I'm not sure how prevalent the issue is but the game has been glitching and freezing a lot for me lately.
Yesterday, the game repeatedly froze during a skull fort battle. My crew mates and I kept getting kicked off of the Galleon we were on, killed and getting black screened until, finally, we all gave up and quit.
I opted to go solo on a Sloop after that, tried an OOS mission and after running a voyage with 5 skulls, my game froze when I was within swimming range of the Ancient Spire Outpost. I waited and waited and waited for more than 5 minutes before I finally quit the game...throwing out a good 45 minutes of gaming treasure.
I've always been very forgiving of the game's shortcomings because, overall, it's so much fun for me (even losing loot to pirates) but, when you can't play the game because the game won't even function, it stops being fun.
Yesterday wasn't my first run in with freezing in this game. Rare, please do something about this. Based on the randoms I've played with I'm not the only one experiencing this problem.