Could have also been a shark. 2 shark bites and you’re dead. If your ship was taking on water, though, there was another player nearby who probably shot you with a sniper rifle.
It’s the fact that whatever got us also got our ship in 30 seconds too. And I didn’t see a damn thing (no fire either). Oh well, I constantly expect to die in Sea of Thieves anyway!
My son and I have been working our way through the new Jack Sparrow content. Our last outing had a pretty funny moment with another group.
We were nearing the end of the second tale (no spoilers) and were in the process of solving a somewhat tricky puzzle. We knew what we had to do, but as we were setting out to complete it, another group of 2 entered the area and attacked us. Since my son and I are both stubborn, we kept respawning and messing up their attempts to solve the puzzle.
Alas, they were better at combat, and managed to kill us both at the same time. So while we were waiting to spawn, they got to the place they needed to and solved the puzzle. But when we finally spawned in, it was right near the newly opened passage to the next area. So we booked it and made our way to the last part of the tale. Once we got in, we were able to effectively stop them from progressing (had to do with how the next challenge plays out). We could see them trying and failing to get to us.
We completed the Tale and savored the sweet sweet taste of revenge.
I’ve not started the Pirate’s Life content yet but please hold that story in your head and give me the details at some point! That does sound delicious.
3rd mission is probably the best, but I enjoyed the full ride. I felt the final battle was a little odd, but overall great fun and now I have some new tunes.
We did the Shores of Gold finale the other night and, my god, it was the most miserable boss fight I can remember. Massive bullet/sword sponge that kept barking the same nonsense over and over again, same attacks, with no feedback to show whether you were actually doing anything. All that great production and puzzling and you end with… that? I hope the Pirate’s Life final battle is better! Surely it can only be.
Have only had the time to do the first tale, but they did a great job with Sparrow. The voice actor is pretty spot on in most places, and sometimes he is down-right impossible to separate from Depp. The whole line about having forgotten the bone or whatever during the ship battle was so Jack Sparrow.
Right! They nailed him and Gibbs are both fairly good.
So we’ve done the first two chapters of A Pirate’s Life and… as well presented as it all is, I much prefer the open world PvP layers/systems, exploring, puzzling and treasure hunting to these discrete adventures.
Chapter 1 was cool and I liked the island puzzling and treasure hunting with the talking head (I also have a soft spot for that Pirates of the Caribbean shanty from the ride). With Chapter 2, glitches and inconsistencies aside, the linear narrative stuff just felt like a slog, with the hackneyed monologues, the awkward ‘cave valve’ portals and the miserable boss fight (which was, somehow, possibly worse than the Shores of Gold final boss).
What makes all this worse is that most of it is in a vacuum away from the open world stuff so the usual tension and unexpected/exciting turns a session can take are absent. It feels a lot more static and dull, like a scripted ride, which is apt given the intro…
All the dynamic open world emergent/story engine multiplayer goodness gets cast aside for this kind of stuff. That’s where the real adventure and magic in Sea of Thieves is for me. The second P in PvPvE adds so much to the E too, and let’s face it: the ship combat is so much more fun than the gunplay and melee. We’re going to complete it all, but I hope the remaining chapters are better than the second one!
Are there any Tall Tales that don’t involve a grueling boss encounter?
To be fair, I think most of them avoid boss fights, hence our surprise with the more recent updates/content featuring them when they’re so bad.
I think my favourite Tall Tale is ‘The Legendary Storyteller’ followed by ‘The Fate of the Morning Star’. Both of these have some great puzzling, storytelling and sense of adventure. ‘Stars of a Thief’ will forever be burned into my mind because we tried to tackle it before checkpoints were implemented and it took us ages because we could never finish it in one sitting. Like, numerous long sessions. We think over 20 hours across attempts. Good grief. We made a meal of that one. I think that was also a good one but it’s hard to tell now.
The Shores of Gold final chapter is great until the boss. Good puzzles and an interesting (new) island to explore.
Be great to hear your thoughts when you crack them.
Most don’t have a boss fight? I must have gotten really unlucky, then, and picked the one the one time that ended with a colossal fight on an island that seemed unwinnable even with three of us continually pounding on the boss (and continually dying). Had had fun up until that point, but the boss was not just unfun but antifun and went back in time to destroy the fun we’d had up until then. We never did finish.
I asked because I want to do a tall tale with my buddy but don’t want it to end up the same way. Scouting around a bit about this I saw Briggsy mentioned, and while I don’t think she is in a tall tale it was a very similar situation. The boss fights are just horrendous and it baffles me that anyone thought including them in this otherwise great game was a good idea. They just suck so absolutely.
Edit: looking around I think I am being too loose in my terminology. We must have done Shores of Gold because I remember it starting with the Shroudbreaker, but that is an “arc” made up of a number of individual tall tales, and it’s the last one I guess that has the boss. Although…come to think of it…I wonder if we ever did that and I’m just thinking of Briggsy. I don’t remember because it’s been so long, but I don’t ever want to fight one of those healthbarless bullet sponges again if I can help it.
Truly.
Yeah, I think there’s a bunch of ‘big name’ pirates you end up fighting, Briggsy, Greymarrow and the Gold Hoarder skelly. The Skeleton Lords are similar but they’re more like world events. Oh hey, this might help:
I think Briggsy was easy but Greymarrow and the Gold Hoarder were utterly miserable. I don’t remember Rooke so may he was an easier one too? The boss health pools scale with your crew size so look at the timestamps to get an idea of how long it can take to do the Gold Hoarder. 10 minutes solo. It took us, a crew of three, about 30-40 minutes to beat him. This:
Oh, I forgot to say that we did the third chapter (out of five) of the Pirate’s Life expansion and we just got to a point where we were like ‘What the fuck are we doing? What are these people even talking about?’ and that’s when we decided it was time to hang our peg legs up. The linear, cutscene-like PvE stuff is not nearly as interesting as the open world PvPvE pirating, puzzling and adventuring. And all the season pass/daily progression things popping up all the time were really getting on my nerves. I know you can disable them but, ugh. Much love for the game but it was time to move on!
Someone said in the comments:
You missed Captain Avery, the other Captain from The Cursed Rogue, Captain of the Lair (Art of the Trickster) the Guardians of the Stone if you can count them as Bosses, Captain Gripper and Captain Shaw (Revenge of the Morningstar)
My guess is they’re not tough and they also don’t seem to be part of those Tall Tales I listed! :-)
As an extra celebration, anyone who plays Sea of Thieves between October 19th (3pm BST) and October 26th (3pm BST) will receive a special login bonus of 25,000 gold and 25 Doubloons. On top of that, one randomly picked pirate who hands in treasure during this period will earn a payout of 25 million in gold!
Haha, ‘story driven live events’, ‘one per month… lasting around two weeks’, ‘adventures are a chapter in an overarching story’, ‘more cinematic’, ‘immerse [yourself] in the world and story and have more of an emotional attachment to the characters’, ‘we can tell a story that will give you those emotional highs’, ‘cinematic lore trailers’… It’s like Rare zeroed in on the very things I came to dislike about the game and decided to focus on that.
YO FO MO!
I don’t know, sounds kind of cool to me. I’ve always enjoyed larking about in Sea of Thieves but I’ve never been able to maintain a group to really keep at it, and I don’t really enjoy playing with random folks as much, so I’ve never ‘stuck’ with Sea of Thieves. Ongoing stories might get me back in.
I’ve only ever played Solo and never gotten in to the “mission” part of it, but I have thought about jumping back at some point and seeing the changes.