Story layout finished.

DEEP is a video game that takes its place in the near future. Future, that is overpopulated, has very limited resources, and people are finding new ways to earn money. After the ice caps melted, a new naval trade route was discovered - through the north sea. Greenland (Denmark), Norway, the north of Russia, Alaska (USA) and Canada, started to build new ports around their coastlines, since they anticipated that these trade routes would be much more profitable for shipping companies; reason being - getting from Europe to East Asia at that time was possible in just by two ways - Suez canal in Egypt, or Panama canal in America. Obviously, the companies that own these canals, know about this so their pricing, in a void of competition, was very high. The northern passage was the perfect solution - no canal fees, and shorter routes.

Shipping companies started to use the northern trade routes, as expected, but that wasn’t the end of it. The northern sea is widely uncharted, and because of the rivalry between the “northern route” countries, conflicts started to emerge. Russia, Denmark, USA, even Norway, couldn’t settle down on which parts of the sea they own, due to complexity of islands, different recognized laws and more.

At first it was just some proxy conflicts, a boat missing here and there, but eventually new governmental structures inside each government emerged, to just manage and protect their “northern route” interests. Similar to the CIA and KGB, but in naval operations. 

Now, there is another problem. The resources of the Earth are scarce, that includes oil, but the shipping volume increased. In order to solve this and save money when it comes to fuel, shipping companies had to adapt, at last, even though they were failing to do so in decades. 

The markets are extremely dependent on each other at this time, so more products and resources need to be moved around the globe. The volume increased, prices of fuel went up, and new competition emerged. For the shipping companies it was a nightmare to stay ahead of the competition.

But a solution started to emerge, that each of these companies started to adapt to slowly, being - slow down the speed of the vessels. Not just by few knots, but slow them down drastically. Problem was always the speed - The faster the vessel went, the more, exponentially, fuel it used. It seems a bit counter productive at first, since the volume of products and resources stayed the same, and that was unlikely solved by, well, buying more vessels, some of them older, quickly fixed up. The cargo shipped over the globe stayed most of the time the same, so with careful AI predictions on weather and population trends, proper vessel plotting, it was much more profitable to have hundred vessels set on low speed than 10 vessels on high.

This obviously increased the number of ships in the “northern routes”, and some of them, nearly in defunkt stage, were old and technologically not protected at all. This, mixed with international tensions and hidden inner governmental organization’s wars, barely protected slow vessels, confusing naval borders and laws, piracy being more and more active, the northern sea started to be the no man’s land of naval industry, ultimately, resulting in a lot of ships being sunk.

This sparked a new profession for some people - oceanic scavenging. Extremely tough and dangerous way of living, off the grid, scavenging anything of value from the ocean’s floor. Soon, the shallow waters have been explored and scavenged, and now it is just a pure race of  who can get deeper to get hands on precious materials, but sometimes, they find some things, hidden away, that they shouldn’t have...

And the player plays for one of these scavengers.