Sea of Thieves Launch Day has come and gone, and after getting some quality time with the final build, it’s obvious that Rare has a list of things to work out in the coming weeks. I’m not talking about the technical glitches or server issues that kept a lot of people from playing this afternoon. I’m referring to balancing issues between PC and console, spawning into bad situations, and just some overall shitty behavior by some players.
The first thing they need to address is the port camping. I’m not sure if there’s a term for it yet (give it a day) but I’m referring to the players that literally wait in the ports for other crews to return with their loot. Once the visiting crew comes ashore carrying their chests, they’re ambushed and killed, and the chests are there for the taking, literally steps from where they can be sold. It’s technically a legal move, albeit a dick one. It’s enough to make a person drop the controller, turn the game off, and never return to it again.
Gamers expressed concerns about this during the multiple betas, suggesting that there be perimeters around the port islands that are considered “safe zones” and once inside, the crew is safe to unload their cargo without fear of attack. It’s a seemingly simple fix that could have been implemented before launch.
Another issue has to do with the cross-play feature, which let’s PC gamers play on the same servers as the console players. There’s a reason this has never really been a thing in the past. At one point during my play session tonight, my crew and I were getting downright demolished by a single dude that kept boarding our boat and waiting for us to spawn. We’d spawn on our boat, get immediately owned, and the process would begin all over again. To make this already infuriating matter even worse, the resulting fights would consist of us trying to stab and shoot a guy that was moving around so quickly and spastically we could barely hit him. His movements were so twitchty, they could only be the result of someone furiously clacking away at the WASD. The netcode of the game isn’t bad, but it’s not amazing either, and movements like that could easily begin to lag behind on the other players’ end, causing them to shoot or stab at someone that literally isn’t in that spot anymore. Back in the old Ghost Recon days we called it “lag dancing” and if this is truly what I experienced tonight, it sucks now just as much as it did back then.
The Mouse and Keyboard vs. Controller debate has never really been a debate, and for good reason. There’s no comparison. It would be nice if Rare offered the option to choose between a controller-only server or one that allows both.
Additionally, it would be nice if there were something else to do if things just aren’t going your way. My crew and I got owned tonight, repeatedly, both because we weren’t being super-serious about what we were doing, and because believe it or not, we were just out to have some fun. All we wanted to do was go hack some skeletons and look for buried treasure, and roughly every ten or fifteen minutes, we were fighting for our lives and our right to keep the treasure we had just tracked down. We didn’t want to fight anyone. We were just playing around trying to have some fun. Emphasis on the word “trying.” Because when you have been out adventuring for over two hours and you barely get back to port with two chests to sell because all the others had been either stolen or sunk to the bottom of the ocean, the fun starts to wear thin. The only thing we had to show for two ours of sailing and being forced to fight were 230 gold pieces. That’s it.
For three guys that rarely get to play together anymore, it was extremely frustrating to be getting constantly attacked with no passive option at all. I get that this is the name of the game, but if that’s all it’s going to offer, I can see us spending our social game time in some other title. For all the freedom the game offers, the one it doesn’t is the ability to just play it without anyone bothering us. Even GTA Online has a passive mode.
Rare has said that they will be listening to the fan feedback and making adjustments, so let’s hope that there are others that feel the same way, so that the game can truly be for everyone.
