Liveliness Please

Suggestions
Liveliness Please
effort 3.666666666666667 3 quality 3.8 5 reasonability 4.6 5
1

(Warning: Sir Yapsalot made this post. Don’t click on this post if you can’t read!!!)

Hi, once again it’s been a minute since I’ve been here. I don’t plan to make suggestions much since 1) I suck at coming up with original, helpful, QoL or otherwise ideas, and 2) I don’t play the game much anymore since my computer can’t handle it (not the game’s fault, my computer’s just trash. this ISN’T about lag.)

Instead, this is about the feel of the game. Currently, besides ships travelling around and stuff, it doesn’t feel very… lively? I guess that’s how I’d put it. I suggested Idle Animations in a previous suggestion and people seemed to like that, so now, instead of suggesting things for the player to feel more alive, I want to make suggestions for the general terrain and atmosphere of the game.

Quick disclaimer: some of these things could be in the game already since, again, I don’t play it a lot anymore, and most of these things are audio-related, and I didn’t really play with audio (big mistake, I’ve since learned just how important audio design in games are.)

First off, there’s the obvious; birds! You wake up in the morning and hear them, you see them, etc. I think putting in birdcall audios, changing depending on where you are, would be nice, and it’d create a slightly more lively atmosphere. Furthermore, it would probably be seperate from music (like how you can hear waves while riding along the ocean). I’m pretty sure some areas (like the sky library (i forget it’s name)) have birds, but i could be misremembering.

Hearing seagulls call every once in a while when you’re riding across the sea or maybe some robins call while on Windrow would be cool.

Furthermore, more animals would be cool too. Ones that don’t always have to serve a complete purpose. Making it to where squirrels maybe live on Windrow per se, and climb on trees would be cool. Something similar to how BoTW has little birds and chipmunks you can shoot at for minor items. That’s part of what makes the game feel so alive in some areas.

Just having little, easily-programmed animals can make an atmosphere feel more lively. While I feel this is uh, less needed than idle animations, I still think it’d be fun to have. Plus, shooting chipmunks with 3000 degree lava WOULD be kind of funny.

As the Arcane world grows bigger, so should it’s nature. We could even make it to where they have magic or something idrk. Like, why is Prometheus set on JUST giving humans magic? Why not let the squirrels indulge in the mastery of lightning as well? (that parts mostly a joke suggestion, but then again, stuff like Poison Jaws exist thanks to the pollution, so it’s not completely farfetched.)

Little animals, like how the sharks and whales are, would be fun to have around, and having animal noises like how whales call would be nice as well. Birdcries especially. It feels kind of… empty not hearing the sounds of nature, just wind blowing and instruments playing in the background. So why not have a chorus of cries?

This one is probably, as I said earlier, less needed. If any of my suggestions, please add idle animations, but if time permits, little animals and sound effects would be sweet as well.

Thanks for reading.

TL;DR (for you lazy folk): We should add little interactable animals (similar to BoTW), as well as animal sound effects that play similarly to the waves and wind.

2 Likes
2

and maybe terrain detail could also put a bunch of decorative seaweed and rocks and stuff on the sea floor, since that looks very empty right now

3

momw to delete their textures from my pc (they cause an unavoidable memleak that kills the game after 3 hours and inevitably starts stacking into a constant loop of infinitely many parrots at the same time)

jokes aside betex apparently doesn’t like doing animals/nonhumanoids so I doubt this will get anywhere but it is nice and it would be nicer if they vanished with graphics settings set to low

2 Likes
4

Agreed. Even if they don’t necessarily directly affect gameplay, little atmospheric touches make a game whole. To use one of your examples, imagine how much worse Breath of the Wild would feel if it lacked the wild animals? How much more dull and lifeless? Sure, the core gameplay would remain virtually untouched, but there would be something missing.

A little while ago I made a suggestion about player housing, and “the vibes” were kind of an important reason for that. It would just… be a really good feeling to be able to save up for and purchase a house in a town of your choice. It’s like the hometown system from WoM, but giving the player agency. Not that I didn’t list potential mechanical benefits, of course, but the idea of player-owned houses itself is the most important thing. Players, and especially those who like RPG’s, don’t just want “the tightest gameplay” or “the best graphics”, they, generally, want to be immersed in a world that is not our own. But it’s difficult to get immersed when the game is unnecessarily restrictive on either what the player can do, or what it allows itself to do creatively.

1 Like
5

if it’s a similar system to how the fish work where they only appear when you have your graphics settings high, it’d still be pretty cool
like imagine a little lizard sitting on a rock and when you get close it runs away and disappears

6

Vetex said in the QnA that he wants to add those so
specifically bears

7

also swahn if you’re having a hard time thinking of ideas I can give you a few (I didn’t get accepted as suggestor)

8

Especially if your bounty or fame affected the price on the housing. So like if you had high bounty you would be feared and have housing prices cheaper but high fame would mean they would be the same.

9

thats a lot of… compressed text

10

More dynamic and interactable animals would be cool, but also a lot of effort and also lag (hate to be yet another person saying that a cool feature is bad bcz of lag but I recently got to witness a beautiful semi-consistent 60 fps in elysium). At the very least there should be dynamic sounds (like waterfall sounds and not like the bird sounds at Shell Island that seem to always play at exact timestamps from when you enter the island).

Tbh the whales ruin my immersion since their ai is so incredibly dogwater. In a perfect world they would have ai and procedural animations as incredible as Rain World’s, but I would at least like them to not fly and shove my ship around in unnatural ways.

If animals are added and their ai is bad, I’d rather have them not physically exist (sound only) or be incredibly simple like Fantastic Frontier’s birds.

I think just giving wilderness islands a soundtrack would be fine.

11

This topic was automatically closed 24 hours after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.