Sea Of Thieves Is Certainly Swashbuckling, But Is It Enough?

For someone who was initially miffed about Rare going the way of a massively-multiplayer, online experience — and admittedly heralding a much lower level of excitement as a result — the outcome, after a fair number of days at [virtual] sea in the closed beta, are more upbeat. Albeit, still mixed in a number of ways. Let’s start with the positives and work our way down: Sea of Thieves has a peculiar degree of charm to it. Perhaps not to the same degree of colorful personality of previous titles, but subtly present nonetheless. Anyone who’s followed Rare for a long time will instantly recognize the degree of care and consideration for the details, both grand and minuscule in equal measure. The glare of the sun as you swim your way back to your ship, the ruffle of paper as you scour your chartered map for the desired island to reach; even the way your on-board lanterns flicker and crackle as the waves collide and risk snuffing out the flames.

But perhaps it's this deliberate restriction that lends itself to some interesting interactions between players and novel use of player skills as a means at working better together. While the skill at merely turning a map around to show others sounds ridiculously basic, it’s a clever move in context. A means to build bridges between similarly-plucked team-mates and better incentivises Sea of Thieves’ core, principle lesson in working together. Granted the perk is proven moot when, upon agreeing on a particular voyage, you simply get handed the same maps in your inventory, but the physicality of such interactivity in-game is welcome regardless. When it comes to your ship, though, all hands are most certainly on deck. There are sails to align and angle; potential hazards to flag and shout out to the player steering the ship (whom, if the sails are set at full length can’t see where they’re steering, again a nice nudging toward better relationships)…and if worse comes to worse, leaks to repair should you collide. Or even worse, cries of "FRAME-RATE!" -- as I had to do when a teammate is barking compass directions but I have no means to control the stuttering performance -- when the game (on PC) decides to nose-dive from relatively stable 60FPS to, at its worst, the high-teens -- the most notable drops occurring mostly at sea, relatively afar from shore.

Tomas: Fortunately I stopped and Azario was able to get back on the ship after about a minute of swimming, and we continued our voyage to the island. It was smooth sailing (pun intended) from there. Once we reached the island, I had someone shoot me out of a cannon onto the isl

How far will the trading concept go, will the cosmetic and customization sides be pushed, will the jolly and co-operative nature of fulfilling objectives flourish when it comes to buddying up with fellow players? That is, when the match-making is (and hopefully will be) better fortified. Without question, there’s a pull in Sea of Thieves that will win even the most jaded of lone wolves over, but is life at sea (and just the sea of thieves Patch notes|Https://seaofthievesfans.com/) enough of a justification? I commend Sea of Thieves for its attractive proposal, but with such a lacking world and over-reliance on random encounters, let’s just say Rare haven’t quite convinced me wholeheartedly on this concept just yet.

Sea of Thieves looks to be the latest in the plethora of new and upcoming shared-world games. The shared world concept is still fairly new for console gamers, and seems to pull together the best of role playing games and massive multiplayer online games into a full online world that gives players the opportunity to interact with each other, work together, and fight one another in an epic wo

The reason this change in creative directors is such a big deal is because the company we once fell in love with as a whole no longer existed at this point in time. Everyone who had worked on the classic smash hits such as Banjo-Kazooie, Jet Force Gemini, Donkey Kong Country and many, many others throughout their seven years with Nintendo had left the company and were replaced by a whole new group. Rare, as it stands today, has no members of the original creative team behind their ingenious games left on their roster. Much like when Star Wars was bought by Disney, a whole new creative team is now behind those films; George Lucas and his new ideas have been tossed out never to be heard from again. Meaning that Rare as we knew it is truly dead.

"When we talk about visual effects in games, we normally mean particles. That's what we're using to create all of the cannon effects for example, like the different explosions. You want to give the player strong feelings when they're playing the game... You should just feel like you're really part of this beautiful wor

And yet…as pleasing as it was to eventually get to grips with the ship’s functions — jostling between control of the wheel and micro-managing of the sails, during solo sessions — or as enticing the next island on the horizon was to make landfall over, it’s hard not to come away from Sea of Thieves and think: "OK…but what else is there?" Admittedly while the beta did restrict activities to purely hunting down treasure, to say the more "in-between" segments — the mundane segments if you will — proved to be the more entertaining and/or insightful segments brings up a worrying and (potentially) lacking hook that Sea of Thieves’ gameplay sorely needs.