As someone who has a lot of work / life commitments and can't always play for the required few hours to really feel like you've had good sail, one thing stands out to me with this game, I'll summarise it with some logical un-piratey executive bullet points:
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A good outing tends to take a little more time than I have / would like in adventure mode these days, particularly during week days. Come on, who wants to get everyone online together, stock a ship up and dig up one island?
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The new Arena mode is totally geared to addressing this by snipping the game into a bite-size chunk for battle-thirsty, time-poor pirates. Good form Rare...
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But...whilst the ship and PvP battles can be outrageously awesome, sometimes I just want to be able to chill a little in the game, play in third gear as it were. Yes this is possible now, but PvP particularly is very unpredictable, a good and bad thing sometimes. Yes, yes, also toggling PvP off would detract from the game in adventure mode, I get it...
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What I believe is missing (which may be in the works already) is some sort of PvE challenge set, where the game play time is still short but it isn't a mad panic-inducing player on player scrap, with a more predictable level of difficulty. PvP by its nature is great fun but it's also very difficult to match players fairly, as I've found as a non top tier player for years (I'm going to pretend it's due to lack of time ok?).
Couple of examples where this works very well, CoD zombies / survival modes, SC2 co-op missions (yes I know it's an RTS...), most games try it, some better than others. I also understand that SoT is a very technically ambitious game and this kind of thing would be buggy as hell but there must be a few things we could do without too much nightmare coding: Ship racing with rocks and horrible choke points, ship gauntlet running with constant Skalleon spawning, super or multi kraken / meg killing, AI royal rumble with all threats at once, fight your way to the top of Old faithful through a stream of skellies, boss / raid mechanics scenarios, cargo slalom, chicken run, grab stuff from an erupting Devils roar island, defending a fort for a bloody change, low resources for extra hard mode etc etc. With enough random effects like weather or curse balls it can still be narrative forging. We've all had a few of these things happen in game already so why not get to replay that 'perfect storm' of poo we experienced two months ago with the kraken, meg, mega-keg, two allied sloops and the humorously shaped banana? Hell, this could even still be arena / PvP but with more emphasis on environmental challenges.
I would love to see Rare considering a few extra bits like this, short game bites but with predictable difficulty and low griefing and saltiness risk...
