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brickfungus
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Article on SoT

Thu Feb 23, 2017 10:02 am

I've quoted highlights, but the whole article is definitely worth a read!

30th January 2017
https://www.pcpowerplay.com.au/feature/ ... ogs,449216

Style and Accessibility
It’s clear Rare is building Sea of Thieves as an accessible title. While “accessible” can be a dirty word, it’s absolutely not in this instance. First and foremost, for my preview, there was no laminated controller layout, hint screens, tutorial video, or developer introduction before our merry group of four Aussies was thrown into the game world with a token dev on deck to answer any questions. There was no need to ask the dev about controls, because it was all incredibly intuitive.

No tutorial needed
“With this pirate theme, we can meet the players halfway,” explained lead designer Mike Chapman. “In your mind, you’ve got an idea of what pirates do and how things work in the world, how a ship would sail, you’ve got that knowledge. Everyone is going to come in equipped with that knowledge, and then the mechanics can meet them halfway by being really intuitive and really immersive. We’re creating this pirate world. We’re creating a set of tools and a set of motivations and handing it over to players, and you just pick your way through it.”

Combat and Cannonfire
We were sunk a lot during our play sessions. Maybe it was the grog, maybe it was the lack of crew synergy, or maybe we just had terrible aim on the cannons. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t take long for our ship to transform from able-bodied boat to leaky tub. Firing cannons is a skill that takes time to master. There aren’t any crosshairs or firing arcs in Sea of Thieves, and the player must manually determine the best vertical and horizontal angle to fire your individual cannon at in order to land a hit from a slow-trajectory cannon ball on a target that’s likely moving and firing back.

More pirate weapons
While they weren’t in the build of the game that I played, you should fully expect to see cutlasses, muskets, pistols, blunderbusses and other pirate instruments of pain in the final version.

Frozen moments video shows content
Joe Neate said "For E3, we had the two videos, we did that cinematic frozen moments in time. [It’s] basically our vision for how Sea of Thieves is going to evolve. You can go and look through all of the different things that were in there – the sunken shipwreck, there are people sword fighting – all of that stuff is in there and it’s all coming. It’s just a matter of how we evolve the game and add that to it.”

Huge crews unlikely
Don’t expect crew and, subsequently, ship sizes to get much larger than the five-person tubs that were prevalent in my preview, though. “When it comes to bigger crew sizes, we experimented a lot with it,” said Neate. “We’ve always wanted the relationships to feel personal between individuals in a crew. Once that crew size gets too big, you start losing that, and you almost get people breaking out into separate groups. We don’t want to go much bigger than what we’re showing here at all.

Mutiny - no thanks
“Early on, we experimented with the idea that you could mutiny. That was a thing that threatened the emergence, because the moment you put the ability for players to double-cross each other in the crew, when it’s meant to be sacred, it played out the same every single time. The moment you add something that could be gained by an individual, an individual would always double-cross a crew, every time, like clockwork. It was fun to a point, but when it started happening every time, it just became this massive drag.”

Solo play!
Both Neate and Chapman stressed that the game has been built for the solo player to enjoy, too, with appropriately sized ships to meet the needs of the lone-wolf player. This is, of course, not without risk. The aggressive lone wolf may find it challenging to hold their own in a fight against a five-player ship, but there’s more than one way to sink a battleship.

“If I encounter a bigger ship, because the smaller one is a bit more manoeuvrable, maybe it’s not as quick on the straits, so a crew working together will probably be able to chase you down,” explained Neate. “But if I see one on the horizon, maybe I’ll hide away behind a smaller island, because the ship is smaller, the site line is there, so I can hide away and let them go past, if I want. But also, if I see another smaller ship, which has happened quite a few times actually, is that generally the two of them just organically gang up on the bigger one because they feel stronger together, and you just naturally have this unspoken agreement.

4k and all that jazz - PC!
The preview was played on Xbox One, but for the hands-off session, PC design lead Ted Timmins showed off Sea of Thieves on PC in all of its 4K glory, “running on an absolute beast of a machine”. Despite the fact that art director Ryan Stevenson has opted for a timeless, stylised look, Sea of Thieves looks absolutely stunning in 4K. The fantastic lighting, three-dimensional clouds and custom water effects all add to the overall feel of this fantastical pirate adventure. That said, Timmins stressed that he wants Sea of Thieves to scale incredibly well.

“Our engineers have been set the goal of, ‘How low can you go?’” said Timmins. “‘Lighting? We don’t need lighting. Shadows? We don’t need shadows.’ They’ve pulled everything out, and we had a review where we sat down and reviewed with a min-spec machine, and we brought in Ryan [Stevenson] who you could see had a face of terror about what he was about to see, and then when he actually came out of the room, he was like, ‘That was actually really cool, guys. I actually really like the look of that on the lower-spec machines.’”

Commitment to a great PC Build
Timmins is also keenly aware that this is Rare’s first PC title, and is eager to impress out of the gate. “We’re very aware that this is Rare’s first PC game,” said Timmins. “Right now, we have the luxury of a clean slate with the PC fan base, and that is one of the most precious things in gaming, so we really want to keep it. We don’t want to run the risk of damaging that.”
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brickfungus
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Re: Article on SoT

Thu Feb 23, 2017 10:03 am

A little disappointed in crews that low... was hoping to get up to 8 or so.... guess we'll have to see
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Re: Article on SoT

Fri Feb 24, 2017 3:23 am

I was a little saddened by the crew sizes, too. Hopefully we could run two crews or more in the same instance, and work together as a fleet.

I have to admit, i'm a little worried that this game will split us up into crews of 4 or 5.
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hel monkey
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Re: Article on SoT

Wed Mar 01, 2017 12:55 pm

I think the answer to that will be xbl party chat and the armada strategy. Its is a little dissapointing still. I can see their point that it would fragment the group for most people. Just remember how impossibleit is to listen to everyone in a 12 man warzone game. Most players can't handle that. But nothing says we can't have a 5 man big gunship with two 2 man ships or one 3 man or....you get the point. I think it will still be a blast.
 
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Re: Article on SoT

Wed Mar 01, 2017 1:09 pm

hel monkey wrote:
But nothing says we can't have a 5 man big gunship with two 2 man ships or one 3 man or....you get the point. I think it will still be a blast.


So you're saying, we need to play with Dinghies?
 
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hel monkey
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Re: Article on SoT

Wed Mar 01, 2017 1:21 pm

Monster wrote:
hel monkey wrote:
But nothing says we can't have a 5 man big gunship with two 2 man ships or one 3 man or....you get the point. I think it will still be a blast.


So you're saying, we need to play with Dinghies?


Perhaps.

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