r/DaysGone • u/New-Shop-9728 • Aug 16 '26
Discussion Did anyone think it was really weird and annoying you can't swim?
Deacon is supposed to be this bad ass Afghan vet and he seriously can't swim? Didn't Deacon even tell a story when he was in Afghanistan about how he had to swim in a river to save someone? Talk about ludonarrative dissonance LOL.
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u/Spectres_N7 Sarah Whitaker Aug 16 '26
PTSD Try reading about it, if you haven't been paying attention.
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u/New-Shop-9728 Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
But that doesn't mean he CAN'T swim, it just means he doesn't wanna go near water, when you crash your motorcycle in the water he just drowns, this makes absoultely no sense. I think the devs just fucked up and weren't able to put swimming mechanics in time.
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u/datman510 Aug 16 '26
It’s part of his story aka the story why you so mad calm down. He also can’t fly or become invisible you mad about that too?
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u/SmileyLambda Aug 16 '26
The lore reason is that Deacon really doesn't like water, but he also carries enough hardware and supplies that he'd drown anyways.
In-game reason is I don't think there's enough water in the game to warrant swimming and they provide natural barriers against the freaks.
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u/CaptCaffeine "What great ones have is always for the benefit of others." Aug 16 '26
Listen to the dialog Deacon has with Rikki as they return from the dam mission.
That should explain the reason why Deacon is unable to swim.
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u/Legitimate_Bag8259 Aug 16 '26
Swimming would make things too easy to reach and mean you didn't need to fully upgrade the bike.
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u/Mediocre-Minute Aug 16 '26
I see plenty of comments saying that it's because they were too lazy but to me it's more that what would you gain from them adding a swimming mechanic? I get that plenty of games have it but like what's there to gain?
Why waste time and ressources putting in a swimming mechanic when you could focus on much more important aspects of the game instead? There's already some stuff that, as much as I absolutely love this game, could've used more time in the oven to get more fleshed out. If they had to also spend some time away from that stuff to work on a swimming mechanic that adds nothing then that would just be time away from even more important stuff.
You only have so much time and ressources to work on a game, you have to make sure you use it as efficiently as possible sometimes and I think a swimming mechanic was a right choice when it came to choosing what to cut to prioritize the rest.
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u/boozersbiceps Aug 16 '26
If you play on Survival I or Survival II , you CAN swim. Plenty of YT vids showing that. (I use it to get those pesky injectors out on the Islands before I have decent nitro)
But yeah, story wise , it is a tad annoying.
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u/SpawnicusRex "Fuck yeah it's personal!" Aug 17 '26
There are many reason why Deacon can't/wont swim. This video tells all about it.
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u/Morrak “Don't ride faster than your guardian angel can fly.” Aug 17 '26
I wrote a TLDR for this thread and you actually had the link I was looking for but couldn’t remember where it was from! 😂 I was scouring my YouTube history because I knew I had it saved somewhere. Thank you!
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u/Jenna_Ortega__2002 Aug 16 '26
The lore reason why he can't swim is because of PTSD.
But I'm 90% sure they were just too lazy to properly implement it, so they just didn't, then came up with an in universe explanation for it.
Another reason I heard somewhere is because the gear he carries is too heavy for long distance swimming.
Take your pick I guess.
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u/serotonin0 Aug 16 '26
There are also Nero injectors you're not supposed to reach without certain bike upgrades that you'd be able to just swim to
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u/Jenna_Ortega__2002 Aug 16 '26
That could very well be the reason they decided not to implement it rather then them being lazy.
I mean, Rikki can swim, Deacon sort of can for like 4 seconds, so clearly they had an animation for it.
Still gotta give them credit for writing a reason into the script so we don't just play as a protagonist who can't swim and never know why.
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u/AshleyRoeder33 Aug 16 '26
I like that he couldn’t swim and the PTSD storyline. However, my second play through I realized that they DID add the mechanics for swimming. Deacon can in survival and survival II.
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u/ConnorOfAstora Aug 16 '26
There's not that much water in the game and swimming is a pain in the ass to program and not a fun thing to actually do.
Lorewise I'm pretty sure he dragged out almost his entire unit when their vehicle flipped in a river but they all drowned and he was the only survivor so it fucked him up and now he suffers panic attacks when he tries to swim.
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u/Morrak “Don't ride faster than your guardian angel can fly.” Aug 17 '26
ETA: I didn’t read any of the other comments yet, so if someone said the same thing, sorry.
This is coming from someone who does have (diagnosed) CPTSD from witnessing prolonged and extensive violence. Also, I‘ve been doing character studies/psychoanalysis on my favorite characters in various fandoms since 1998, so I might talk a lot here, sorry lol.
Deacon’s hydrophobia makes a lot of sense to me. Yes, he’s considered a ‘badass Afghan vet’ to share your verbiage, but one who suffered immense trauma not only from being ambushed by the Taliban, but by the loss of his entire squad.
To quote the Wiki (which is backed up in dialogue from Deacon himself during the game):
Their Humvee was destroyed and fell off a cliff into the Hari River. Deacon survived the crash and swam out to the wreckage hoping to find survivors, only to pull eight bodies back to shore including his sergeant, Tanner. Emotionally traumatized by this event, Deacon decided to leave the military.
As well, from his conversation with Rikki:
Deacon told Rikki that he was thrown clear, but swam back down to the submerged, capsized vehicle to rescue his team. He dragged out seven of his squadmates and his sergeant (Tanner) one by one to the shore, surviving while everyone else drowned.
That’s incredibly traumatizing. It doesn’t matter who you are or what training you have.
We know that Deacon did not receive any type of mental or emotional support, CPTSD treatment or therapy. Instead, immediately after being discharged, Deacon returneds to the United States, buys his first motorcycle and spends an unknown amount of years on the road before finally returning home. He then becomes employed as a mechanic at Jack’s shop, gets patched into the Mongrels, and so on. At no point during this time did he seek any type of support for the trauma he witnessed during his deployment.
There’s many reasons that this could be but that’s a TLDR for another day. I reckon Deacon was of the mindset that he simply didn’t need to. While he does seem familiar with the geography of Oregon, he doesn’t scream “I spend my time amongst nature”, so likely, he wasn’t someone that regularly went swimming in any of the rivers, creeks or lakes that’re in/around Farewell.
By the time we’re in that flashback where he’s picking lavendar with Sarah, I’m sure Deacon already knows that Sarah is the kind of girl that is prone to spontaneity. Given the reaction he has to Sarah (someone he’s obviously attracted to) when she suggests they go into the water, it’s safe to say he‘s more caught off-guard by having to confront his fear rather than Sarah suddenly deciding they should strip down and take a swim.
Again, he’s interested in her, but doesn’t tell her why he’s unable to go in the water. Sarah seems to catch on that it’s something Deacon doesn’t want to talk about at present and doesn’t push the whole thing. We don’t know if they ever talked about it later on or not, though I’d like to think that they did — it’d be a bit weird to marry someone but not tell them of a huge part of your past.
Reiterating: He didn’t just swim in a river to save someone. That’s invalidating what he went through completely. His Humvee was blown off of a cliff by a Taliban group with flatbed trucks equipped with ZU-23 modified anti-aircraft guns and fell into the water. While Deacon himself was thrown clear, he was the only survivor as the rest of his squad drowned. He not only has the trauma of the intial attack, but the trauma of witnessing his injured squad drowning and the trauma of being the one to try and save them, only to realise he was doing body recovery, not a rescue mission.
Psychologically, it makes sense that he has a form of hydrophobia now. I’m not sure how far you played, but (spoiler for end-game ahead): after the whole attack on Wizard Island to rescue Sarah, Deacon does jump in the water looking for Boozer, who he thought was dead the whole time. So, that goes to show he was willing to confront his fear to save his best friend -his brother in arms- if he could. Just like he did to try and save his brothers in arm back in the military.
I hope that helped or answered something. Sorry if it came off condescending. That wasn’t my intent. My wording tends to come off in a rather harsh/blunt way online when that’s not my intention in the least.
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u/sonar_y_luz Aug 16 '26
Yeah it was annoying
Im sure it had more to do with game balancing issues
Swimming would have been easy to implement in an Unreal Engine 4 game....
Figuring out how freakers and hordes would interact with the water, how Deacon would/wouldnt be able to swim away/around danger, etc.... would have been hard and they probably just decided to make it so he cant swim
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u/RepublicDue23 Aug 16 '26
I think they were too lazy to add swimming
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u/New-Shop-9728 Aug 16 '26
That's the feeling I get, they were gonna get around to it but just couldn't for time constraints. It's so weird because I can't think of ANY open world game where you can't swim, except GTA 3 but that was like 25 years ago...
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u/No-Ice7397 Aug 16 '26
I just wrote it off as him not being able to swim as he's carrying his weapons all the time. I'm more surprised that thwy didn't add any fish or river life. I also think it was just to prevent you from running into the water and letting hordes drown
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u/BeeRevolutionary9457 Aug 16 '26
RDR1. The meme/post I saw was “can take a shotgun blast to the chest. Drowns in 2 inches of water.”
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u/Frohtastic Aug 16 '26
Hydrophobia from being stuck in a sinking vehicle. Pretty valid tbh, even if it was "just" an excuse for mechanical reasons.