Make Sea of Thieves more immersive

Have games in the tavern (darts, five finger fillet, dominoes, checkers, cards, etc.)

Ill be sure to keg your ship while your playing.

Have more interaction from the Tavern Keeper (you sit down and they come over and ask if you want a drink, or piece of cooked meat). Could take it a step further and have items that will give you a small buff during your voyages. Maybe you can ask for gossip and they'll tell you about the current world event. Or add a group of musicians playing a shanty similar to Athena's Fortune Hideout that you can play along with.

You kind of already do these things. Talk with the Npc and choose certain Dialog, you discover they might know something in the world. (They also tend to update few times a season as things change)

Have other random NPCs appear in taverns or around the towns

The Players/Pirates are the towns people who randomly appear.

@burnbacon you choosing to keg my ship doesn't take away the fact that I want more activities to do in the outpost and the extent of what they have now isn't enough. The other players that are in the server don't wander around the Outpost while I'm there. They steer clear or if they do show up, they're like you and trying to keg my ship. Maybe 1 out of 10 times it's a player offering a karma crate but I want something to interact with that isn't trying to kill me.

@deadlysaint88

I honestly wouldn't hold my breath on this one, my friend. This topic has come up more than once on the forums and it never really gains any traction since the servers that host our sessions just don't have the processing power to keep up with that many moving parts on something so (forgive me for saying) trivial when combat, enemies and ship physics actually requires so much semi-regular upkeep to keep it as non-buggy as possible, with varying degrees of success lately.

Outposts for the overwhelming majority of players exist for the purposes of spawning, restocking and selling with the occasional bit of shopping thrown in. Nothing more.

The community who wants to sit around in the tavern and make small talk with the bartenders is such a miniscule and not terribly well-represented subset of the playerbase that it's not even remotely cost-effective for the development team to waste time doing the admittedly massive amount of over-hauling and coding that would be required to give the existing NPCs any more autonomy than they already have (which is to say, pre-programmed talking billboards), let alone add more of them.

To be blunt, the point is that this game is SEA of Thieves. By its very design you're not supposed to be hanging around on any of the islands for extended periods of time eating dinner and talking to the locals about their hobbies and whatever exciting new gossip is buzzing around. You're supposed to be out in the water where ALL the things are happening. That's the whole point of why they moved the voyage system off the outposts, away from the NPCs and onto your ship's voyage table. You're supposed to be spending all your time there.

@thegrimpreacher I don't doubt it and I won't hold my breath. I see it more of as one of those things that if I never mention it, then there's 0% chance it will ever happen. So I try to do a search and see if things have been mentioned before and I didn't see anything on it so I said my 2 cents. I think that personally, Outposts could be more interesting.

I do get that rpg's can be immersive, but different people find different stuff immersive, and im not sure that rpg mechanics in a pirate sandbox quite hits the mark. Having more npc's is a popular request, but since most of the actual content of the game is far from the outposts, i dont think adding more features to them would make the game much more immersive, and having a bunch of mini games and a tavern keeper who talks to you would not be enough to keep me sitting around in the tavern. Im willing to bet ordering grog at the table wouldnt entice others to stick around in tavers either.

This is not to say it is bad suggestions, just that its the wrong type of game for rpg style features since its gameplay is entirely different.

I think the more likely immersion we could see and is requested frequently is just filling the sea's with more sea life. It'd be nice to see more fish, turtles, whales, dolphins swimming around. None interactable of course.

I think those are great ideas, and I would love to see them.
Would generally love to have a more immersive world. as the game feels really artifical and empty like it is now.
just adding ever more stuff to the ocean (like the ghost forts, the mermaid forts) just does not do it for me.
I liked the game a lot more when mermaid and ghost forts where not there yet. Dont get me wrong, especially the mermaid locations are beautiful af and well crafted, but the sea has gotten too crowded for me in recent years. And not in the good way (like more players), but just overcrowed with too much stuff to do in too little space.
What they should have done (at least) is move the new locations away from the center of the map, use the outskirts of the map more to open things up a little, instead of stuffing even more into the middle of it. But thats another thing. And ofc, they would have needed more ships per server for that, which they cant do bec server, so I get why they did it. I just think it was not a good solution still.

SoT being a "hidden" place is no argument for me, as the game clearly indicates there are and always have been a ton of people on it. And even in present day there are more then 5 different factions on it, each with a ton of people. So, no, its not that "hidden".

But as others pointed out, this will likely not happen, as the servers are constantly more or less on maximum capacity. I believe SoT suffers from the developers wanting to do more then the game can handle, and it has been like this for a while now.
Maybe start thinking about SoT2 ?

At this point, just adding NPCs inside the tavern would be enough for me. I'm tired, like everyone else, of how empty and sad the taverns seem. Doing the Tall Tales that have both taverns brimming with NPCs was so exciting and cool. I know that they have the processing power to add a few NPCs into outposts. If they can make Tall Tales have a plethora of npcs and you can have hoardes of skeletons chase you around forts, I highly doubt adding 5-8 npcs at taverns is gonna break the game worse than it is.

The game doesn't take place in the taverns. As long as your ship is parked/anchored, you're susceptible to being attacked by other players. It's like logging into World of Warcraft and never leaving the Inn, yet surprised no one is around. The game is out there on the sea, not the place where you sell/log in.

@europa4033

Maybe they could add a function where your ship doesn't spawn in automatically until you go talk to the shipwright. Then you could spend as much time as you wanted at the Outpost when you start without worrying about being sunk by players when you login (just a thought). I wouldn't want them to go so far as to create a "safe zone" around the Outposts to keep your ship safe because when you're selling you're a prime target but if your ship is new with no loot then I'm sure they could figure something out.

@deadlysaint88 Seems fun, nice suggestion

@deadlysaint88 That's why logging into a social hub/Sea Dog Tavern would be awesome. You could look for open crews there, utilize a crew browser feature at a table, check shops, check commendations, and just hang out with other people. Then from there one could choose which outpost they want to spawn at by walking through a specific door with respective tavern name above it.

@thamb0 I like the idea of a social hub tavern!

@deadlysaint88

I see a lot of people here being quite negative and asking "why?" a lot here, So I would just like to pop in and say "Why not?". Sure some of these things have been asked for before, and It may never appear in the game but honestly you never know what is just around the corner!

Even just implementing one of these cool little ideas could be enjoyable, like a band playing in the corner of the tavern - maybe even just for an event - christmas carols perhaps - I really don't see the need for all the negativity here!

OP you keep bringing your positive energy to this forum! It's a breath of fresh air!

@deadlysaint88 Perhaps they will add more NPCs at some point. But minigames? I doubt it.

@bekkbloodaxe96 Thanks!