Just a disclaimer: I do like SoT very much for its new take on pirate games ranging from seemingly indie style to fun gameplay and so on. But I do think that in recent months development and progress of the game has seemingly halted at least from a player's perspective, who is not the most active person on forums.
Back at E3 in 2014 or 2015, cannot surely recall, we had seen the first pieces of an amazing upcoming pirate adventure game and most of us if not all got really excited about it. When they told us about the Insider program I immediately rushed to their website and signed up so I would not miss out on anything developers at Rare had is store for us players. I was the most excited I have ever been for a game and was really hoping it had reached the expectations I had set in my mind.
The years went by, the development of the game was going nicely, but the only thing I was lacking was the ability to play the game. Although I was a very early bird to sign up for the Insider program, my first play session was in 2017. I had had problems even then, when I was not let to play the previews and alphas for half the play session.
Anyhow, when I finally had the ability to play the Alpha, I was thrilled and eager and eventually ready to play the game I was dreaming about for years. In the week I was able to play, I had fallen in love with the game once more and was sure that this is finally it - my game of the decade.
Months passed and I was already naming my ship and establishing my crew of friends when Beta dropped from nowhere (at least for me). I rediscovered that feeling of joy and was again happy to be aboard. But that did not went as expected...
The Beta was in my opinion rubbish. There was less content than in Closed Alpha, because they was supposedly "saving the content for full release" or they did not have anything new to show, so they even took some away. It is against all logic that the "Alpha" version of the game is more filled with content than the "Beta" two months from the release date of the game. You could just buy the voyages and that is all you could do in the Beta and it got repetitive in no time. Not to say half the shops are still empty and there is no sign of ship customisation. The servers were also very poorly optimised as it was similar to roulette: sometimes you got in and were able to play and sometimes you couldn't play.
And now the "Scale test" has identical problem or servers not working as they should. They could not handle all the players then and they cannot now. They do a goddam scale test of how much player cannot play the game not the other way around. And with introduction of micro-transactions they had raised the doubt in me about my previous claims.
That got me thinking about one game for which I had also had high hopes and dreams but failed to deliver any: No Man's Sky. It definitely was gorgeous and it brought us some things it has promised but far too little to satisfy the hardcore fans like me.
But in recent update (1.35 I reckon) No Man's Sky is close to what is has promised to be in the beginning. It is still gorgeous as it was when it launched, but the damage has been done and it is quite impossible to fix.
Will that happen to Sea of Thieves? Will it also be full of promises that turn out to be just a marketing speech from Microsoft? From my perspective, they are walking very close to the edge of failure and despair and they need to be very careful of what they do next because a game that costs $60 is supposed to be far better than what they had showed us which is basically an indie treasure hunt exploration game worth not more than $30.
