In a conversation with GamesBeat, Sea of Thieves lead designer Mike Chapman explained that these team battlers are only one small slice of the overall experience.
“The goal for us was to create a rich pirate world,” he said. “When you look at the cinematic trailer and see all the familiar pirate tropes, your mind kinda fills with the possible quests. For us, we want to allow people to be the pirate they want to be. If you want to be the solitary pirate who sales around on a small, one-man ship, we want to allow you to do that.”
At the same time, Rare isn’t going to fudge things to help a single-person vessel take on a larger opponent.
“It’s better to play with other people, but I don’t mean that mechanically. It makes sense in the world,” he said. “If I have a bigger group, I can control a bigger ship. I can man more cannons. I can repair at the same time that someone is on the wheel. You’re gonna be a little bit more limited when you’re on your own, but not because we’re limiting players.”
Instead, Rare wants to empower people who play together with a different experience that is more complex and rewarding because you can do more when working in unison.
“When people see our game, they think that it looks like a classic Rare action adventure,” said Chapman. “That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to build most cooperative adventure game, but we don’t want to limit what players can do for people who want to get lost in the world. That’s just as valid.”
http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/14/sea-o ... at-a-cost/E3 demo impressions:
There's a reason this game is getting 4-5 hour lines at E3. It is a game that is so much fun to play. I was lucky enough to get a private demo and I played twice the first day of E3. I played with complete strangers and we immediately picked our jobs after taking a look around. To man a ship you have done to raise the anchor, which can take up to 3 people to do it fast enough, lower the sails and angle them and steer the ship. Twice we went aggressively and snake at least one of the 2 other teams ships.
My 3rd play through we went to another island and explored. Meanwhile we left one guy to guard the ship and the other team took it and sunk the 3rd teams ship.
Everyone who has played it was laughing and having a great time. Talking to the developers you got a sense that there was a lot that was already done in other builds, but they wanted to give us a very small slice to limit the time of the demo. They even put the ships in pretty close proximity to each other at the start.
Honestly, it was one of my favorite demos at this e3 and one that I hope to play again soon.
I played the demo twice yesterday and going back today for more. Both demos were completely different experiences. The second time we were dropping anchor to do quick 180s and got more used to angling the sales. We also rammed into the final ship to take them out. It is seriously my game of the show. No contest. Both times I played with complete strangers and we worked really well as a team.
So much fun.
Many things were turned off in the demo to make ship battles quicker, such as blunderbusses to invade other ships, and buckets to try and get rid of water in your sinking ship.
There will also be ways of communicating without voice in final release, and the game will have a lot more other than ship to ship combat. Also there is much smaller ships that will require 1-2 players instead of 5.
I hope we can get enough people rounded up here for a decent sized GRcade crew