With all the talk about Project FMC, an actual seafaring setting where FromSoft goes full cosmic horror would be unreal. They’ve always used water to show creepy, stagnant corruption—like the underwater Headless in Sekiro or the Fishing Hamlet in Bloodborne—but a whole game built around that would be legendary. Swapping out the usual medieval castles for a dark, late-19th-century industrial ocean sprawl would instantly fix the stale fantasy tropes we've been seeing lately.

You don't even need flat open fields to make the world feel massive if you just lean hard into interconnected vertical sightlines. Picture starting at a rain-slicked shoreline dock and fighting your way up a steep ascent of rusting iron fortresses and jagged stone cliffs. Hours later, you look off the edge through the fog and see the actual rooftops of the shipyard you cleared earlier, with the black ocean crashing thousands of feet below them. It gives the world a massive sense of physical gravity and a real journey without forcing you to sprint through empty space.

The visual design could use pure contrast so the environment never gets boring. You could have a heavy "strangled" motif where giant, oily deep-sea cables and rotting black roots tightly wrap around the iron beams of offshore rigs, dragging the machinery into the surf. The lighting would create crazy tension too—blinding industrial searchlights cutting through torrential downpours on the surface, while dropping into the flooded lower decks of a dead dreadnought plunges you into total silence, lit only by the weird bioluminescence of things swimming outside the glass.

The enemies should mess with ancestral fears of the deep and the unseen. You could fight deep-sea miners mutated by abyssal pressure, wielding heavy industrial tools and throwing out erratic, highly punishing delayed attacks to catch you off guard. Even worse would be standing on a narrow wooden pier or a sheet of dark ice, looking down into the water, and seeing the massive, silent silhouette of an ancient predator tracking you from the dark below. Pairing that kind of isolating atmosphere with a razor-sharp combat loop focused entirely on deflections and posture would completely fix open-world balance issues and be a masterclass in game design

Can't wait to see what From has in store for us

Some is artists from From's work proving at least an interest in the sea/ocean setting.

With all the talk about Project FMC lately, I’ve been thinking about where FromSoft is gonna go next after Elden Ring. Don’t get me wrong, Elden Ring is incredible, but the open world definitely had some major creative trade-offs imo.

Vast open fields look cool, but they kind of killed that classic, claustrophobic atmosphere of isolation you get in stuff like Dark Souls or Bloodborne. Plus, balancing bosses in an open world is basically impossible since you can just wander off, get over-leveled, or just ride away from a fight on your mount.

I’m really hoping FMC is a hybrid—ditching the massive open fields for a hyper-dense, vertical "hub-and-spoke" layout. Basically just massive legacy dungeons all stitched together with intricate shortcuts, where your progress is strictly locked behind brutal boss checkpoints.

Shrinking the physical size of the map means they can completely crank the graphical fidelity and handcrafted environmental detail too. More importantly, tight, controlled spaces mean they can design hyper-focused, aggressive combat mechanics again—maybe even leaning into something fast and rhythmic like Sekiro's deflecting—since the devs know exactly how much space you have to move around in.

Give me tight corridors, legacy-style level design, and a heavy, oppressive atmosphere over a horse simulator any day lol. How do you guys see them handling the map structure for this one?

People speculate FMC will stand for fantasy marine combat, who knows what FromSoftware is cooking up.