A willing sacrafice.

[Trodorne]

oh yeah, i agree. makes it hard to run away from a horde of mobs when i get stuck on a small branch that was sticking out of the ground. mainly in Yhortar Jungle.

[Andromeda]

Character movement is on the thumbsticks for the PS2 and 360 versions I'm not sure what would be available to make that control any better. As for the PC, I was never to fond of how the game controlled, but I'm used to having a controller in my hand. So I'm probably bias.

Though I do have to ask, to what end would jumping and swimming improve the game?

The only thing that I really wanted better control over was the character creation at the beginning. The options were fairly small given the size of the population. So it was very easy to find myself out in the world. Unfortunately, as I've learned from game development, a robust character creation system comes a very high cost for the rest of the game. So they would have had to give up a lot of the detail in the game and probably a number of animations across the board.

[Trodorne]

to me ive always been a person of exploration when im not leveling up, so i guess when i played WoW, that part was the most appealing. being able to jump and swim would allow me to climb mountains, swim to the bottom of lakes to gather materials for alchemy, and etc.
so then it would raise another point to removing the loading borders and make everything as part of one map. like the idea of Running from windurst scaling over the rocks and getting to tahrongi canyons, or even climbing up along the spine to get to a high part of the crags.

so yeah in the end i would have to give up the HD detail of the land, and maybe of the characters themselves. cause Andromeda brought up a good point about the character creations, if the detail is slightly dropped, customize the faces, and the body type as well. i always wanted to make a moderately fat character.