The ONE time people wanted Ubisoft to just reskin one of their games (Black Flag) they instead chase live service money while having WAY less features than a 10 year old game.
People forget, but Ubisoft had the same reputation 10 years ago they have today. Even 10 years ago the prediction was this game was gonna be ass. Delay delay delay, people have played Sea of Thieves to death and are onto new things, THEN Ubi drops a lacklustre beta where you can’t even get out of your ship. Yup. Sounds about right.
I don’t need to get out of my ship, but maybe you could let me direct my crew on how they attack. Let me arm my crew differently. Let me change my crew as an item. Let me hire individual crew members as “items”.
To me it seems like a “we gotta get SOMETHING out the door” scenario and they made a “cohesive” game out of what was finished and hope that it lives long enough to add the other stuff.
I found myself wanting to log on last night which shocked me, the setting and ship combat definitely works for me. I wish there was more but sea of thieves didn’t do it for me.
It’s like they took Black Flag and said “everyone wants a Sid Meier pirates remake … let’s try that” but they didn’t give us dancing or ship boarding.
There is so much potential and it’s wild that they seem to have created the “core” but it’s taken them this long to get there.
Bring dedicated servers back.
Can’t have persistent server capacity issues if I can throw my own hardware at it.
This also gets rid of match making, which is whatever. Just give me a server browser and I’ll find a few favorites and hang on those.
It can also keep working long after the companies give up on them too.
This also gets rid of match making, which is whatever.
In the real world, probably.
But it doesn't actually have to. There's nothing stopping you from letting users add multiple matchmaking servers, and even adding some basic rules to queue up in multiple (eg: primary matchmaking for 30 seconds, if no signal indicating good progress towards a match, fall back to also joining server two, etc). It would take a little thought to the base server you provide to handle everything gracefully, but if your priority is actually to give your players the best chance to have a long term ability to form their own communities and play the game reliably instead of to maintain an iron grip to squeeze every penny out, you could do it.
The tutorial was shit but I played the beta for 12ish hours. Had no intention of playing it but it ended up being super fun. Won’t buy it, not worth the 70€ price tag. Got ubi+ for a month, should be enough. It was a pleasant surprise.
There is a good game to be made out of this but it’s nuts that this is all they have to show for it given it doesn’t do pirating as well as Black Flag did….
kotaku.com
Aktywne