I am a very vocal person when it comes to my opinion of this game. I will be pretty vocal here as well. I am also sure that this will bring on the arguing, and trolls, and whatever. Unfortunately, my feelings here are more positive than you will leave here believing. I just think a lot needs to be said to get the "upswing" that this game so desperately needs right now. Here is what I think of this update so far, and where I believes things need to go in the future.
For starters, hats off to Rare as this update is looking great so far in terms of stability and bugs. I did not notice anything serious introduced in terms of bugs with this new update. In spite of all of the complaining about this update, hats off to you for that.
It is good to see one of the "con" cosmetics in-game, but I am a little torn on that because that really makes "exclusives" pretty worthless...but we have all seen that people just whine like the dickens because they don't get something (including me with the skeleton torso that is coming soon lol).
I have noticed a few times that rowboats I am watching people maneuver around in seem to be popping up out of the water. That could be visual because of my graphics settings, and this is definitely not an issue for me. I just thought I would mention it.
A bit more serious, we did a total of 7 Gold Hoarders missions, but only got credit towards the commendation for four. This needs to be fixed obviously.
I hear animals on the island, but they really feel devoid of life in spite of the ambient sounds. Hopefully that will be rectified at some point. It seems like this would have been a good time and place to introduce little non-interact-able crabs that run around...even if it were just one per island.
The volcanoes are great. I still think that there are issues with targeting on sloops. We have sailed all but the galleon at this point, and the sloop just feels like it gets RAILED in comparison to the brigandine. At skull forts it definitely gets hit more than the brigandine and the galleon, and this needs to be addressed. I am assuming that to handled targeting the skeletons (and volcanoes) target a radius around the ships...and the sloops just is so much smaller they end up being a much tighter target. It is true though, if you don't believe it I challenge you to just sail past an active skull fort closely with each boat and watch how many holes you get. The same thing happens with volcanoes... so I feel sorry for anyone who is sailing solo, or even duo with this content.
That being said, though, for the people complaining that this is too hard... OMG stop it. Stay in the other area until you feel like you can handle this then. We lost a single sloop to this just trying out the different boats in the zone. We lost nothing during the time that we were actually playing except for two rowboats.
The geysers killing you? Carry bananas and eat them.
Getting sunk by the island? Play smart... watch for smoke coming from the top. If itt isn't there you are safe. If it starts coming out RUSH to your boat and get away fast. This is pretty basic survival in this zone, but you were told up front that the content was harder than the pre-existing zone.
On that note, this "content"...sorry but this is not new content. I am really liking the way it turned out...but this is not going to be enough for people who are letting the game "hinge" on this update. This is the same thing we have been doing since day one, which is not a lot. Orange cannonballs that fall from the sky are not new. Geysers are kind of new...but nothing spectacular, and once you have seen them...well, you have seen them. In fact, once you have seen all of these things once, you are basically done with it. If this update is the "dealbreaker" for some players...then it is probably pretty broken at this point.
I definitely see some quality improvements in the work Rare put into this update... but what is needed is a direction improvement. We are still moving laterally in terms of gameplay. The core loop is still the same. Nothing new was added there.
There is still nothing new for pirate legends (except, lol, it just got easier to level Athena's...you just do it in the new zone and have less voyages while you do them...ie, no merchants. this is the new cheese). I don't know why merchant was excluded in this zone with this update, but that was a mistake. Almost every streamer is doing nothing but running Athenas right now...and all of them are talking about how much "easier these are". Please work very hard in the future to not leave things out that make progressing in the game faster.
If you want to add a new way to accomplish something, don't cut actual time to accomplish it out. You can make it so you can do the same amount of work in the same amount of time in shorter sessions... but things like the "missing merchant" and commendation letters just serve the purpose of feeding the cheese that people complain about constantly, and as a company make you look pretty sloppy. Focus on polish, a lot of polish... shine each build until you can spot it sitting on the beach from a ship without having to use a looking glass.
Overall though, I will repeat that this is a big "hats off to Rare" for this update. It is really good, and was a small step (even though I am sure this took a huge amount of work) in the right direction... just a lateral step. Without a doubt, there is a level of quality we have not seen yet come with any other update present here. Hopefully everyone can see and appreciate that.
My suggestion for the future would be that you start looking at full-time and full-team passes on the server and client to work on stability and resource management. Get those to a point that adding new features does not break things, cause stability issues, or require things be disabled for the sake of a new feature. At the same time there needs to be another team looking into forwarding the existing core-loop of the game. The repetition involved in fetch quests (and it doesn't matter what we are fetching) are going to drive people insane... or just out of the game. It has already happened, and that needs to change. Do ANYTHING different...and I mean different. Cargo runs are NOT different. Picking up "ashen" versions of the same thing are not different.
There was a post about how pets would "save this game"...in a way that is true, as silly as that may seem to a lot of us. Provided you put your art team to work and get pets released in a timely fashion, that is. If you get pets pumped out at a rate of one every two or three weeks not only would your revenue begin to rise again, but people would be interested even though they were vanity items. As silly as that may seem, people like those things. If you start adding things like a tracked achievement for collected pets, again you add a goal for people to work towards... It does not have to be multiple achievements...if you had 13 pets in-game, you would track that the player had XX of 13.
Stop listening to suggestions about things like banjos that take a lot of work (recording tracks for every song) and focus on things you can put into the game rapidly, like a new shanty. Go back to doing weekly content updates... you can record a new public domain shanty (like Flight of the Valkyries) in one, two, or three week's time and get it in-game and make a lot of people happy. It is not game-changing, and could be done every month or so. Once you do that a few times, you have had time to add a way to select a shanty to play, which makes a lot of other people who have made that request.
Start doing things like making use of your fantastic music director. When I loaded into the game today met with a new title screen and got the same-old, same-old song playing...it just made it all feel flat out of the gate. Just taking an instrumental version of the song from the trailer would have brought that opening up by leaps and bounds. Loading into a bit of styled-textual logo for Forsaken Shores with the same-old Sea of Thieves title track just made it feel dull.
The biggest things though, is really start to focus on the client and server and making sure that you have robust engines for both that won't just fall to pieces every time you make changes to them -- AND, immediately start working on revamping the core-loop of the game. People do not buy games so they can "create" the game themselves. If they could handle creating their own fun, they wouldn't buy games...let's be totally honest. lol. I have no doubts that people will read that and immediately be offended, and I could care less...but it is absolutely true. The whole reason you purchased this game was to be entertained by it -- not so you could sit around and entertain yourself in it.
Unfortunately, I do not feel I have given enough praise to you, Rare, in this post. While I recognize that a lot went into this update, I do not see it as being "game-changing" in the way that people want it to be. There is a definite spike in players right now... You won't ever tell us what the playerbase actually consists of, but it is evident in stream viewership right now...and I am sure that within a months time we will see that decline back to where it was before this week. I see the work that went into this, but you have to get away from the lateral moves, and start moving in a progressive manner.
Here are some key points that I know need to be thought about:
The game world is beautiful.
The bare mechanics of the game are beautiful.
Player-to-player ombat mechanics are pretty bare and sometimes wonky.
Ship-to-ship combat mechanics were perfect -- and you changed them with cursed cannonballs. They are still okay, but I have no idea why that needed adjusting.
The core-loop and progression are dreadful, boring, and tedious.
End-game is easily obtainable by anyone willing to put in time and effort, but you made it overly easy because people who weren't willing to do that complained... basically insulting everyone who came before them. Not only that, but it was a totally pointless move, because it is still the exact same core gameplay, and there is nothing at the end of it anyway.
You literally dropped your internal plans in favor of what the masses were asking for...which led you down a path of creating problems. This also cut your a planned revenue stream in the form of microtransactions, which I honestly thing would drive some interest in the game from a certain type of gamer. This also led to non-cohesive gameplay and lore. We have things like thrones and mermaid statues...but why, exactly? Why are those statues there? They showed up, there was a cursed...but we never saw the entities that placed them. We never had to deal with that. It makes very little sense to have such a pointless campaign and go nowhere with it. Even if you go back to it months down the road... there is no cohesion to tie it back to the statues at that point.
I know you don't want to hand-hold people and take them on "their story"...but there has to be in-game story as well. Not just lore...but it makes perfect sense that there would be some form of NPC quest system in game, and a story to go with it. Even if you rolled out short quests that came every two or three weeks that would be new content that everyone would be doing. Start using those print comic books and the people that create those to work on something like that. Just because in-game stories exist doesn't mean we are not creating our own.
I can't believe that one of the center-pieces for this update is a group of people wearing necklaces. In a game where cosmetics are the only form of real progression you implemented that for NPC's and not for players. Our gear should be broken down so much that we should be choosing things like hat pins, lapel pins, cuff links, hat feathers... we should be spending all of our gold on things to wear. More cosmetic choices should be going into this game than "a set per big patch/content update".
I know this was long...and I wish I had some way to put more OOMPHFFFF into the praise I want to give Rare for the work that went into this update. It does feel a lot better than previous updates...the promise of higher difficulty is there. It is definitely possible to play in this new area with a little though and on-the-fly planning and reaction. This does add some difficulty and fun to the game for the time being.
Again, HATS OFF TO RARE for the time being. Hopefully we will not start to move away from the horizontal changes to the game and start moving up.
