First of all I know that this have been said a lot of times before, but after a week playing the game daily and tasting nearly every aspect of non-legendary gameplay I want to say sme things about the global feeling of the game and it's world.
Also, I love the game, I enjoy it with friends and fortunately I haven't experienced the problems and complaints many people have expressed through this posts. I think and know that there are a lot of unfinished and anoying things but i haven't found anithing yet that kills my experience in SoT.
So lets start. I put the Kraken in the title because is the aspect of the game I found that can help me express my concerning about the global experience.
When it was announced and teased everyone thought that it would be and epic giant monster with a whole body and so on. Later we discovered that it was just some dancing tentacles that, although shocking the first time, felt bland when you fight it/them. And I don't really mind the no-body, I understand the difficulty of coordinating the body and the random position of the tentacles. What really annoys me is the wasted opportunity of creating a really menacing and brutal event in the game. It has been so spammed that has lost it's epicness and menace. Is more frightening to find a galleon heading towards your ship. And it's sad, because we could be writting posts about that time when the Kraken attacked 3 Galleons and none survived. Yes, the first thing I think about the Kraken is that it should be deadlier. A lot. If you find yourself in dark waters you should know that it's the end. And yeah, a lot of people will whine about it and how op is this monster and so on, but hey, it's the Kraken! We are in a fantasy pirate game and it feels like a farming sandbox with dangerous PVP! The Kraken feels like another risk, like a storm, an it shouldn't.
Maybe you could make that it doesn´t stop your ship but can extend the black water so that you can try to scape the area while the tentacles appear in front of your ship trying to catch you and your crewmates fight them (or just flee if you are a solo player). And god, it should appear many less times, I understand that at this point is the only big "epic" thing in the game, but by spamming it this much you're making it look like something trivial.
tldr: The Kraken: frecuent enconters + bland/weak monster=wasted oportunity.
And this leads to my whole opinion of the game currently. It's fun, very fun. It has a lot of potential, the mechanics are great and the ones that aren't so great (cough sword combat cough) can ruin you one sesion but not the whole game experience. The PVP problems like the respawning system need to be reworked too. BUT my point is that we are pirates, yes, and we dig treasures and shoot cannons, but this is a fantasy world and a dangerous challenging one, and I can't currently feel it.
Developers should put their efforts in creating a more challenging game and not in making it easy so everyone can come into it. Yes, you will lose the ones that won't come back after being helplessly smashed by the hard world aspects, but man, the ones that like risk and glory will fill this forums with the epic tale of the undefeated Kraken or the sighting of a ghost ship.
SoT can become a source of epic adventures or a loot grinding game, it's up to you, Rare.
