Lore friendly suggestions for additional quests and features. My love letter to Sea of Thieves.

  • Let me start by saying that i am utterly in love with Sea of Thieves BUT i am worried about the longevity of the game at it’s current state. I do agree with the people that say that this game is in dire need of more content, so i compiled a list of ideas that i think would significantly add more variety to the list of things you can do in Sea of Thieves whilst remaining as lore friendly as possible. These suggestions come from a place of love and interest for the future of this game.

    A rework of the merchant company

    As it stands the quests of the merchant company feel like a chore. My friends and all the people i met ingame and chatted with had their merchant company ranks way lower than that of the other two companies because they found them boring to complete.

    Suggestions on how to improve this:

    • Hunting Sharks & Whales with a new weapon or ship accessory; the Harpoon (perhaps using pigs or chicken as bait in the water?). Additionally, hunting the Kraken for a tentacle trophy.
    • An island economy. Outpost ‘x’ produces gunpowder while outpost ‘y’ produces bananas (or silk, or spices, or sugar; you get the idea). You can buy these resources at a specific location and sell them in another one where demand is high. Additionally, certain uninhabited islands could be used as plantation locations (banana isle, spice isle, incense isle etc.) in which players can find and manually pick resources, pack them and sell them at outposts.
    • Alternative to Skull Forts. Merchant asks that you deliver specific cargo to specific location within specific timeframe. Whilst you’re doing the delivery you’re a target for other ships (similar to how skull forts are visible for everyone, perhaps through a unique flag or ship skin?) these quests should provide an alternative to skull forts, so they should have a high buy in cost and high reward if successfully completed.

    Player driven content through new company

    Players can set bounties on other players and their ships, which people can take from outpost billboards. This can be a bounty hunting company.

    • Player 1 has an unfortunate encounter with player 2 and is salty about it. Player 1 can then place a bounty for the sinking of player 2’s ship in an outpost, with a custom amount of gold which player 3 (or 4 or 5 or as many are in the server) can take as a mission. If player 3 (or 4,5 etc.) manages to defeat player 2 and sink their ship, he/she must recover the ship’s wheel and bring it to the outpost to receive their reward. Players can set bounties only once every now and then to avoid griefing.

    An additional type of quest for the Order of Souls

    This is a suggestion for the hardest type of quest that could be offered by the order of souls.

    • Capture live skeleton captains and deliver them to outposts for gold. Once a skeleton captain is weakened in combat they can be caught with a new item, the net, and then they can be picked up and carried to the outposts. However, you will need to keep them in a weakened state while on board otherwise they will break free from the net and spawn skeletons that will climb aboard your ship and fight you. Shadow captains need to be constantly under the light of a player’s lantern, Gold captains need to be thrown buckets of water and Green captains need to be kept away from water at all costs (waves, rain, water flooding the ship etc.).
    • Whilst carrying skeleton captains, you’re essentially a crewman down which exponentially increases the difficulty of sailing and all that can happen during that time (pvp with other ships, storms etc.) If the skeleton captain manages to jump in the sea, the quest is over.

    More interesting locations through unique raids, bosses and rewards.

    • As it stands there is zero incentive to explore the islands. Either because they are very small and there is nothing happening at places that should have something going on or because there is no meaningful reward for the exploration of these unique locations (cave systems, etc.).*

    • This can be improved with the addition of more unique locations and the chance of unique raids and rewards on said locations.

    • In order to avoid players ‘farming’ these unique raids, they can be made to be very rare quests initiated by finding random clues on random islands. For example, you find an ancient tablet in some ruin (or message in a bottle in a shipwreck, or journal dropped from slaying an epic skeleton captain) that has clues and riddles on a sequence of things you must do before initiating the main raid on specific locations.

    • These events should be significantly rarer and harder than your run of the mill quests, they should take you in specific locations (cave systems, underwater hidden temples, shipwrecks, unmarked islands etc) that are inherently interesting and worth exploring (instead of a random beach or jungle).

    • They should reward you with unique treasures, either very rare chests, skulls, artifacts and/or even unique player customization skins.

    An ingame, non pvp off-world social hub:

    • By speaking to a specific npc you fast travel to a large city, off the world map, in which you can’t engage in pvp and serves the sole purpose of meeting new friends to crew up and sail on adventures. This allows lone players who want to meet new friends or teams that need an additional crew member to first meet and chat ingame before sailing on adventures together.
    • Additionally or alternatively, a handshake emote that when activated by two players adds them as friends in the xbox app and let’s them team up immediately.

    Additional Ideas in short:

    • Mortars that fire slowly explosive rounds (also a major hazard for the operators).
    • Players throwing things at a distance (crates, bananas etc.)
    • Primitive grenades and molotovs.
    • More musical instruments (Violin for those sad moments, drums for those fear and awe inspiring dramatic moments).
    • Player Harpoon for underwater fishing of small sea creatures, snatching and pulling crates from a distance.
    • Ship harpoon for hunting large sea beasts and pulling enemy ships closer for boarding.
    • Rope swinging from the crows nest to jump and board enemy ships
    • Hatchet that can be used to cut enemy harpoon attached to your ship or thrown at an enemy like a tomahawk.
    • A 3 person ship like a brig with two masts and two sets of cannons on each side, slower than the sloop, faster than the galleon.
    • A 6 person ship like a frigate or man-o-war with 4 masts that is exceptionally slow and hard to handle but carries cannons in the stern and bow.
    • For the love of Davy Jones, ROWBOATS please!!!
    • More sea monsters, Megalodon, Giant whales, sea serpents, hydra etc.
    • Sirens, while on treacherous seas (rocks, reefs etc) they sing and have the same effect as being drunk etc.
    • Visible anchor underwater that can be cut whilst deployed from daring swimmers.
      More customization options (ship wheel, flags, anchor etc)
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  • @notateef I agree with everything you said. especially the trading aspect. this would be absolutly awesome if seamonster or NPC ships attacked you to.

    This game needs more PVE combat involving your ship.

  • @notateef This is a pretty great list of suggestions.

    One I've been thinking about is more wildlife in general... crabs on beaches/underwater, sea turtles, lobsters, monkeys, reptiles, starfish, coral reefs etc. Some/all of these could be catchable for the merchant's alliance.

    New AI enemies would be nice as well, like zombie/drowned pirates and maybe even live soldiers on ships or at forts.

    One idea I heard that I liked was on quests that involve collecting chests/loot, it would be nice if you could somehow open those with the chance of them being worth more than selling them to the gold hoarder.

    Variety will make the game feel more alive, so anything new will be appreciated.

    One of the games I think of that has a lot of variety is Zelda Breath of the Wild. If Sea of Thieves continues to add new stuff it will eventually meet or surpass the variety in that game and that would be amazing.

  • Saw this list on reddit, fantastic suggestions. Personally really like the idea of having to capture a skeleton captain - sounds like it'd be really funny and full of mishaps

    To the guy above me, BOTW is definitely the standard of what a populated world should be like. Loads of animals, sea creatures, and small rewards for checking out things that looks like they were meant to be checked out

  • I honestly hope the Devs take notice of this post and its insane popularity on reddit. Excellent work compiling the list in a thoughtful manner.

  • Great ideas OP! I hope that they‘ll be noticed.
    I want monkeys (besides a lot of other things) and i want it so that you are able to train monkeys to grab stuff for you, for example Bananas. But you also have to feed the monkey, so for every 5 Bananas, the monkey gets one.
    Maybe you can train them to steal stuff from other players.

  • @notateef said in Lore friendly suggestions for additional quests and features. My love letter to Sea of Thieves.:

    • Additionally or alternatively, a handshake emote that when activated by two players adds them as friends in the xbox app and let’s them team up immediately.

    Actually, if you both use the "make friends" emote at the same time it adds you as friends! It doesn't team you, though.

  • I think there are lots of good ideas here, and I've read lots of other great ideas from others.
    Its clear the potential this game has always had is now been discovered by most to be quite far off from realisation.... I fear at this point in the game, to instigate even a small amount of these ideas, would be impossible for us to play, at least until the next sot 2 comes out... if that'll even happen now! Especially now that rare have made such a poor impression especially in terms of lack of content at game release and the price in terms of value for money. Its a real shame as the foundations to a good game are clearly here.

  • Got an idea for a community event which we can even organize ourselves:

    The Drunken Duell
    The rules are simple:

    • Pick an Island
    • Pick a Chest or some other sort of Booty
    • Get hammered (!!!)
    • Duke it out with other Players and take their booty once you won the duell

    If you‘ve had enough of duelling and puking, just leave.
    Other Players can stand on the sidelines and play music or whatever.
    Wouldn‘t that be coo you guys?

  • My response turned out much longer than I originally intended but here you all go.

    I agree with many of the ideas here. I simply love the world that Rare has created, the art, atmosphere, the simple fun loving nature of it. I do say though that it does seem as though the game leans a little too much on simple and lean however.

    Trade...
    I've been thinking myself similar thoughts that are shared here. The Merchant Alliance ideas with whaling with a possible harpoon really sounds awesome. I think it would actually be really cool to have another ship variant that is perhaps geared more towards hunting / trading. The ship could still have cannons (perhaps 4 or so), but would have a harpoon gun or harpoon area perhaps towards the front of the ship.

    Enemies...
    For enemy variety I think there absolutely should be an occasional skeleton ship. There should be a ghost ship (maybe there is already, I simply have not come across it).

    A possible fun idea that would change it quite a bit is the ability to be in different factions. I'm imagining being able to play as ghost pirates, skeleton pirates, etc., and you are pitted against the other factions of players.

    I would also say the enemy encounters, enemy AI, and enemy movement in general needs to be revamped. The hunt for skeletons is fun at first, but no variety in the long haul. The way they all fight is identical. They all walk the same, attack the same. There should also be more objective type encounters when fighting skeletons ( and other possible enemy types) and skeleton forts.

    Objective / Scenario ideas...
    1: Gain entrance to the fort. You must blow open main gate entrance. This can be done by either planting explosive barrels at the gate or even with your ships cannons.
    2: Storm and hold this location in fort the X amount of time.
    3: When you are attacking the fort, there could be a bellowing call heard as a call for help to all surrounding skeletons. Shortly after hearing this, skeleton ships slowly come in from surrounding areas beyond the skeleton fort to aid the fort and the players must fend them off for a certain amount of time.

    Exploration...
    I agree that there needs to be more incentive for exploring the islands. I think this also could extend to exploring the ocean floor to an extent. Similar to how you can occasionally see a glimmer on the shore of an island and it turns out to be a trinket or gem of some sort for you to sell, you could have some sort of shining magical beam emitting from the ocean. To those paying attention, they will see this shining through the ocean floor a little bit and and stop the ship and see what is below. This is not something that is right below the surface like the wrecked ships though. It ought to be deeper, more intricate. Of course, there will need to be a way to breath under water for longer periods of time. Perhaps an item or something. Or maybe the magical item emitting the light actually also enables the player to breath underwater for long periods of time. Just spit balling here.

    Misc...

    • One main thing to really nail and improve is to try and eliminate the fetch quest feeling that this all gets.

    • This game also needs lip sync. Please add it. Even if players don't encounter NPCs all that frequently, I would still think that the NPCs should have lip sync.

    • Introduce little minigame types of things you can do on either the ship and/or the outposts. This is just for a relaxing time to take a break between voyages and socialize, etc.

    • While possibly adding and changing the game, keep it Sea of Thieves. I'm sure this is of top concern for Rare, but I really do enjoy the simple relaxing nature of this game. Any one of these ideas I or others have proposed has the potential of making the game more complex than it needs to be. So always keep the balance. :)

    • Purchasable weapon. I actually liked the fact that there were purchasable weapons/items in the beta. Made it feel like there was some real progression for the player beyond just cosmetic. It would be awesome to bring that back. Might be some outcry from players, but I personally think it's kinda worth it.

    • In my opinion the game world does need to be larger. When playing the beta I thought the world was a sample size, maybe 1/4 the final size. I was sort of shocked that it was actually the final size of the game as a whole.

    That is all for now. Keep it up Rare! The foundation is awesome. Just keep building off of that.

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