The IPG is the first thing everyone is sent to as soon as they start sea of thieves for the first time and is where you are asked to select the pirate you want to be, the issue however is that it can be quite difficult to find a pirate that you like through and through.
Some players do not care what their pirate looks like and that is completely fine, but the players that do want a decent looking pirate are forced to rely on sheer luck to get one. Some may go in and spent 10 minutes to find their perfect pirate and others wont find theirs even after spinning and generating for several hours.
From what I understand the original intention of this randomly generating system was to allow players to have fully unique pirates rather than ending up in situations where players use a template and end up looking the same, something I actually like the idea of but know could be heavily improved.
I'm going to go over a few ways it could possibly be improved, both by adding only slight changes and keep more randomness and another that will limit the randomness more.
Firstly, I will go over a few issues I noticed myself.
- Inability to see all areas of the pirate you are hovering over.
In many cases there are several attributes that are randomly generated that usually aren't fully seen until the pirate is already selected and you are in game, such as missing teeth. - Reliance on fully randomly generating attributes
Relying on the entirely random system often creates situations where you are trying to generate a male or female pirate only to end up with the opposite, or generate pirates that look closer to yourself in skin tone but end up generating tons of ones that do not fit. - Generated clothing hiding true size or shape of the pirate
This is a more recently noticed issue as I was introducing someone to the game, they picked a pirate they enjoyed but upon removing the jacket once they got into the game became annoyed because the pirate was much more bulky than they wanted. The jacket had made the pirate appear smaller than they were.
[Simple Fixes - Fixes that do not majorly change the purpose of the IPG]
- Provide the ability to change the pose the selected pirate is in.
This would allow the player to switch through various poses that are also used on other pirates within the generator, the usefulness of this would primarily affect the teeth of generated pirates. Once a pirate is generated they are given a randomly selected pose which often keeps their mouth closed and makes it impossible to see all of the attributes before selecting.
I myself went through this issue when I first played the game when I selected a character I thought looked great, only to notice once in game that they had missing teeth, which has been a common annoyance as far as I have seen. - Utilizing the favorite system in order to help players generate pirates with certain attributes they are desiring
This idea would give an entirely new purpose to the favorites system in which rather than just saving pirates you think look nice as you continue searching, would instead give you the option to generate pirates based off of those favorites whilst still having the randomization with it.
As an example, lets say you find a pirate with green but barely noticeable eyes and another with more open and noticeable eyes but they are brown, If you favorited both of those pirates and selected the ability to generate more pirates based of your favorites, you would have a chance to generate one with the wider more noticeable eyes but now in the green colour you preferred. - Provide the ability to change the generated clothing on select pirates within the menu.
A simple idea to allow players to regenerate only the clothes on whatever pirate you are selecting in order to get a better look at the pirate itself, be it scars, true body size, so on.
[Complex Fixes - Fixes that change various parts of the IGP and limit the randomization of the process]
- Provide the ability to inspect the pirate in closer detail and change attributes manually.
This would allow the player to inspect the selected pirate much more closely and allow them to change the eye colour, eye blindness, teeth, and scar pattern that first randomly generated with the pirate. - Allow players to swap model parts from one favorite to another.
This process would allow players to swap attributes and parts from pirates they have favorited with other generated pirates within reason: Eye shapes, body types, head types, noses, ears, etc. In a sense this would still be somewhat randomized but give more freedom in switching around parts. - Provide the ability to change the generated clothing on select pirates within the menu.
This would function the exact same as the fix mentioned above, there are only so many ways you could change the clothes.
Out of both fixes I described above personally I love the Simple version more as it keeps the randomized generation but allows the player to have some control over what could be generated and uses your favorites to do so. I understand the IPG is not as big of an issue as hit registration, hackers, and loot bugs but its one of the few issues I feel could be solved relatively easily and pushed out in a QoL update.
Thank you for reading.
