Swimming (skill)
From The Nameless Mod
Swimming is a skill in Deus Ex. It is remarkable amoung the Deus Ex skills in that it whereas most skills are useful, swimming is a complete waste of skill points. It has been removed in TNM in favor of the Fists weapon skill, which probably isn't very useful either because it competes with Weapons: Low-Tech. Investing in low-tech will let you destroy doors and security cameras with the combat strength aug in addition to being able to kill anyone in one or two hits and quickly destroy corpses instead of hiding them. The fist is supposed to be a fallback weapon and probably isn't as versatile as the good melee weapons. If someone really used melee weapons so little that they couldn't spare 4 slots for the DTS, they probably wouldn't spend skill points on the fist anyway, which uses no inventory room.
The skill makes the player swim faster and have more breath underwater. It is the cheapest skill in the game.
Why is swimming useless?
In order to call swimming useless, we need to compare it to the other skills in Deus Ex. All of the skills are more costly than swimming, which gives it an advantage since a player with a bunch of high-level skills can upgrade it for relatively little skill points compared to their other skills, but it is still a waste.
Most of Deus Ex takes place on land. If you spend 20 hours playing Deus Ex, you'd spend maybe one of those hours swimming. The other skills (weapons, hacking, and increased item efficiency) are all useful for a majority of the game. They also sometimes provide an incredible benefit at a certain point in the game, which can make up for a lack of general usefulness.
In contrast, swimming only applies to 1/20th of the game so it would have to be very useful at those points in order to justify its cost. It isn't. All it does is make you swim faster and stay underwater longer. The latter functionality can be provided by rebreathers (which are affected by the tool use skill), medkits (affected by the medicine skill), and the aqualung and regeneration augs. With the exception of aqualung, the skills and augs used provide other benefits to the player. Medkits can also be used for any healing. Augmentation upgrade canisters are arguably a less important resource than skill points later in the game, so a high-level aqualung and regeneration aug could be considered less expensive than swimming. Both can be installed for little cost because the torso can hold three augs and there is no benefit for not using all three. As for swimming faster, this can only be accomplished with the swimming skill, but the most important advantage it gives is being able to transverse longer areas of water, which increased breath would also do. The number of areas in the game where the player engages in combat underwater can be counted on one hand, so increased speed does little else.
Deus Ex strongly rewards the player for maxing out weapon skills, which are the most expensive skills in the game. It is better to max out rifles than to have advanced in both pistols and rifles. A player with a maxed out weapon skill has perfect aim and can use their weapons more because there is more ammo later in the game, many weapons are affected by the same skill and use different ammo, and the player will use less ammo with maxed skill. In addition, there aren't a whole lot of skill points in Deus Ex and the skills are quantized to great extent. You would upgrade your skills maybe 10 times in Deus Ex. Deus Ex is shorter than your typical RPG, it is impossible to max all or a significant amount of your skills, and it is linear, so skills need to be upgraded early to have maximum use. If you upgrade swimming, you are reducing the effectiveness of the other skills even if you have plenty of skill points. It is better to save your points for worthwhile skills rather than waste them on fodder in Deus Ex.
Swimming is useless because it is so easily replacable by other skills or augs, most of which are cheaper, more general, or more effective. Also, it costs skills points which is one of the most important resources in Deus Ex in terms of supply and demand. It also does very little; there are a few secret areas in the game where swimming or its alternatives are necessary but you can mostly get by without increasing your breath or speed underwater.
The uselessness of swimming in popular media
Yahtzee talks about how useless the swimming skill is in Deus Ex in his review of an irrelevant game: (At the end of the Guitar Hero World Tour review).
