Fallout 4: The Life Aquatic.

As part of my Survival mode replay of Fallout 4, I've also been exploring parts of the map that I just didn't get to previously, such as Spectacle Island*, located in the ocean to the southeast of the city.  Because I'm unable to fast travel to locations, I've also been using bays and lakes as shortcuts to speed up my travel time.

As a result, I've been spending a lot of game time underwater - which, quite frankly, creeps me out.  I had a bad experience with water as a small child, which has left me with a lifelong aversion to swimming.  I realize full well that I'm just looking at pixels on a screen, but my chest tightens a bit whenever I jump into a body of water and the weight of my power armour pulls me down, down, down to the bottom.

It tightens even more whenever I find myself forced into deeper water for any reason - it's one thing to enter the ocean by walking into the water from a beach, a completely different thing to discover that, in order to make your exit, you have to detour deeper to find a path out of a shipping channel.

Granted, if you stay underwater long enough, your armour will eventually run out of air (which, again, creeped me out more than a little the first time it happened and I realized that I was in trouble) but there's also an upgrade perk which allows you to breathe underwater, so now that I have that, presumably I could spend as much time as I want marching around in the wet.

Unfortunately, the game programmers haven't done very much to make it worth my while.  There's a bit of seaweed, some sunken cargo containers, the occasional ditched aircraft or drowned house, at least one suit of submerged power armour, and my trip to Spectacle Island revealed massive enigmatic pipelines running under the water, but that's about it. There are amphibious monsters in the game, but I haven't run into anything dangerous under the water, all of my encounters have taken place in the air.**  In fact, it's not even possible to deploy weapons when submerged.

If anyone from the game development group at Bethesda Softworks is reading this, I'd like to strongly recommend that they change all that. Making the underwater environment as fully featured as the land would be a huge opportunity to add additional depth (no pun intended) to the game.

As hinted by the appearance of dead fish and beached mutant shark-dolphins on the shoreline, it would be easy to create an underwater ecology to match the surface one.  Whereas on the surface the player harvests plants and shoots animals - either for food or in self-defense - the submarine survivor would be dredging up seaweed, prying open shell fish, and defending themselves against whatever undersea menaces the creative minds in game development could come up with.

And, obviously, there would have to be an armoury of subsurface weaponry:  spear guns, tridents, and so on, as well as modifications to the existing catalogue of surface weapons to allow underwater usage.  (After all, a knife is a knife, whether you're on land or under the sea.)

To make it even more involved, the concept of underwater settlements would be an interesting addition.  Whereas on the surface, settlements are restricted to certain areas, the oceanic equivalent would be abandoned undersea bases which the player would have to pump out, supply with oxygen, and equip with defenses against pirates or aquatic creatures. There could even be one or two of the experimental Vaults that sheltered a selected few from the atomic holocaust - perhaps one with a secret tunnel connecting it to another Vault located on the mainland.

The creation of submarine wildlife would be simple. Instead of birds, there would be fish, the amphibious mirelurks would have a larger role as we discovered their underwater nests and communities, and the reptilian deathclaws would only need gills and fins to make the change to life in the ocean.

Frankly, I'd like them to stop there.  As we go further from land, the bottom drops away to vast dark gulfs, alien to light and warmth, where unimaginable horrors may lie in wait...

Seriously, the underwater parts already make me nervous, I don't need to have nightmares.

- Sid

* An actual island near the real-world Boston.  Thompson Island, located closer to the mainland, didn't make the cut for the game.

** Although  I do seem to recall being attacked while wading around in the sewers in Fallout 3.