Designing a Clothing-Preset button!

  • Greetings scallywags, today I wanted to compile a suggestion I've had since my first day on the waves, now that we finally have the promise of ship loadouts incoming - cosmetic loadouts!

    I personally always dress my pirate to match the company I represent, but have been cursed with a pirate who looks bad in most of the costumes (plus, in a cosmetic-driven game, costumes don't really match this purpose anyway), so I wanted to share my ideas!

    Firstly, add a new tab adjacent to the "costume" tab in the clothing customisation chest - called loadouts (or presets..?) In there is an option for creating a new loadout, updating an existing one, or deleting a loadout.

    Creating or updating a loadout is like creating a new costume - it changes all the clothes internally to an exact copy of what you have equipped - and in addition, all of your weapons, tools, your title, curse, and pet are saved as well. Essentially everything that would make up a pirate look!

    When you have one of these loadouts equipped, a new tab appears in the armory. It takes place as the new "default" tab when you open it, for ease of use in emergency situations. It shows you one of each weapon type - Sailor's by default, of course, but it matches what you had equipped in your current loadout. This would create a much healthier system not only for hard-core roleplayers to start sessions quickly, but also to solve a recurring issue for any hardened (and frugal) legend on the high seas:

    If you're in a PvP situation, and you need to swap weapons quickly, there are two issues - if you own a lot of weapons, then all your Eye of Reaches need to be scrolled through to access even the default skin. Yes, you can click on the tab at the top, but it's not intuitive enough to be easy in an emergency (at least, not in my opinion). Additionally, this issue means that as tensions rise, players just pick any old skin for their weapon - even if it doesn't match. It goes without saying that this is a small issue, but in a cosmetic-driven game with a heavy RP focus, it doesn't make sense to have to equip a weapon that doesn't match your look just because of the time sink. On a personal note, the stress of having to look at every skin often causes me to fumble and equip things accidentally (might just be me, though).

    With my system, picking any of the four weapons would be as intuitive and quick as it is when you first complete the Maiden's Voyage (the good old days when you only had the Sailor's skins to pick from) - and keep your pirate as shiny and fresh as ever.

    (When you don't have a loadout equipped, the armory should work as it does now, to be easier on new players.)

    The UI for picking loadouts to update or delete sounds complicated and unique for Sea of Thieves, but I imagine Rare has solved this issue in light of adding ship loadouts, which would have the exact same problem.

    Another design issue is that you can only have two weapons equipped at once, when you need to pick all four. To solve this, I think there are two intuitive options:
    Either add four slots for manual input, as any cosmetic other than weapons is chosen currently. Alternatively, "updating" a loadout's look adds the two skins for the weapons you have equipped, and doesn't reset the types of weapon that you DON'T have equipped, meaning the method of play would look like this:

    • equipping all your clothes, tools, pets, curses, weapons and titles the way you want.
    • clicking either "create new loadout", or "update existing loadout" in the new Loadout tab of the clothing chest.
    • going to the armoury chest and selecting your favourite skins for the other two types of weapon
    • going back and clicking "update existing loadout" to complete and future-proof the look in case of rough battles.

    It's a small suggestion overall, but with the promise of ship presets, more of the fanbase than ever is begging for this to be added (me included), and so I thought I'd give a go at designing a system myself as a prospecting game developer. Of course, designing ship presets might have made more intuitive systems for handling this than I could think of (accessorising those cabins sounds like one heck of a UI challenge), so if a Rare Dev does see this, feel free to change whatever you like. But PLEASE include weapons, pets, and titles in an intuitive way, as I feel they might be overlooked.

    Either way, thank you for reading, and see you on the high seas!

1
Posts
448
Views
1 out of 1