Hey! Me and my friend played this recently and it took us a good while to clear. It’s fun, but incredibly difficult. We even turned it down to the lowest difficulty and still only one of us finished the climb.
Sea of Thieves really is something. It’s gorgeous, it’s fun, it has a relatively simple game loop that’s very satisfying to do but can get up there in complexity, and can be super chill with the fishing and cooking stuff.
Edit: when I played, I was a solo slooper, so I mainly stuck to the volcano area and just took on all the Captain’s Voyages I could get at a time. Those things just dump money on you.
I used to be a solo slooper, i always did Merchant’s alliance though. Didn’t pay well at all but i liked sailing around and trading the resources. It was a fun roleplay for me lol
So it’s been about two and a half years since I’ve played (before my daughter was born), so take this with a grain of salt. I think last big update I experienced was the addition of the Reapers’s equivalent of the Athena’s Fortune faction.
Unless they’ve changed how captained ships work, every time you log in your ship only has a basic set of resources (like 30 wood, 30 canonballs, 15 bananas, something like that). Stocking up from the outpost barrels was an every session start thing. The whole captained ship thing was originally just a way to save your ship cosmetics and adding a bunch of ship specific achievements. Also gave access to a convenient one stop sell location and some “captain” exclusive quests.
Regarding PVP, natural “emergent” PVP has really dried up since they added in the hourglass (dedicated PVP match queuing) and the ability to server hop (lose all your sellable loot and active quest progress, keep the barrelled resources on your ship). So people up for scrapping usually hop servers until they find a popular and lucrative server event happening where there are likely to be other players. There already was the Reaper’s flag and emmisary to imdicate you were up for/looking for PVP too (both make you visible on the map to the whole server). So a lot of players left running around aren’t as bloodthirsty.
Also, unless they changed server limits again, each server has an absolute max of six ships. It’s a big sea for so few ships. Especially when we stayed around The Roar (volcanoey area at the east side of the map) we could go entire sessions without running into other players.
Man, I really hope it’s still around when I have the time to come back to it. Awesome game.
Captained ships afaik are the same. I feel like it sometimes restocks by themselves for some reason but i can’t say for sure. Maybe there’s some niche conditions or something but i’ve feel like it’s been doing that. And i too hope it’s around for a long while to come. Congrats on the daughter btw!
I’ve thought about it. I’ve played a bit a few years ago but not much. Initially when i heard the sequel was going to have Co-op i was planning to wait for that since I’m not too big on Subnautica’s lore and really just like the concept, but after recent news i might just pick up the first one instead or something.
See they should have done a Charlie’s Angels type thing, have them standing kind of back to back like they’re on the same team. But I guess that won’t have been as controversial.
I think they were trying to lean too hard into the warring gamers battling it out, and the black woman represented the original PSP while the white woman represented the new white PSP, player 2.
But they put it on a fucking billboard where the only context we have to go by is beating the shit out of a black chick. What they fuck did they expect people to think?
Like artistically I can see what they were aiming for with this but they not only failed to understand the medium and audience, but when the obvious interpretation came to their attention they did not fucking care.
I’ve been building PCs since before cable management was a thing and so I’ve never cable managed anything. The inside of my case looks messy regardless of where you open it. Thankfully there’s no glass panel either.
I remember seeing these ads as an impressionable young gamer and getting the idea that Playstations had games that were scary and weird, and Nintendo games and handhelds were for boys. Generally the ads told me “this is not for you”. Because I only ever saw ads for specific PC games and never for PCs themselves, (they were aimed at adults, not in the kind of magazines and comics young me was perusing) even though I was still not the target market it clicked more with me. I think that might be a part of why I’ve only ever really gotten into PC games over the years. I knew there were games I’d like and games I wouldn’t, and never got the same platform level messaging.
I remember seeing an ad for Thief and thought it looked cool, and I remember being super grossed out by that Quake 3 ad, but I never felt unwelcome or out of place playing PC games. In contrast, the focus on marketing to young males is really obvious in those console ads.
Examples of some PC game ads I remember working for me and led to me getting them:
Kolanaki linked it above. It’s a disgusting crusty gamer den implying the game is so addictive you’ll live in filth. I remember that image being on the first couple of pages of a PC Gamer issue from the late 90s or early 00’s.
You put your finger on it. Most of the ads say, “this is not for you,” to a young girl.
Old ads for cars, alcohol, cigarettes etc. were like that as well. They’re aimed at the hotshot guy who has a chick he’s treating poorly, or more accurately, the guy who wants to have chicks throwing themselves at him. They have nothing to offer a woman or girl, because why would she want to be ignored arm candy?
I guess the one with the woman holding a controller in the bathtub may be an exception.
I’m sure a lot of boys and men were weirded out by these ads too.
There’s more, but I suppose…back then shock was a tactic, the gaming industry wasn’t as clean cut and commercialized as it is now, and they were appealing to a certain demographic?!
Back in the early 1980s fresh off the video game crash of 1983, Nintendo was on the verge of releasing the Famicom in Japan, and needed a way to market the console in America.
There was just one rule. In America, video games were dead. A fad. Disco was dead, and so were video games. So it wasn’t a Famicom. It was a Nintendo Entertainment System.
In stores like Woolworths (think Walmart but not terrible) and Hills (think Target, but also a bit shady) they tried marketing the NES as an Entertainment system. It wasn’t a video game. It was an appliance. Like a VCR. It was the only way to get stores to agree to stock the damn thing. No store wanted the risk of a video game.
Well, after a year of selling, and research Nintendo found kids were the main target of their product.
So they shifted away from the electronics section and into the toy isle. There was just one problem. Toy stores in America were divided. Some isles carried toys for boys, and the other half of the isles carried the toys for girls.
A bit of market research showed that interest in Nintendo shifted slightly more towards boys. 55%‐45%.
What happens next is the key to the PS2 ads.
Nintendo chose to carry the NES in the boys section of the toy isles. Which had an IMMEDIATE influence over not only the marketing in America, but also the direction developers took their games.
There was a clear shift towards the games AND the marketing being geared towards boys 5-13.
Nintendo then DOMINATED the video game landscape. Seriously. If your mom today is roughly 80 years old, theres a pretty good chance she calls all video games “Nintendos” (regardless of brand), the same way she calls all tissues “kleenex”. Or if you’re from the south (especially Georgia) all soft drinks “coke”. Could be orange soda, it’s a coke. Just like it’s one of those Xbox 1080p Nintendos.
Well by the time of the PS2 days, that influence, even though Sony had nothing to do with it, had caked over. Video games were now very male centric, and the age range grew up with them.
In the late 80s, you were 5 years old playing super mario bros. In the mid 90s, you were 13 playing tomb raider and argueing with friends over the validity of a nude cheat code. And by 2001 you were 18 and horny, and…hey, look at these ads for the PS2. They’re edgy!
And that is my TedTalk on why raunchy dreamcast ads, and raunchy PS2 ads goes all the way back to the atari 2600 game crashing the whole industry worldwide 20 years earlier.
A bit of market research showed that interest in Nintendo shifted slightly more towards boys. 55%‐45%.
Need a source on this. The more appropriate action in those days with those numbers would’ve been to sell a blue version to boys and a pink version to girls.
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Aktywne