Proposed issue
I’ll just cut to the chase: underwater combat sucks. For a game with so much sea and so much sailing, it’s impressive how both combat on a ship and in the water absolutely blow. I’ll mainly be covering the underwater part, since I think underwater combat could be significantly improved by changing how the underwater movement works. The goal of this suggestion is to set up a new water movement system that serves as a foundation for combat to work on, and then combat features (like air movement) can be adjusted in the water around it. At the same time, the threat of oxygen should still exist.
Proposed Changes
Let’s start with a few basic bug fixes and QoL adjustments:
- Fix the weird buggy parts of the sea floor that don’t regenerate stamina when you’re on it for some reason.
- You should be treated as within the same state if you are not moving underwater, regardless of whether you have sprint on or off. Right now, if you stop moving in a walking state, stamina drain halts and stamina regenerates if on sea floor, but if you do the same in a running state your stamina will just keep draining.
Now for the actual big changes:
- Stamina will regenerate at a slower rate while staying still/paddling slowly in the water without trying to rise out of it. The regen is fast enough that if you alternate between this and rising upwards you’ll be going up on average, and it will prevent situations where you are an inch away from getting out of the water but run out of stamina and start sinking. However, it should rise you up very slowly on average, so it won’t save you if you’ve gone way too deep.
- You’re able to dodge reflex in the water as many times as you like on a cooldown of a few seconds (should be significantly longer than whatever it is on land to compensate for being able to do it whenever). You can’t dodge reflex directly upwards or downards; the most you can do is reflex slanted a bit in either direction. This can be used as a quick burst of horizontal mobility to dodge something (maybe a shark lunging at you) but it’s not that useful for moving around vertically. If you are literally an inch away from the sea floor and have a smidge of stamina left, the little bit of height from a slanted dash could also send you out of the water (though obviously at the cost of a bit of HP, as with anything that uses more stamina than you currently have)