Optimizing SoT

  • pegtistic
    Ship Mate
    Insider

    Sea of Thieves, developed by Rare and published by Xbox Game Studios, has captured the hearts of many gamers since its release. With its immersive world, vibrant graphics, and adventurous gameplay, it offers a unique and engaging multiplayer experience. However, as with many online multiplayer games, Sea of Thieves has had its fair share of performance issues and bugs that hinder the overall experience. To provide players with a smoother and more stable gaming experience, some may argue that the game needs to remove certain content. In this article, we will explore the idea of optimizing Sea of Thieves by potentially removing content to improve performance and stability.

    The Challenge of Content in Sea of Thieves

    Sea of Thieves boasts a vast open world, numerous islands, quests, creatures, and countless customization options for ships and characters. This plethora of content, while undoubtedly contributing to the game's appeal, can also be a double-edged sword when it comes to performance. As more content is added to the game over time, the potential for performance bottlenecks and bugs increases. Here are some reasons why some may suggest that certain content should be removed:

    Performance Issues: With every update, Sea of Thieves becomes more demanding on players' hardware. This can lead to lag, frame rate drops, and connection problems, especially for players with less powerful PCs or consoles.

Bug Proliferation: Each new piece of content has the potential to introduce new bugs and glitches, making it challenging for developers to maintain a stable experience.

Balancing Act: Maintaining a balanced and fair multiplayer experience is critical in a game like Sea of Thieves. When content is continuously added, it can disrupt the balance, leading to frustration for players.

    Potential Content to Consider for Removal

    While the idea of removing content from Sea of Thieves may be a controversial one, it is worth considering for the sake of performance and stability. Here are some elements that players and developers might evaluate for potential removal or optimization:

    Outdated and Underused Features: Some game mechanics, cosmetics, or islands that are rarely visited may be candidates for removal if they no longer significantly contribute to the game's overall experience.

Repetitive or Unbalanced Quests: Redundant or imbalanced quest types might be streamlined or revised to offer a more engaging experience without the need for constant addition of new content.

Resource-Intensive Visual Effects: Resource-heavy visual effects, such as weather or particle effects, could be adjusted to improve performance while retaining the game's visual charm.

Infrequently Visited Regions: Islands or areas of the map that see little player traffic may be merged, condensed, or removed to focus on more active and engaging parts of the game world.

    TLDR: there is too much in the game for it to have good performance, and taking out some content that is barely used could help a lot with performance. Possibly even cycling events, or even regions (devils roar) would drastically help server performance. There is just too much stuff in the game right.

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  • pegtistic
    Ship Mate
    Insider

    Note: this article was made by me and my friends

  • RealStyli
    Vanguard
    Insider

    While I don't doubt that the game needs some optimisation server side, the problem isn't the amount of content. Most of that content you mentioned isn't rendered until you actually get within range. While the server is keeping track of where things are, this is a fairly small load for a server to handle compared to doing actual physics calculations (ships, waves, hit reg). In other words, if you don't see it, it doesn't actually exist until the game needs to access that data and render it (and most of that data is going to be client side anyway).

    I've spoken about this several times before, the issue is with the poor CPU utilisation - which is a common issue with Unreal Engine games, unless they are optimised for multithreading/SMT.

    Sea of Thieves only really saturates 2 CPU cores (4 threads) in the heaviest areas and that leads to scenarios where you can be CPU bound on even the beefiest GPUs paired with an 8+ core CPU and speedy RAM. A CPU with faster single core clocks will help but, ultimately, you are still going to be bottlenecked because the game isn't multithreading efficiently. The result is that the game struggles to move assets in and out of memory fast enough, causing hitches and drops, even though the overall CPU usage will appear relatively low (less than 30% most of the time).

    Rare have so far tried to optimise by culling LODs but, I think, that has had the opposite effect - reducing VRAM load but creating more load on the CPU (only 2 cores of it, remember) as it tries to switch out more data, more often. This increases the render time per frame, and frames have to be dropped. You can see this LOD culling in action in the game by the amount of pop in on textures and shadows at very short distances, even on Mythical settings.

    Improving CPU utilisation across more cores is probably a better solution than removing content, in my opinion.

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