So after a considerable grind on HG, solo and duo slooping with a mate for a couple of weeks, I began to feel burnt out, so did he. This is common. My HG grind started well with lots of winning streaks, unlocking PVP cosmetics and rolling our rep up with fair fights, don't get me wrong, there were defeats too, but that's to be expected. Out of nowhere we both encountered players that couldn't miss shots, at first I thought it was just more skilled players but those shots just seemed so suss to me and to us. As veteran players, both of us, that have been around since the beta, it would make sense that we are somewhat qualified to make a fairly accurate assessment on whether cannon and gun shots are suss or not Vs something that looks and feels more like legitimate skilled players getting the better of us in a fair hourglass match. So my mate just said "I'm sick of this, I'm so bored of Hourglass." Hourglass just seems to be an exploit heavy, cheaty toxic mode, I turned off Comms from other crews and that helped me enjoy the mode more but admittedly we just got bored of it, winning and losing, so we went and hunted ships on High Seas for a good few days and did some odd voyages here and there along the way but both of us got bored with that as well even though we were having a lot of success with High Seas PVP. We have all the cosmetics we could ever want for our Pirates at this stage and there is very few reasons to voyage or steal loot to sell for gold besides the fun it can sometimes be to do so, but the pay off doesn't really feel worth the hassle a lot of the time now.
So three of my friends I played SOT with regularly have dropped off and decided they are done with SOT until a half decent update comes along and I was convinced I felt the same a good while ago but truthfully I wanted to play SOT a bit more but didn't know what to do, I wasn't interested in burning myself out with doing more solo HG or hunting ships on my own on High Seas and I'm not in a rush to be distinction 5 with everything and I went off commendations hunting awhile ago. I have been drawn to playing other games more often over the years but I always come back to SOT eventually. I decided to switch things up and went to replay the Monkey Island Tall Tales and honestly, it felt like a breath of fresh air ! For anyone who doesn't know, The locations and characters are all a 3D SOT stylised rendering of a Lucas arts classic point and click adventure game from way back when and the visuals are amazing. The story is weird, funny and quite amusing, the characters you encounter are all odd ball larger than life characters and some of the things you find while playing the Monkey Island Tall Tales are not what you would expect to see in the world of Sea Of Thieves at all.
SPOILER ALERT for Monkey Island lore:
In the Monkey Island Tall Tale you will find little things like a Grog vending machine. You'll visit a circus in the woods. You'll even see a sign wreathed in lights directing you across the water to a small island that looks not dissimilar to something you would see at a theme park. You'll read things eluding to winning a free t-shirt. You'll encounter a used sea vessel salesman, really really quirky stuff. The reason for all of this is because the creator of the original Monkey Island games stated that Guybrush Threepwood (the main character) was simply a kid in a theme park and the adventure is (I think) supposed to all be the imaginings of a child in a theme park. At the end of Monkey Island 2 it shows that Guybrush and (the antagonist) captain LeChuck are just brothers, kids, visiting a theme park with their parents, which explains why you see things that don't belong in a circa 1700's pirate Caribbean setting. (I'll get back to this in a bit)
Tall Tale criticism:
I was playing on an alt account as I've done it all before on my main account and I missed a commendation which unlocks some ship trinkets associated with Monkey Island so I wanted to speed run the chapter again from the checkpoint to the part I needed to do, I had no problem with going through the steps to get there again but there was no way to skip through some of the dialogue with certain NPC's. I feel this needs changed so that all and any dialogue can be skipped to allow players who have already played the Tall Tale once who may have missed something to be able to speed run it to get to the part they missed with far more haste, without having to sit through lengthy NPC dialogues, this isn't unique to the Monkey Island Tall Tales though, I think this issue exists in all Tall Tales where there is NPC dialogue. (The dialogue you can't skip has a black background.)
Back to the absurdity of Monkey Island:
Sea Of Thieves is said to be a mythologised area in the Caribbean, hidden away in the fold / crease of a map and it requires certain steps to reach via navigating through the devil's shroud. This reminds me of those 80's movies like the Never Ending Story where the kid opens a story book and gets pulled into it and has an adventure, or someone jumps through a painting and ends up in a magical place, or Peter Pan's Neverland, this idea that Sea of Thieves is separate from the real world allows for it to be absurd and wacky... like Monkey Island is.
I would like to see the Rare team unleash their imaginations and introduce things that might seem out of place and peculiar in the Sea Of Thieves, like we see in Monkey Island. I'm not suggesting that they introduce bazookas and machine guns or aircraft but subtle things to spice it all up, tweak the lighting of certain regions too maybe? The Wilds and The Devil's Roar could be made a bit more pleasing to the eye without losing their identity!
P.s.
Hourglass is better than it used to be but Console only servers as an in game hard opt out of cross play option needs to exist. AND Hourglass still needs some improvements as does matchmaking... I'm not sure blocking cross play on Xbox is 100% effective.
