Sunless Sea is a game that has a lot of atmosphere, a lot of creepy vibes and Cthulu influences circling under the bow of your intrepid vessel. It nails it in terms of themes, of interesting stories and weird happenings at the various islands of the Underzee as you navigate its black horizons, but there is one aspect that has been pretty dull to date: combat.
While it's hardly the focus of the game, beating sharks trapped in metal containers and giant glowing eyed crabs is something you need to do from time to time, but it regularly boiled down to the exact same encounter and attacks every single time.
To fix that, Failbetter Games have now updated it to a real time system, with elements of the original illumination mechanic still present. To help explain, a new devblog video has been released, showing how the new system works and how you can continue killing creatures of the deep, hopefully, with a little more fun involved.
Now players have a different combat interface (with placeholder UI elements) that appears when you're in range of an enemy. You need to hold them there while your crew ready your guns. You can fire as soon as they're 50 per cent ready, but if you wait till it's 100 per cent, you are guaranteed a hit, if not, you stand a chance of missing.
The enemy will need to be in your line of site to fire, though keeping them illuminated too will give you a faster weapon readyness. You can even turn your light off to sneak up on enemies now.
Have any of you guys been playing Sunless Sea? I've enjoyed it quite a bit so far, but it has been hard to judge whether you actually stand a chance of surviving a combat until now. Hopefully this new system will help things.
