Ferry of the Damned Overhauled

@sailorkek

While this is a decent rework of the Ferry, there's already too much involving the Ferry for this. It's a major multiplayer area, a place to meet worthy foes in battle (yes, some will taunt there, but that'll happen regardless), includes the Well of Fates and the Tale of the Morningstar chapter of the Shores of Gold, and has many bits of lore around it. Load times would be fixed if it and the ship were always kept loaded in, rather than the game keeping them out of play until you have to go there.

@sailorkek

Yes, they could do that, but with the lore there's only the one Ferryman, and only the one Ferry that he sails. Additionally, there are plenty of positive interactions on the Ferry as it is, not all are negative (in fact very few since those players tend to get reported).

@sailorkek said in Ferry of the Damned Overhauled:

After seeing a post about the ferry of the damned I thought I'd give one of my ideas as to how the death sequence should work in SoT.

Removing the multiplayer aspect
I won't deny SoT has a very unique respawn system and I do enjoy it but because you teleport (multiple times) during this, it is straining on players with lower connectivity and can be quite tedious should you come across a blunderbuss wielding spawn camper.

Players will still see their dead crewmates but no longer will they get to delight in teasing the enemy in purgatory.

Instead each crew will have their own personal ferries that mirror that which they are sailing.

Mirror world/ship*
The ferry of the Damned mirrors your own which, in short means;
Sloop crews have a sloop ferry
Brigantines get a brigantine ferry
Galleons get a galleon ferry

Going to the ferry
You still need to die...
Upon death your eyes slowly close only to re-open them aboard the ferry. You cannot interact with anything but you may now enter the hull of the ship to choose where you will spawn.

Returning to life
Whispers begin to count down from ten, upon zero the bell will ring, your eyes will close once more and when they open again you will be in the same spot you were on the ferry.

This gives players the choice to choose which part of the ship they would like to spawn be ot the deck or the hull, bough or stern. It also forces people to return to life instead of AFK farming on the ferry.

Very interesting idea... I wonder if this could be incorporated in such a way that it's still part of the open world.

It's just kind of a graphics filter, when you die, you become invisible to living pirates, and living pirates become invisible to you, the world around your ship becomes black, you can't see beyond a specific radius outside your ship, there's just empty void past that point... Colours would become less vibrant while you're dead too, so you're almost colourblind.

You walk around your ship, choose your spawn location, and when the bell rings, the graphics filter turns off again...

This means... No loading screens. :D

Is that possible, Rare? :D

@sweltering-nick

There could also be no loading screens if the game simply kept the ship and Ferry loaded at all times. No need to load anything since it's already there, and the only issue would be if the game can't place you like it sometimes used to glitch into, which was also due to loading so would also be fixed.

@ultmateragnarok Keeping the ferry loaded at all times would also affect performance, which, btw, is already reasonably terrible for everyone. : /

Rare has done a decent job optimizing the game over the year and a half so far, but the game still can't maintain stable FPS on certain islands.

And i have a high-end PC. xD

@sweltering-nick

PCs are known for not maintaining stable FPS in Sea of Thieves. XBoxes are similarly known for maintaining medium/low but stable FPS, depending on what you're comparing it to. As for the Ferry, it's actually not nearly as bad as the ships, since it doesn't move or have more than about two interaction points, which don't move either. It has no interior and no physics, the model and hitbox are the most taxing thing about it and they're not all that bad. The ship is additionally often (almost always) loaded and performs well enough.

@ultmateragnarok yeah, but Xbox One's don't have enough memory to keep that loaded, as well as the rest of the pirate world, without it seriously affecting gameplay.

And the reason Xbox's have "stable" fps in Sea of Thieves is because the FPS is capped at 30... and so you don't know how much it rises beyond 30, because it's locked at 30... You only notice the dips below 30. xD

Where'as PC's can unlock the FPS, and see how truly unstable the FPS is. In truth, the game is equally unstable on both platforms, PC's can just see it better because they have more options to play with.

@sweltering-nick

Yes, PCs do see it more because they're hitting the max they can. XBoxes do have the power to keep it above 30, we just don't know how far above it really is. As for memory, the Ferry, again, isn't all that taxing. More taxing would be the area above it, but that could be fixed simply by lowering it or specifically making those in that state not load it in.

@ultmateragnarok Xbox One X has 12GB of DDR5 ram.

Running the game requires 2250 MB which is 2,25 GB, keep in mind this game does not run in true fullscreen, it runs in borderless windowed mode, so it renders the desktop of your PC/Xbox simultaneously.

The Xbox, like any Microsoft product, runs all the uneccesary bloatware that Microsoft likes to inject their OS's with nowadays.

I have 32 gigs of RAM on my PC, and running the game, i am using a grand total of 23% of my RAM which is to say around 7.36GB. Equalling roughly 61% of the RAM capacity of an Xbox One X.

Which is enough to cause issues, because the ram needs a certain amount of open space to function optimally. And that's excluding the CPU issues from having to render the desktop at all times.

Hmm, maybe keeping the ferry loaded wont be as impactful as i thought it would, but the main performance issue seems to be the fact that this game doesn't run in true fullscreen mode. : /

No doubt Rare has already thought of having the ferry loaded at all times, so i wonder why they haven't done it, there must be some kind of a technological limitation we don't know about. :o

@sweltering-nick

It might be that they didn't remove as much as they could've from the Ferry, or something like that.

I like your idea as whole. I would just like to add that maybe the re-spawn time should be longer when there is an "enemy" crew member aboard your ship.

It's important to remember that at the end of the day the person who died is the "loser". Regardless of whether it was justified or fair. A player who has "lost" should not gain an advantage on a player that has "won". That punishes the winner.

It takes two to do the Spawn Killing Tango. The player who has "lost" is not accepting his defeat and demanding a re-match. The Spawn-Killer is forced to kill again and again just to defend what is now rightly his conquered property. Even if he doesn't want a re-match. Who is the actually "bad-guy" here?