There's No Excuse Why Rare Can't Add Whales (and other marine life)

@rustyaldrich Thank you for this post. With this game having incredible water, there’s ton of unexplored potential beneath just the cool waves on the surface. Just as exploring points of interests should create playtime, choosing to dive into the water below should also create a more meaningful experience rather than just being met with an empty void with the occasional siren or sharks. I think the mermaid statues and underwater caves in the shallow areas around islands are a good start, but would love to see more done here in terms of interactions.

The ocean really should emulate that sense of both wonder and terror to be found below, while at the same time allowing for players to give more playtime to these voided areas if they choose to do so.

@sgt-w0lfe I’ve outlined a lot of purposes that marine life can serve.

They can serve the same purpose as pigs, chickens, snakes, and sharks do. They can also serve as events with reward incentives, similar to meg encounters.

I would argue that this is something that Rare should be interested in, as one of their primary concerns is storytelling.

So let your underwater tell more of a story and garner more of an experience in the empty areas outside of siren shrines.

@sgt-w0lfe What I really mean to get across is that these underwater gray areas tell no story, and serve little purpose content-wise. Here I’m at least proposing to give purpose and incentive for more playtime in said areas.

One of the most successful design strategies for open world games is to chain nearby content and create a sort of flow for the player with minimal downtime of doing nothing.

As stated before, it’s seen in games like Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring where you initially set off to some point of interest, and along the way you encounter dozens of other interesting things that may even take you to a new path.

Now, Sea of Thieves does do this and Rare continues to improve upon this. We’ve seen the siren shrines, treasuries, and spanish forts appear in between islands, and maps take you to other nearby islands and so on. So by the end of a session where you initially set off to one island, you actually ended up going to 5 other places as well and had a bigger adventure. This is what Rare does well. However, jump off your boat and look around for something to do, and you’ll suddenly find yourself devoid of that content.

Once again, I am not suggesting to make a massive sunken kingdom sea floor. I understand that the emphasis of the game is sailing to points of interest above water. But jumping into the water should not suddenly disrupt this flow of content being provided to the player. I am suggesting to create more life, storytelling, events, and overall interactions with what’s under the water (obviously the server stability comes first, but this is speculation on future content updates)

In an open world game, if players can reach gray space of the map, it can lead to wasted playtime, boredom, and the breaking of immersion. In this game, that gray area is all around the player as they sail.

@lackbarwastaken Please refer to my suggestions in the original post. It's more than just whales (whales being the primary example). It's tons of marine life suggestions and underwater content outside of shrines.

And I would think reworking forts is a lower priority, because it's content that is already existing vs. adding new, needed content in already existing empty areas of the game.

Think of it this way (and I apologize if it's a dumb analogy because it's the best I could come up with):

Imagine you save up money to invest into a really nice suit and tie, but you completely neglect buying any shoes and have to walk around in your socks. You're essentially walking around with a fancier, yet incomplete outfit.

Or, would you rather try to bring all of your clothes up to par and buy a decent bit of everything. While each individual piece may not be the fanciest, at least you have a completed outfit to be presentable.

The idea here being that the ocean beneath your boat is largely incomplete, yet is always accessible to the player. A fundamental of an open world game is to keep a steady flow of content always within the player's reach, while minimizing dull, empty spaces that risk losing the player's patience or interest. As long as it is within the playable space, you always want to give your players something to do or interact with wherever they choose to venture to. I'm simply suggesting they add more life and interactions to this gray space beneath our boats. There's definitely a lot more that could be done there.

@galactic-geek Not really sure if you understand the point. This isn't asking why whales don't exist in the SoT from a lore perspective, but rather why they, along with plenty of other marine life, are not added to the video game when we know they could be.

And if we're talking lore, Sea of Thieves is a pirate fantasy with a 6-eyed megalodon that can travel through different dimensions. I'm pretty sure they could come up with whatever they want. It doesn't have to be whales, it could be tons of the un-implemented marine life they drafted in the artbooks, or entirely new fantasy species that only exist within the Sea of Thieves, kind of like a Galapagos Islands sort of thing. You could come up with any number of creative, new creatures that have a means to exist in the SoT, not just whales.

The real key of this all is that no player who chooses to dive underwater in most areas wants to be greeted with gray nothingness in a game literally about the sea.

@galactic-geek Hence, why this is under the Feedback and Suggestions section of the forums :)

@lackbarwastaken Exploring the water of what this game is literally named after is not core? Okay.

@lackbarwastaken Not really sure what you're insinuating with Sea of Friends. I personally love PvP in this game, and I don't really care if implemented marine life is friendly or not. As I've been stating, I just want to see the gray space beneath our boats to have a bit more interaction. It's more than just whales my guy.

@lackbarwastaken I am definitely a boat guy, and also a sea monster/Lovecraft guy. I'm simply suggesting to enhance the overall seafaring experience by offering more than just white space (because that's what it is) in the water. I think adding more marine life spawns, more creatures, and more water-based events would enhance the boating experience.

@galactic-geek I think that would be a wonderful idea, especially in the siren areas. I'm all for more biodiversity in this game. The Sea of Thieves is such an interesting place from a lore perspective, I just wish the general water areas would reflect this a bit more.

There's No Excuse Why Rare Can't Add Whales (and other marine life)

Well there is, old gen Xbox is still part of the playerbase and they are already struggling enough. Bouncing between 20-30 FPS as it is