Well, SoT has gotten many negative reviews that are completly right, this game lacks content, is expensive and has some poorly designed features.
It's time to fix that.
I've went through the entire forum looking for suggestions and fixes for several problems as well as watched 2 hours worth of reviews, and figured out that there are 5 main things that are able to save the game, otherwise it will end up as a another "No man's sky meme".
So today I'll talk about certain improvements that could be made to make the game actually worth the money; From a player's perspective as well as from the perspective of a indie developer.
(A review that strongly proves my points can be found here HERE)
Contents:
1. Player interactions
2.Quality of life improvements
3. Gameplay balance
4. Quest Improvements
5. Gameplay additions
1. More player interactions
- Add some type of minigame to play with your mates: dice, cards , some form of darts, drinking games and many more possible pirate-like games.
- Create safezones make at least 1 island a NO-PVP zone to prevent greifing; I see how "ambushing" others could be a gameplay tactic however, without safezones you either sail back and fourth every 3 minutes or risk loosing 2 hours worth of loot.
- Long-distance communication, morse code for example. Have a designated tool along with a chart or some sort of auto light-text conversion on a magic scroll (we have magic elements already) so we have other interactions with players except for kill-on-sight.
2. Quality of life improvements
- Item transferring, instead of spending 20-25 min of transporting each skull (which could totally fit in your pocket since a shovel fits in there) make a "crate"/"basket" where you could load up to 10 skulls and hand them in at once. Same goes with the little trinkets such as goblets or coffers.
- Pig feeding (or animal feeding in general) improvements. Make a sort of hunger indicator for animals, it could be them squealing or a simple bar above them along with a indicator when the animal has died instead of just vanising.
- Make a 02 bar (I know they're planning to add it however how hard is plugging in 1 variable into a simple radial indicator?)
3. Gameplay tweaks/balances
- Snake nerf, these annoying little creatures take way too many swings/bullets (almost as tough as standard skeletons) to kill meanwhile they incapacitate your sight for 10 sec and drain your health. Their health and poison duration could be brought down to make them less of a pain.
- Respawn consequences, a punishment for respawning could be introduced such as 20% lower health for 30sec after respawn. This would be introduced in order to make strongholds and ship raids more challenging.
- Rain (It's raining pain, hallelujah its raining pain!) often as a solo player i experienced my ship sinking after 5 minutes of intense rain, please. Make the time to fill up the boat with water increased instead of copying the mechanic from the cursed chests. (which i could understand sinking your ship in a few minutes. It's cursed after all)
- Add more defensive capabilities for sloops, make them have at least a faster reload speed for canons or a sort of "swivel gun" so solo players wold be as versatile in combat as the larger ships, maybe make the ship a bit less squishy when solo.
- Making ship cosmetics a tiny bit cheaper, so far I've only stumbled upon 1 ship which had red sails and that's it. Players don't want to spend 70K on just sails (literally a piece of cloth) due to not making the grind worth it. Deflation anyone?
4. Quest improvements
- Treasure chest opening? Insetead of selling the chest you can open it for a random reward like a amount of coins, other smaller treasures like coffers or challices or just (rarely) a cosmetic (possiblities for rare chest-only items no microtransactions included) Rewards depend on chest quality of course. (The cursed chest could spill out a large amount of water upon opening)
- Special skeleton bosses, each skeleton captain could have a unique attack depending on their name, for example "The scorched" could have a fireball attack and "Crumbling" could throw/summon bone shards. This could start from level 10+ skeleton quests and would make the system more exciting.
- Animal cages as inventory items for trading quests, makes running around the islands to find specific animals easier. You could carry them on your back (1 at a time) and they decrease your MS (movement speed) by 10%. After capturing the animal you can't carry the cage on your back anymore. This would make the quests less tedious.
5. Gameplay additions
- Fishing/Sea monster hunting, introduce another "guild" that specialises in fishing, it won't be necessary to become a legend but a nice way to spend your time and earn some gold. This concept could include nets, different rods, different baits, bounties for legendary fish and so on.
- Merchant and/or skeleton ships, NPC ships that provide loot upon defeating. Merchant ships would be aggressive only when attacked and would travel in an escort due to transporting riches. On the other hand skeleton ships would be all-time aggressive ship and would add a layer of additional protection to strongholds.
- Ship capturing, a way to raid ships without sinking them. This would require climbing to the nest on top of the ship and painting an X on the flag when the owners of the ship are all dead. When they respawned and the ship is capatured they would be locked in the brig for a set amount of time, (1min 30sec) and after the initial 30 sec the capatured player(s) could start a lockpicking minigame for a early realease. This would provide time to loot the ships in an alternative way. (The timer could be different for smaller player groups to balance it out)
- Underwater exploration, speaks for itself. Shipwrecks, diving bells, possibly magical ways to breathe underwater...
- A way to secure gunpowder barrels, like a safe or a contraption that would make them easier to transport and would require opening the safe to make them vulnerable to explosions.
- Flares, a fun piece of gear that would produce smoke and light of your chosen color to attract others or send signals about your location to your buddies (could be purchasable in the weapon shop)
- Special one-time amulets, magic items you could obtain from strongholds or underwater exploration that posses strong magical abilities like summoning a lightning storm, clearing weather, summoning the kraken. (or other creatures) There's many possibilities due to the game's "magic" system.
These items wold greatly improve the SoT experience and would help the game grow. Keep in mind i haven't included several concepts about "weapon upgrades" or "ship armour upgrades" because the Devs intended to keep every fight as balanced as possible between newbie and legends alike. Hope this will somehow contribute to the growth of this game :D
Feel free to leave further concepts on improving the game down below!
-BlindScar <
