggler's cache" locations (all of which have the lamest most useless loot ever making seeking these locations out kind of pointless except to "complete" the game fully), and I see this huge ship in the water parked there just off the coast of a small island. I save my game and approach it cautiously from a distance circling around looking for signs of life. I move closer and sirens spawn in (enemies visibly spawning in is pretty lame too for immersion) but no sign of humans. Ok, so I kill the annoying sirens then a short while later more sirens that weren't there magically spawn in practically right in my face. I kill them too.
Ok, so after killing off all the annoying sirens, I dive in the water and collect the lame loot from the 3 smuggler's cache chests underwater. It more or less boils down to a box of used toothpicks and an empty styrofoam cup in terms of worthfulness. But... there's this massive ship! Hell, it must be loaded with goodies! Ok, so I circle around the ship swimming and can't find a way to get on the ship at all. I get back on my boat and circle around the ship and find a loading area that has a piece of the rail missing obviously to drop a ramp down on when loading/unloading, so I park my boat as close to that as I can, and Geralt refuses to grab onto the ship. I try running and jumping, different angles, etc. and no matter what I do I can't board that ship.
Ok. No problem, so the ship is not intended to be boarded I guess. So _why_ put it there? Any gamer that all of a sudden stumbles upon a huge ship for the first time is going to naturally be curious and thinking OMGWTF LOOT! Or "Holy shit, maybe I can steal this ship! SHIP UPGRADE!". Just about any remotely curious gamer will want to board the ship and look around at least because well... it's THERE. Why is it there? Just to look pretty in the water?
Ok so now I'm in a dilemma. Do I keep frantically doing death defying non-fun acrobatics trying to jump ridiculously into the boat and hoping I get the right magic angle and luck to board to hopefully find a mega chest loaded with treasure such as a dirty pair of socks and a used tampon? Or... do I say "just a prop" and leave the area wondering if I missed finding The Sword of 1000 Truths or something?
Ugh...
If you go underwater, Geralt's body can swim THROUGH the ship's bottom too, but can not get inside of it. Seems clear that it is just a visual prop which has no proper collision detection on it. I found another ship in the water similarly before although it was smaller than this one but bigger than the small rowboat Geralt uses. I did get on that ship to find a body tied to the mast and burned alive, and no loot. The awesome thing about that other ship is that just walking from one end of the ship to the other exploring Geralt suddenly magically was transported about 50 feet into the air directly above the ship and promptly plummeted 50 feet down onto the deck of the ship with instadeath. Awesome, just walking across a ship can have you catapulted into the air for no reason to plummet to your death. Fortunately I save my game often and didn't lose anything.
When I found each of these ships I was excited. "OOOH, I found something cool, can't wait to see what's inside!" only to find they're both ultimately props with buggy collision detection bugs that can/might kill you, and protected by sirens that are on infinite respawn-right-in-your-face.
Game is f'n awesome, but glitches like these totally break immersion and leave me wondering if it was supposed to be this way, or if they had bigger plans for these ships and they got dropped on the cutting room floor racing to the May 19 deadline. Hopefully a future patch either makes the ships bug fixed and boardable with some useful reason for them being there, or just removes them to not waste people's time with superflous glitchy game assets that can inadvertently kill you.
I've seen a whale's tail pop out of the water here and there a few times... I wonder if that's just eye-candy too or if I can kill it or eat it or something. :) Still cool either way.
Attachments:
tw3-ship1.jpg - Map showing location of ship I'm at.
tw3-ship2.jpg - Screenshot showing point I'm attempting to board the ship with my boat backed up as far as it will go.
Ok, I go back in the water and swim around the underside of the boat, as I passed inside the boat that way by accident trying to avoid sirens earlier. The sirens are dead until they magically respawn whenever they see fit so I take a break for it and ... voila! I manage to swim inside of the ship with a bit of dinking around. The awesome part is that while the ship has crappy collision detection underwater and lets me swim right through the wood into the inside of the ship, it has amazing award winning collision detection INSIDE the ship that doesn't let me swim back out of the ship or move around much at all. :)
I took some amusing screenshots (attached). I suppose I should report this as a bug on the CDPR forums but man... I've encountered 200 such issues in the game and it'd take weeks to report them all with enough info to be useful. On the upside, despite the bugs the game has, it only has 1/10,000th the bugs that Skyrim has, and I haven't found a single quest breaking bug yet although I've heard some rumours there are a few.
Enjoy the screenies... :)
Ok, so after killing off all the annoying sirens, I dive in the water and collect the lame loot from the 3 smuggler's cache chests underwater. It more or less boils down to a box of used toothpicks and an empty styrofoam cup in terms of worthfulness. But... there's this massive ship! Hell, it must be loaded with goodies! Ok, so I circle around the ship swimming and can't find a way to get on the ship at all. I get back on my boat and circle around the ship and find a loading area that has a piece of the rail missing obviously to drop a ramp down on when loading/unloading, so I park my boat as close to that as I can, and Geralt refuses to grab onto the ship. I try running and jumping, different angles, etc. and no matter what I do I can't board that ship.
Ok. No problem, so the ship is not intended to be boarded I guess. So _why_ put it there? Any gamer that all of a sudden stumbles upon a huge ship for the first time is going to naturally be curious and thinking OMGWTF LOOT! Or "Holy shit, maybe I can steal this ship! SHIP UPGRADE!". Just about any remotely curious gamer will want to board the ship and look around at least because well... it's THERE. Why is it there? Just to look pretty in the water?
Ok so now I'm in a dilemma. Do I keep frantically doing death defying non-fun acrobatics trying to jump ridiculously into the boat and hoping I get the right magic angle and luck to board to hopefully find a mega chest loaded with treasure such as a dirty pair of socks and a used tampon? Or... do I say "just a prop" and leave the area wondering if I missed finding The Sword of 1000 Truths or something?
Ugh...
If you go underwater, Geralt's body can swim THROUGH the ship's bottom too, but can not get inside of it. Seems clear that it is just a visual prop which has no proper collision detection on it. I found another ship in the water similarly before although it was smaller than this one but bigger than the small rowboat Geralt uses. I did get on that ship to find a body tied to the mast and burned alive, and no loot. The awesome thing about that other ship is that just walking from one end of the ship to the other exploring Geralt suddenly magically was transported about 50 feet into the air directly above the ship and promptly plummeted 50 feet down onto the deck of the ship with instadeath. Awesome, just walking across a ship can have you catapulted into the air for no reason to plummet to your death. Fortunately I save my game often and didn't lose anything.
When I found each of these ships I was excited. "OOOH, I found something cool, can't wait to see what's inside!" only to find they're both ultimately props with buggy collision detection bugs that can/might kill you, and protected by sirens that are on infinite respawn-right-in-your-face.
Game is f'n awesome, but glitches like these totally break immersion and leave me wondering if it was supposed to be this way, or if they had bigger plans for these ships and they got dropped on the cutting room floor racing to the May 19 deadline. Hopefully a future patch either makes the ships bug fixed and boardable with some useful reason for them being there, or just removes them to not waste people's time with superflous glitchy game assets that can inadvertently kill you.
I've seen a whale's tail pop out of the water here and there a few times... I wonder if that's just eye-candy too or if I can kill it or eat it or something. :) Still cool either way.
Attachments:
tw3-ship1.jpg - Map showing location of ship I'm at.
tw3-ship2.jpg - Screenshot showing point I'm attempting to board the ship with my boat backed up as far as it will go.
Ok, I go back in the water and swim around the underside of the boat, as I passed inside the boat that way by accident trying to avoid sirens earlier. The sirens are dead until they magically respawn whenever they see fit so I take a break for it and ... voila! I manage to swim inside of the ship with a bit of dinking around. The awesome part is that while the ship has crappy collision detection underwater and lets me swim right through the wood into the inside of the ship, it has amazing award winning collision detection INSIDE the ship that doesn't let me swim back out of the ship or move around much at all. :)
I took some amusing screenshots (attached). I suppose I should report this as a bug on the CDPR forums but man... I've encountered 200 such issues in the game and it'd take weeks to report them all with enough info to be useful. On the upside, despite the bugs the game has, it only has 1/10,000th the bugs that Skyrim has, and I haven't found a single quest breaking bug yet although I've heard some rumours there are a few.
Enjoy the screenies... :)
Attachments:
tw3-ship1.jpg (412 Kb)
tw3-ship2.jpg (348 Kb)
tw3-ship3.jpg (305 Kb)
tw3-ship4.jpg (328 Kb)
Post edited June 13, 2015 by skeletonbow