Can Ocean Routes Be Made More Interesting?

[Civet]

So I'm making a Pokémon game and I decided to ask my co-owner to map up a large ocean route. After completion, I thought: "How can I make this route fun?" My colleague decided to map a little island in the middle of the route and make the route a bit maze-like by placing rocks around, however I still feel this will be rather tedious and annoying to some impatient players.

I'm sure some of you can relate to this - surfing on the ocean getting into battles with Tentacool's or Wingull's every 5-10 steps gets a bit daunting, as well as overly-weak trainers draining your precious PP. On the official games I saw the ocean routes more tedious than interesting; they were just an obstruction to me.

So my question is this: can ocean routes be made more interesting and fun? I'd love to hear your views & ideas and what you'd like to see in an ocean route.

 

[Winter Wonderland]

You could change the behavior bite of the two types of water(they have the dive dark water and regular water) and make it so the lighter water is wild battle-free and the dark water to contain Pokemon. With this being said, you could also add events into the water. Like, a rival battle or something of the sort. :P

 

[RHIOneAlbum]

Try adding a water city? Or if RSE, underwater city. Lower the encounter rate in AM.

 

[Tropical Sunlight]

You can always throw in a few different types of rocks, a small island, dive spots... But I guess that's about it.

There's always the option of making it half sea, half land, and include all sorts of puzzles ;)
Sea routes can be done interesting.

 

[aperso]

remove magikarp from rods. surprized no one thought of that.

 

[Lord Varion]

remove magikarp from rods. surprized no one thought of that.

That doesn't make it intresting.
That makes it more boring. What'chu got agaisnt magikarp.

My idea of intresting sea routes would be big/mini island with obstacles on the way through xD

 

[Spherical Ice]

Events, like people mentioned, would be cool. Waterfalls that act as steps on ordinary maps, the idea of dark water being wild Pokémon is also good, so yeah. But the best way is to make them as small as possible so you're not there forever.

 

[AimayBee]

Events, like people mentioned, would be cool. Waterfalls that act as steps on ordinary maps, the idea of dark water being wild Pokémon is also good, so yeah. But the best way is to make them as small as possible so you're not there forever.

I disagree with the bold and agree with the italic.

I love a good water route but like when walking you can avoid grass where possible, I say, change it to 2 types of water like Winter Wonderland said so you can choose to battle or not.

You may need to come up with a good reason why Pokemon don't appear there though.

 

[Civet]

I did some thinking and decided to add a short, simple script on the sea route where a message would come up saying: "A glowing Pokémon from above shot past at an incredible speed!". Then the player can find it on the island ahead. I've also thought of adding a little side-quest on who can catch the biggest Wailmer (sprites included). There's 12 Wailmer's all bobbing around in the water and you get 3 picks, if you pick the largest one out of everyone involved, you win a prize! A super rod and/or powerful TM. As for the trainers, some of them after the battle (providing you win of course) will give you an item or something, saying something like "I found this in the ocean but I have no need for it so go ahead and take it". This could be anything from a few berries to Mystic Water. I'm going to try and make all my water routes as interesting and script-filled as this, if not even better.

Thanks for all your ideas guys. I'm also keen to know if any of you had a method or something to make ocean routes more fun for you on the official games which I forgot to mention in the initial post.

My amazingly-awesome method was:

Spoiler:

using repels!

 

[E.C.]

of course ocean routes can be made more interesting, try creating diving spots that lead to various secret routes that lead to rare Pokemon, or hidden items, it makes the ocean maps much more fun to explore, also, maybe add a couple of small islands or spots where the player goes down through a waterfall.

 

[M.L]

You may need to come up with a good reason why Pokemon don't appear there though.

well you could say the lighter spots the water is too shallow for pokemon so they dont swim there and they do in darker spots witch is deeper water...

and yes a map can be made interesting but sometimes has a theme aswell with can apply and sometimes actually makes it fun to be on somthing aswell you never see boats i meen its the ocean boats are normally on the water arnt they ?? and you could make them diffrent like fishing boats you click it and well a fish jumped out the net and attacked you(just an example) or just a normal boat to talk to people or maybe to give you a lift ect ....

 

[Platinum Lucario]

Technically I think ocean routes should be equal to as much as land. But then again, it deppends on what the region really is. If the region is inland, then it would have mostly just land and not much in the way of ocean, but if the region is situated along a coastline, then it would be about 30-50% of ocean routes and 50-70% of land, if the region is just made of islands, then there should be about 60-70% of ocean routes and 30-40% of land.

Ocean routes surely can be made more interesting and fun if there's not only just wild Pokémon around, but also the fact that there can be made some special events occuring only on the ocean, like recieving a certain hold item or something like that. But on top of that, you could also put in a mini game in the ocean that operates on different scripts and stuff like that. You can also put in legendary Pokémon around, not only that but you can also put in caves that are on the water and things that are underwater as well, like underwater caves or something. And that's about all of my tips about ocean routes.

 

[eragon1997]

Diving would be cool, because you can add coral reefs! I haven't heard of a game that's done that. I R/S/E, I loved diving under. And make diffrent diving levels, like in real games. Maybe even add under-water currents. Ofcoarse, that is if you can script, map, etc.

 

[Sinister9]

add some waterfalls!
use some spots to dive?
or bring back whirlpool?

 

[Charmie20]

Try to make a deep cave that has something to do with the storyline

 

[Liquid Twilight]

I agree with what everyone else is saying. Add variety to the ocean, light shaded parts and darker diving spots. I like the idea of creating islands and cities and I definately love the idea of side quests.

Also, I always thought that the wrecked ship in R/S/E was a really nice touch and it felt pretty original. I always love it when you think you know the game back to front and then you find something that the game tells you very little about, such an awesome feeling.

 

[ZangoMango]

If you wanna get fancy, maybe you could have like, Tentacool actually on the map. You know how annoying the swimmer trainers are, always swimming really fast, so you have to time it just right to avoid battling them? Replace the swimmers with overworld sprites of Tentacool. Then if you run into one, switch it to a Wild Tentacool battle, rather than a trainer battle. And have a ton of them on the map.

I'm not gonna say it'd be fun, but it would be interesting.

 

[jammeym1]

make it so you can only use water pokemon when fighting
or pokemon what can use surf
or that you cant use your pokemon what is surfing and your pokemon stand on the surfing pokemon

 

[Posiden]

Well, first you have to think what the difference is between ocean routes and other routes. I think the main differences are:
Wild Pokemon can appear wherever you are.
There are only swimmers to battle, with all water types, which gets boring.
Most ocean routes have the same pokemon, so most of the time youve seen them all before.
Less Items hidden around the place.
These can all quickly be solved by doing these respectively:
Making patches of Kelp where pokemon appear and making them not appear outside of them.
You meet different types of trainers also surfing, and they must have one pokemon that knows surf but apart from that they can have a greater range of pokemon.
If you have fakemon, make a rare fakemon specifically for that route, and make it hard to find, if not, just make it the only place where you can find frillish or whatever in the game.
Have some floating Item balls.

Also you can always add gimmicky things like that Wailmer thing you mentioned.

 

[teejermiester]

I always just stick an island in there. And usually, my ocean routes aren't too long. Even though the hack is in an archipalago. Usually, tiny ocean routes with different pokemon with streches of land in there make it click for me.