As a vague idea, sailing sounds good, but once you actually start thinking in depth about what it would involve and how one would go about training it, it just falls a bit apart in my opinion. It would be very difficult to avoid it becoming a "forced" skill, which basically means a skill that will make you use a bunch of existing skills while you essentially play a minigame, except the minigame is replaced with an actual skill with levels and experience (a.K.a. dungeoneering).
Also it would be completely disconnected or isolated from the existing gameworld so it wouldn't feel very important or change other aspects of the game to be more diverse (lack of integration). Take hunter skill for example. It intergrates perfectly in the game world. You see hunting locations everywhere that make the scenery more diverse. Hunter products benefit a variety of skills such as ranged, and also introduce spottier capes which are useful in almost every non-combat activity. Cooking/fishing in a similar way are deeply rooted into the gameplay and it would be hard to do anything combat related if these two skills didn't exist. Sailing would most likely struggle to have the same kind of impact on the rest of the game as all of the pre-dungeoneering skills have.
IMO any new skill should be integrated into the existing gameworld in a way that other activities benefit from the skill, instead of creating a separate world next to the existing gameworld (dungeoneering, sailing) that has almost no impact on the rest of the game.
08-Aug-2015 20:58:48
!
