Hi everyone!
I've seen a couple of threads over the last two weeks about permadeath at sea and I wanted to talk a little bit on how our thinking on this topic as changed, so here goes!
The reason we want death to be a big risk on the seas is two fold. At the most basic level, dying at sea doesn't work well with our spirit walk mechanic: When your body is at the bottom of the ocean more than a kilometer down, how do you get to it as a spirit, and once you do, how do you get back to somewhere without just drowning again?
On a slightly more abstract level: Nothing makes the world smaller than easy travel. It's true on Earth and its true for every online gameworld I've ever experienced. When travel is easy, a vast majority of the world's contents are just "stuff to be ignored while you travel" and you end up, without even meaning to, diminishing your own experience which, to be clear, we see as bad.
It can be hella convenient to travel quickly and easily, but that's not the same thing as "good" for a game. In the real world, we like to mitigate risk and save time, but games aren't the real world and we can't consider them as the same, even if we want them to feel similar. That sort of harkens back to the thing you'll see me say from time to time, "Verisimilitude > Veracity," where I basically mean "with games it's better to feel real than be real because a lot of what is real isn't really fun. But the feel of accomplishment that successfully dealing with 'realness' brings is pretty much the best there is, so if you can feel real while still cutting out all the unfun bits, you've made a good experience."
So our thinking was "We can't let "stepping off a boat and drowning" shortcut travel in any way, because you'd both foreshorten the sense of the world's size, and you'd also step away from any sense of water travel being "real" in a useful sense. This is what led us to the idea that drowning in deep water should result in permadeath. It kept the seas dangerous, which is definitely something we wanted, and it prevented any "I don't want to sail back, so I'll just jump off and die-teleport back home" nonsense that some death mechanics can inadvertently incentivize.
However, permadeath is a very harsh penalty. We definitely know that. And so we've been talking off and on about how to handle that for, sheesh, the last year or so? For a long time, at any rate. I'm sure the conversation actually even precedes my time here; I'm really just talking about my part in it. Anyway, the point is, we know it's harsh and we've been looking at other possibilities.
One such possibility is the idea that instead of dying permanently, when you drown you'll black out, as if you had been CDG'd. At that point the currents will take you, and if you're close enough to another shore, your body will wash up there, and your spirit will also appear somewhere in the same area, allowing you to complete your spirit walk, When you do you'll come to wherever you ended up, with no ship to get you home.
In that way, there's still some risk and you can't actually predict where you'll end up, so its "fast travel" ability is severely reduced, and it's still very dangerous since you could find yourself stranded. At the same time, you're potentially not so afraid of losing your character and your legacy that you're afraid to set out on the water at all.
Anyway, it's just an example of the sorts of things we're considering. I'm not really trying to sell you on any one particular approach. Rather, I'm taking a moment to explain that we're open to changing this to soften the penalty, but we do have a few factors we need to consider that still necessitate a certain level of "harshness." This isn't me saying "we're doing away with harsh penalties for water death" - just that the form those penalties take could change.
Thanks for reading, hope that helps! :)
