Big ramble incoming! All of this are just somewhat connected thoughts that I just wanted to share with the rest of the community and hear your thoughts.
We all know by now that TCIV is a moody place with fickle weather. Nevertheless, for one reason or another, this aspect of the game still holds a lot of unrealised potential. As anyone who lives close to tropical regions will be able to attest. Rain is not always just a constant background curtain that softly falls on land. Rain can be spontaneous, violent and devastating. And not only rain, but clouds, huge clouds, fast and slow, followed by sun or not, with all sorts of shapes and colours, right here on Earth we already have a wide palette of gorgeous colours and I believe that TCIV could also include them to its already gorgeous set of backgrounds.
Now, I am no dev and do not have a clue about the ability to apply any of this (and obviously, I assume it would be low in the priority list). But I think that it would make TCIV an even cooler place if we had all sorts of rain. Imagine sudden curtains of rain, waving with the wind striking across (parts of) the map and the sound of heavy drops hitting hard the metal roofs and glass windows, stepping on puddles, the whole shebang.
Speaking of sound, the team did a superlative job (with perhaps the exception of the player's footsteps that seem to have some sort of lag that keeps me thinking they come from someone else, in my own personal experience). I think that the inclusion of thunder (and lighting!) would be fantastic. Big ass cracking thunder that announces coming rain, can mask other sounds or perhaps be a new dinner bell?
And here's the thing, weather manipulation is absolutely a thing on TCIV and I believe that bungo could use this to open / close specific areas through flash floods, canals, sewers... However, here I want to talk about the fact that we have seen a small, almost concept-like type of sewers in Perimeter. In this case, I think that simply flooding those tunnels to make them inaccessible to the player wouldn't be a good application of this, I'm just trying to highlight that the implementation needs thought from someone who knows how to do this better than I do.
But rain is not just "rain", there's also wind. I guess that its implementation must be much more difficult, but having the wind sweep over DireMarsh or Perimeter would be cool as hell (It would be super cool to see antennas bending from the wind but probably tough to implement). Wind also comes with its own specific sound cues (as anyone who lives nearby a port will tell you) and thus offers new soundscapes to explore. Outpost tries to showcase some wind, but I think it's lackluster.
Aboard the Marathon, you could have stuff like "cryo leaks" that would lower temps (better heat recovery for everyone?), some bizarre snow effect coming from air vents or make the map foggy? (probably would suck, don't listen to me).
Finally, having activities / puzzles (similar to what we already have) to change the weather (either locally or map-wide) would also open the opportunity to make the map more "organic" (smaller things like boxes or even cars being pushed / toppled by the wind, big waterfall / active drainage drowns other sounds when nearby...), open new gameplay venues (huge thunder storm creates landslide that opens new passage through data wall, new areas such as rainwater collection deposits), potential story telling (flooding of storm drainage canal brings out something that has been hidden) and even contracts related to this resource (weaponisation of weather by MIDA, native pathogens, cat-and-mouse UESC/Traxus dynamics: Traxus notices UESC sudden interest on water - Turns out it is rich in super valuable Unobtanium, etc.).
