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Sea of Thieves (XBO/PC) - New Rare game

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7 minutes ago, Kav said:

No Mans Sea.

Haha I've seen that comparison, never played No Man's Sky though so can't comment on that! :p

It's weird as in my own way I'm kind of enjoying it for what it is, but I couldn't really recommend it to any one else; it would be great to try a full N-E galleon to see what it's like, but  after a few voyages...what's next? 

I'll be interested to see what happens when the first people start to get legendary status and if that then unlocks more variety. If it's just the same type of quests but harder/bigger rewards, then trouble will be brewing!

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No Man's Sky improved a lot over the year or two it's been out with all the free content, hopefully Rare do something similar with content for this game.  Otherwise it'll be heading for Davy Jones's Locker sooner rather than later.

They had to take the servers offline yesterday due to the flood of people, i guess they didn't consider those getting the game on the Xbox Gamepass with these numbers adding to those who pre-ordered.

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I've just watched the video, hopefully it won't be long until the first big (eye)patch is rolled out with any luck. :D

It would be nice to play this for a bit over Easter... but I won't hold my breath. (especially not in these currently choppy waters, I might drown)

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I was all ready to buy the game for PC with Payday looming but seeing all this server issues I may hold off a bit. Already have Penny Punching Princess and GalGun 2 to buy this coming month.

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On the upside, my copy of Tales from the Sea of Thieves has arrived. :D

So at least I can read the "Pirate's Manual" as it were in time for when the game is ready to set sail again. :peace:

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Definitely getting No Man's Sky vibes from this. Seems a very shallow experience and probably could have done with another year of development.

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6 hours ago, Hero-of-Time said:

Here's an interesting piece by Game Informer in which they talk about how the game doesn't actually have a target audience.

Article

Would you say these are fair points, @Kaepora_Gaebora?

I can't argue with a lot of that to be honest! 

To be fair I've been playing solo but I have wondered about the whole joining up on the fly thing, and the potential of playing with Sam was scuppered as he couldn't just join my game and I didn't notice he was online or looking for a game either until it was too late.

I have ploughed a bit more time into the game and actually had a decent session last night...up to a point.

Mid quest I found a strange book that gave me an island that contained some legendary pirates or something, so I followed the clues but...impossible to defeat the wave after wave of enemy on my own. I died a few times, and then when I regenerated the last time a full galleon were plundering my ship! 

Fair enough, that's the point of the game, but they killed me and I respawned on a different island.

It was already late, so I switched off...and had nothing to show for my entire evenings play.

The sentiment in that article "it's trying to waste as much of my time as possible" is very apt; I really want to like the game and when I'm playing it and admiring the art style it's great...but it feels like I'm wasting my time and not getting much out of it at all.

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I keep saying I'm going to leave this, and then keep firing it up; I feel like it's a duty to Rare to keep on trying as I don't want to see them go kaput coupled with the fact that the idea of this game (when I'm thinking about it at work) is amazing, but the reality is sadly less so.

Like tonight I was on my voyage, heading to the last of three islands when I noticed a circle of birds in the shy above the ocean (if video games have taught me anything) and true enough there was a ship wreck under neath the waves, which I explored and plundered for a skull and a captains chest (lot of coins for one of those). Worth noting that under water controls are horrendous, Banjo Kazooie levels of borked, which for a game that relies on them to a degree is terrible, still...

Reached the top of the ocean with captains chest to find another solo player bombing the hell out of my boat, which had a few chests and the skull on it. Got back aboard, raised anchor and went about patching it up, which I managed to do en route to the final island. I hadn't realised the guy followed me, so when I stopped with a sharp turn we ended up ploughing into each other, again causing holes in my ship that needed patching up. Then a four person galleon turned up, luckily picking on the other guy first which gave me the chance to get the hell out of there and recover myself. Went to the nearest out post and cashed in my skull and chests before going back to the final island, which was now empty...

...To spend an hour trying to solve the riddle to find the chest and having to abandon it in the end as it got so late. I either missed something obvious, or something wasn't quite right about it as every place I thought "this must be it" well, it wasn't. And the lack of any entertaining or, really, any NPC's is a crime; it leaves the islands feeling souless and empty. I get that they just want real life players to populate the game, but it'd be so much better to find a random character while you're searching for a chest, or like sometimes in BOTW you'd find a random character in the middle of nowhere and you'd get a quest from them.

Writing that all down, it does sound quite entertaining (the battle bit at least) and yet, to go back to the previous post, I didnt really achieve alot in about 2 1/2 hours of game play. Not even an achievement for solo patching my ship back up and surving that chaos! This is such a weird experience; I'm enjoying it to a degree, but at the same time, and going back to the earlier article posted by @Hero-of-Time, the target audience thing is messed up; they've only gone for four player teams with microphones. I'm constantly reminded the experience is better with a mic and being a solo player is clearly an after thought...but this is an open world, "game as a service" type game, surely I should be able to play it however I wanted to and still have the same experience? Why should my play style hinder my experience, you have to say at the opening screen who is in your crew etc, so if I'm playing solo why not increase the reward from chests knowing that I've one manned the mission rather than had help and done it in half the time? 

Christ, late night ramble! I just desperately want to like this game for Rare as much as anything and am waiting for the moment it all comes in to place, I won't say I'm not going to play it again as I probably will tomorrow 😂 but I already feel like I'm coming towards a point where I won't bother. If my local GAME had bothered to stock any copies of Kirby I'd have picked that up today and would have been the end of SoT likely.

Perhaps I just need to read more of the book before I "get it" 😝

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I don’t know man. If you feel you have to force to play the game just to try and support a studio which...lets face it, it’s nostalgia at this point. Last great game was Viva Piñata series and arguably Nuts and Bolts....a decade ago. 

They just don’t have it anymore, maybe it is time to shutter the doors. 

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34 minutes ago, Mandalore said:

Rare top of the UK sales charts. When's the last time that happened?

Did they go top on Rare Replay?

Also I don't mean to be negative but being at the top of the charts don't really mean much in the UK. Games don't have to sell by the bucket load in order to achieve the no 1 spot.

I'm more interested with the numbers.

In any event, being top of the charts is better than no 2 so well done Rare!

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11 hours ago, Blade said:

Did they go top on Rare Replay?

Also I don't mean to be negative but being at the top of the charts don't really mean much in the UK. Games don't have to sell by the bucket load in order to achieve the no 1 spot.

I'm more interested with the numbers.

In any event, being top of the charts is better than no 2 so well done Rare!

Yup. Just take a look at this.

Quote

Sea of Thieves debuted with 22,695, which is very low for a big budget game.

Mass Effect Andromeda debuted last year with 80k-100k and that was enough of a bomb to kill the franchise.

So yeah, top 6 this week combined is less than Andromeda's bad debut.

 

Easy Allies review.

 

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A very fair review from EZA there.

Think I've put about 20 hours into the game since last week and, I know I've said it before, but I am now done with it until they make some big changes.

I came across a "stranger" in a tavern who told me he wanted all my traders reputations up to 5, so I duly obliged and went back to him, only to be told my next objective was level 10. No reward, nothing else apart from a change in the writing.

The problem is, the levelling up takes so, so long! Before the game was released all the promo videos had you digging up the best chests etc, well 9 times out of 10 you get the most basic one with the smaller monetary and reputation reward too. Fair enough it may get better the higher the rank...but its too much of a slog to get there.

I'll be really interested to see what the views are of people who make it to legendary status and if this improves the game and missions at all, or if it stays along the same blue print as the moment.

Hopefully a player base stays around to make this all worth while, but it's got Titanfall drop off numbers written all over it in my opinion.

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I know I said it before but...

Bloody missed ending the 14 day free trial by a day, so now I've paid £7.99 for another month of game pass...against my better judgement may well be playing this some more when the mood takes.

Almost finished the official book too...I wish it was a single player aspect of the actual game, Paul Davies has done a really good job in illuminating the world while also creating an interesting through story too!

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In a bid to have an enjoyable, open world type game where I could level up, upgrade cosmetic and useful items and have multiple challenges to face of I want to...I've started playing The Division again :p

I had one last crack at this last night and just didn't enjoy myself; last leg of a quest and a two man sloop started taking all my chests while I was on an island finding the last of the treasure. I saw them from a distance and swam over to there boat spamming the "ahoy" message to show I was friendly, put a chest down on their deck for them as a peace offering...and they blew me to bits, took all my chest and sunk my ship while I was waiting to respawn. They hurled some abuse my way and sailed off, and that was that.

The official forums is full of these stories and, fair point, it is a pirate game and I actually don't mind what happened to a degree, as it's part of the game...but to have spent a good hour doing all that and literally have nothing to show for it, no money, no rankings upgrades nothing at all...they need to sort this game out yesterday.

As it is, I loved jumping back into the Division, where my last save had been in the Dark Zone; I gained some good gear and even after dying once I was able to go back and finish the enemies off and reclaim it, teamed up with some randoms to extract...I know it's had plenty of updates but with games like this and Destiny showing what players gravitate towards its still stunning how Rare got SoT so drastically wrong in that respect.

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Sound the klaxon, content incoming! 

Looks interesting, all for no additional cost either. The pressure is on for them to get this right, certainly the first DLC "The Hungering Deep"...having watched the trailer for 'The Meg' earlier today, I hope they put a Megaladon in this!

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Decided to fill out that Microsoft survey about all things Xbox that I've had in my inbox for a while, they wanted to specifically know about why I scored Sea of Thieves so low, well...

Not enough meaningful content, Rare founded a lot of its previous titles on there being a decent amount of single-player content, I realise that this is an online focused game but I feel that it would benefit from having a dedicated single-player campaign as either extra dlc or preferably a free update. I realise that more things will be added or tweaked to Sea of Thieves over time, but at the moment, it is far from a desirable experience, which is a shame because the art direction is spectacular and there is surely still a lot of talent at Rare. I also feel that if possible external forces had not effectively forced Rare to release the game early to be part of the Game Pass then this could have released later in the year as a more fleshed out title to greater critical acclaim, rather than releasing now for relatively short-term gains.

They then asked me What is the primary reason you purchased Sea of Thieves?

To play as a Pirate! Arrrrg!

That'll do I think. :p

I can only hope that we get a surprise update during E3 which somehow transforms the game into something closer to what everyone expected it to be. :peace:

 

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Is it a big surprise given the Xbox and Microsoft's current sort of position/standing in the market? Also how does this Xbox game pass thing work in regards to PC? Few of my mates played for a bit on PC during the trial and possibly thinking of picking it up later on - but similarly I don't think they have/will quite yet.

Ofc it's a bit of a shame that due to it being Rare etc this won't make it to ps4 - they could make a killing with the install base of the ps4 now. I can only see it growing bigger and I'm not sure how much competition is really going to impact on it now vs vice versa.

It'll be interesting to see how sales go over time - I imagine a few people are looking to pick it up eventually but the other thing that surely affects how good/worth it it is is also the size of the playerbase?

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14 minutes ago, Rummy said:

Is it a big surprise given the Xbox and Microsoft's current sort of position/standing in the market? Also how does this Xbox game pass thing work in regards to PC? Few of my mates played for a bit on PC during the trial and possibly thinking of picking it up later on - but similarly I don't think they have/will quite yet.

Ofc it's a bit of a shame that due to it being Rare etc this won't make it to ps4 - they could make a killing with the install base of the ps4 now. I can only see it growing bigger and I'm not sure how much competition is really going to impact on it now vs vice versa.

It'll be interesting to see how sales go over time - I imagine a few people are looking to pick it up eventually but the other thing that surely affects how good/worth it it is is also the size of the playerbase?

I don't think the size and position of the Xbox market has much to do with the drop off. The game had a very strong start both in retail and digitally but a lot of players left not long after it launched. The reason for this is the game just lacks content, which is baffling considering how long it was in development for. Having it on other consoles wouldn't have helped as you would have just had more people left disappointed.

There is also the problem of it lacking a real single player component. Sure, you can play on your own but no doubt you will get hunted down by a group of people who are playing together. I've read a fair few stories on Era about how people got sick of losing their loot due to being attacked by a random group of players. This is fine if its an even battle but if you are off about doing your own thing by yourself, exploring and getting treasure, only for it to be nicked away from you after putting a couple of hours into getting it, it's not hard to see why people got fed up.

The GaaS model is a tricky one and you need to have a plenty of things to do for the player that keep them engaged otherwise it's going to tank. Ubisoft seems to really have cracked the code with some of their games. Just look at how well Rainbow Six, The Division and even For Honor are doing. All 3 of them had bumpy starts but Ubisoft engaged with their user base, listened to the feedback and reacted quickly in order to deliver games that are now very successful.

 

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I really feel that having a strong Single-Player component would be a decent option for this game in addition to the DLC they are currently working on.

If this happens at E3 followed by a soft-relaunch with a free software update soon then I wouldn't be too surprised.

Failing that... revive Project Dream in its original form, that had Pirates and at the moment I'd much rather play that and it's kind of what I was hoping this game might end up being more like.

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