Sea of Thieves (XB/PC/Game Pass/PS5) - Over 35m players. Coming to PS5 on 30th April. 2024 details.

Zellery wrote:Photek. If this game is actually good, people will buy it.

You don’t have to worry so much.

BID0 wrote:It'd be great if they do another weekend and someone can walk me through the game. My first alpha attempt I couldn't connect to anything and the last one was spent walking around not knowing what to do

Photek wrote:

BID0 wrote:It'd be great if they do another weekend and someone can walk me through the game. My first alpha attempt I couldn't connect to anything and the last one was spent walking around not knowing what to do

Why didn’t you pick the 1 player boat? It literally gives you the option at the start?

BID0 wrote:

Photek wrote:

BID0 wrote:It'd be great if they do another weekend and someone can walk me through the game. My first alpha attempt I couldn't connect to anything and the last one was spent walking around not knowing what to do

Why didn’t you pick the 1 player boat? It literally gives you the option at the start?

Because it looked gooseberry fool and I wanted a bigger boat? If I couldn't find a big boat then I imagine I'd probably struggle spotting a row boat.

Photek wrote:

BID0 wrote:

Photek wrote:

BID0 wrote:It'd be great if they do another weekend and someone can walk me through the game. My first alpha attempt I couldn't connect to anything and the last one was spent walking around not knowing what to do

Why didn’t you pick the 1 player boat? It literally gives you the option at the start?

Because it looked gooseberry fool and I wanted a bigger boat? If I couldn't find a big boat then I imagine I'd probably struggle spotting a row boat.

What are you 5? It’s not a row boat... ? Picking 1p it would have showed you the ropes.

After Sea of Thieves' closed beta, I was left impressed by the emergent potential of its world but also wondering what I'd be doing in the game after a couple of weeks. Last Monday I visited Rare, and the developer explained its vision of how it will all come together at launch. With a clear endgame, difficult skeleton fort raids and the ever-present threat of a kraken that can attack multiple ships at once, I'm convinced that I'll be playing it for at least a couple of months.

Pirate legend status is your overarching goal in Sea of Thieves. Rare has alluded to this before in one of the game's countless community videos—it's unlocked by building your reputation with the game's three trading companies, as well as by proving yourself to other NPCs who will populate the game's world at launch.

The reward, besides the status itself, is a secret pirate hideout that only legends can access—and I'm seeing it for the first time. "When you become a pirate legend, you discover a secret and get access to a key, shall we say, that gives you access to this location," explains design director Mike Chapman. "It's seamlessly hidden in the world. It's not loading off a menu. It was already in our closed beta, but no one could become pirate legend and unlock it—but it was there." This cove, which reminds me of The Goonies, contains a ship that's been retrofitted into a pub—the Tavern of Legends, along with another, seemingly functional ship beside it. Pirate legends, who appear as ghosts, live in the tavern. They include the pirates from the game's E3 2016 trailer. It's nice to see promotional characters go to a good home.

Character customization

Sea of Thieves won't have dozens of sliders and dials, allowing you to finely tune the shape of your nose or cheekbones. Instead, Rare has attempted to strike a balance between customizability and accessibility.

When you initially make your character in Sea of Thieves, you will be presented with a carousel of eight, completely randomly generated pirates, pulling from a potential pool of millions. The idea is that no two pirates will look the same, even if, like most players, you simply hit the "play now" button and go with whatever design you're given.

Rare made the point that in many other games of this nature, players often simply stick with the default skin. In a game world that revolves around player-generated lore and personal legends, encountering pirates that look identical 75 percent of the time would potentially infringe upon that idea.

Instead of asking players to do the heavy lifting, spending hours to design a unique and memorable pirate face, Rare will do it for you. But hey, if you're like me and you're the kind of gamer who will spend hours and hours customizing your dude or dudette in Fallout 4 until they look perfect, know that Rare doesn't completely remove control from the player.

Hairstyles, beards, peg legs, hooks, and more transitory cosmetic options will be available in the vanity chest, found on ships or outside clothes shops. Additionally, Rare will let you reroll the pirate generator carousel an infinite number of times until you find the pirate that's right for you. It's important to note too that hitboxes will be normalized, so picking a smaller pirate won't help you.

Be wary though, once you pick, that's it, you become locked in, and that character becomes tied to your gamer tag on Xbox Live. Rare wants player identity to truly matter in Sea of Thieves, to the point where specific players will be recognizable from their character models alone. Your deeds will go with you.

To that end, the first addition to the Sea of Thieves premium shop will be virtual pets, which you can buy directly (individually). These pets work like other items in the game: they're physical objects that can be held not just by the owner, but by other players.

"It's entirely optional, but if you had a monkey, for example, you'll be able to hold it like you can other things in the game, but then I'll also be able to hold it, then drop it overboard, because that's funny," Neate explained.

"It'll come back. It'll be fine! I desperately want us to be able to fire other stuff out of cannons, including monkeys and other animals, just because it's fun, right?

"So even if you were the only person who had bought a pet, but you had it on board, your crew would be able to enjoy the benefits of a monkey. It's about adding to the fun and social nature. It's just the right spirit for what Sea of Thieves is. Again, it's completely optional. You will know what you're getting. It doesn't affect power and it doesn't affect progression."

The studio’s currently aiming to add its first major free content update three months after launch, which will not only offer as-yet unspecified new voyages for Pirate Legends, but also begin to advance the wider story into the Golden Age of Piracy (as well as add the game’s first microtransactions).

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That’s not say there won’t be updates for the first three months either - Rare’s live service approach means that event quests, new items and even mysterious new islands could be added to the world as and when they want them to be. The earliest could be a time-limited challenge, coming shortly after a release.

“We won’t just do these arbitrarily,” Chapman explains, “we’ll do it based on the lore of the game. We’ll make an event out of it. I think we might announce by saying ‘there’s a new Trading Company that’s come to the world’, but behind the scenes we’ve changed the islands in some way - then that news spreads around the community. That’s the potential we have with Sea of Thieves, that this world is dynamic and it’s always changing - and there’s always new things to discover and ways to progress.”

As we add additional stuff to the game down the line, there's no intent to charge for the content updates – there's no season pass, there are no DLC packs, that stuff will be delivered for free, we don't want to separate our players

Rare made the point that in many other games of this nature, players often simply stick with the default skin.