Sea of thieves

[Froggy]

Right boys, it's out this week after seemingly forever in development. I've been on the beta with my mates and the load tests and have enjoyed it, they seemed to have fixed the balance for single and two player as well from the first to the second. Definitely need 4 people on a big ship to have any hope against another 4 person crew, I think some people may also get sea sickness from this game too lol.

This week they are having the golden bananas comp:
https://www.windowscentral.com/sea-thie ... en-bananas

Marking the Sea of Thieves release, Microsoft has announced an unusual celebration of its latest title. "The Quest for the Golden Bananas" will challenge players with a series of riddles to solve, with the ultimate prize of four hallmarked 18-carat gold bananas. The complete bunch of these bananas is valued at £80,000 (over $110,000) which can be shared with your three other crewmates.


This has got one of my friends off the fence and he's in, being on Game Pass already have a couple of others who wouldn't normally be into this on from PC.

[Froggy]

https://www.xbox.com/en-AU/promotions/the-quest

[lestat]

I'm sure a few here will give it a crack thanks to gamepass.

[Froggy]

Yeah, without game pass I'd have no crew the 3 people playing only gave it a go because of game pass and signing up for that.. then got themselves the MS insider to have beta go. I know it's not indicative but I'm wondering if this could really explode for MS if the Game Pass numbers are strong as well as retail.

[Madmya]

Yeah I'm trying to con my mates to get on the game pass trial to play this. I don't think it'll be too difficult.

[FosterSan]

This game is out on March 20th, right? Anyone planning going hard on release?

[Twiztid Elf]

I'm going to pass for now.
I watched the whole 2.5 hour GiantBomb feature and wasn't sold.
It seemed like there was a whole lot of tedious, frustrating busywork.
But the real killer for me was they would all agree to an objective or goal, but wouldn't finish because they'd be distracted by something else. But then wouldn't finish that something else because they were distracted by the next thing. Etc, etc.
It ultimately seemed unsatisfying and aimless.

[t0mby]

That sounds like every open world game to me.

[lestat]

Lots of aimless games are big these days, although some of us older more time constrained folk want clear goals to feel we're getting the most out of our time, the younger generation have no qualms with wasting hours upon hours being aimless but still socialising and having fun.

So we'll see, I'm not sure how much I'll enjoy it, looks like a lot of the fun is getting a good crew together.

[lestat]

The game has a day one patch.



Arrgh!

[pilonv1]

Managed to sail around with no idea what I'm doing and have sunk every ship

[lestat]

Chaos, Hercy and I got a good crew together, there is no tutorial or guide so you need to figure shit out yourself, we managed to learn to sail the ship and did a few chicken fetch quests and gold ones, although we have no idea what happened on the last gold treasure quest, our ship vanished and in place there was a creepy siren in the water. She teleports you back to the ship but we had to leave the treasure chests.

Initially I got paired up with randoms and we attacked the island with the glowing skull cloud above and got fucked up quick.

The basic object of the game is you collect quests from the vendors, do the objective and then collect the reward from the vendor. This gives you money you can then spend on customising the look of your character, there are no levels so no xp/stat grinding. The only thing that carries over from different sessions is the money you've earned and gear, other items seem to get lost on respawn, the different gear just appears to be just cosmetic as well.

It's fun once you get the hang of things and know what the hell you're supposed to do and get a good crew going. I'd only get it on gamepass, I don't think there is content here to justify a full price.

I've been playing it on PC, runs at 4k 60fps max details on a 1080Ti but it's pretty taxing, around 80% gpu util but doesn't fluctuate much so it's pretty solid.

[Hercy]

Good summation.

I was thinking afterwards that perhaps our heavy landing on the beach of that island put a hole in our hull which sunk our ship. But a 30 second sinking does seem too fast. What's strange is that I noticed that there's an achievement for the first time your boat sinks, and we don't have that achievement. So it really does point towards a bug that made our ship disappear.

I'm also hoping that the game has a hidden newbie mode activated for new players which reduces the general difficulty. Because in 2 hours and visiting around 10 islands we saw 1 other ship. Also we never had to do anything fancy like tacking. It seemed that we could leave our sails facing forward and just steer anywhere we wanted and we would make good progress at a fast speed. So as I said, hopefully the game was just going easy on us to ease us in, otherwise after not too long the game is going to get very old.

[t0mby]

I can't imagine the sailing getting too technical, most gamers these days can't even handle manual gears in a Racer, lord knows how they'd handle anything more than sails up/sails down with steering.

[Peppermint Lounge]

Was the GR crew all PC or cross platform? If cross platform how did it run?

MS getting good Game Pass publicity from this launch.

[lestat]

I was playing PC, Chaos on X and Hercy on the original one. Cross play worked great.

[flipswitch]

I can't imagine the sailing getting too technical, most gamers these days can't even handle manual gears in a Racer, lord knows how they'd handle anything more than sails up/sails down with steering.

This is what I’m worried about. I watched a video last night, had no idea what was happening half the time, but I reckon it looks like something I’m interested in.

[lestat]

We didn't run into many people last night, there was a ship though at one of the ports we came across, we fired cannons at them but they ran away, but we soon discovered they left a crew mate behind.

As I was running around the vendors, I went behind the pub and the crew mate they left was hiding there, I pulled out my sword and knifed the poor bloke.

Never leave a man behind.

I think the fun grieving people in PVP is what will keep people coming back for more.

Minor correction on the leveling, there are levels/rep you gain with traders, as you do more quests you gain rep levels which unlock better quests with better rewards. Just no character leveling, this is good because people can play with friends and not worry about the different character level BS or get grieved by higher level players in pvp.

[Hercy]

Was the GR crew all PC or cross platform? If cross platform how did it run?

Flawless cross play. If lestat didn't tell us he was on PC we wouldn't have known. We were all in a party and in party chat.

[lestat]

Ahh the Siren appearing is a built in game mechanic.

from reddit.

If your ship is sunk or you're just too far away from it, a mermaid will spawn to take you to your (new) ship.

Look for the rising smoke.

[guttermouth]

Played it with a mate last night for about 4 hours. The water and lighting effects in the game are pretty damn amazing. We done a ton of missions and the boat was loaded with chests and bounty skulls. Saw a fair few ships, some came towards us but we bailed quickly, didn't want to loose our booty. If you see birds flying in a circle, head there, its means there is a sunken ship.

[pilonv1]

The PC version is really well done. Full detail at 1440p for me at 60fps, no lag, no stuttering and ping was fine.

[Cletus]

So glad I switched to Xbox X. It's looks stunning in 4k.

[Lepo5]

already got four?....no probs happy to wait.

[Froggy]

How often are you guys coming across other boats? I thought the last two days when I can see at least one GR boat online going by friends list that my boat would eventually come across someone else on my friends list considering timezone and stuff but so far.. pretty baron?