I would settle for a grappling-hook gun emote.
Fire your fake grappling-hook gun. A fake swing line shoots off into the night or blue yonder (a special effect that fades after a second or two). Toggle Super Leap and "be pulled away by your grappling line, nudge wink."
As people have illustrated for me, it's the closest you'll likely ever get to a swing power in this game. So I've asked people in-game if they'd buy this silly emote. People tend to say yes. Wipe that surprised look off your face. People bought the dance party pack. They will buy this.
Its only potential drawback is that it could backfire--in the public relations sense. Magazine reviewers might mock the feature while comparing and contrasting it with the competition's genuine offerings. It might be something to poke fun at. Or, I might just be over-thinking it.
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Hmm. What if... they applied the idea of Spring Attack into a pseudo teleport travel power that played the animation of the character firing the grapple into the air, an instant later he is pulled up and off screen very quickly. Shortly after he comes 'swinging' down at the reticles targeted location?
This wouldn't require any new code. This would simply be a series of new animations.
Granted you are still left with the whole, "Your character is swinging around the city, clearly not attaching his grapple to anything but 'good intentions'.", but then again, you get a similar effect with Spring Attack when the character jumps into the air and comes back down while in a low ceiling building or cave.
Sadly, this approach would end up turning 'Grapple Swing' into a glorified teleport travel power, but within the confines of the game engine, it's better than nothing. Plus, it would sell. I guarantee it!
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It's also pretty obvious that there is no mechanism for a power to move a player in any way other than instantaneously to a pre-defined point or to a reticule.
It's pretty obvious that movement is a special case in the code (Its one of the few places that animations have their rate altered, along with character height) and that gravity is a special case. Hence I don't think it's a stretch to say that even Cryptic's-other-game-style grappling into nothing would be tough-to-the-point-of-monopolising-most-of-their-time simple due to the inverse parabola and collision issues.
Soooo.
/jranger
Simple sounding things simply aren't always simple when it comes to writing the code to do it.
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