Sea Beasts: Episode 3

Dan joined the Davey Jone’s Locker

Please do more Red Alert with Vinny commentary

I don't think this game is for me. Seems to have some high highs, but some deep low lows.

I hated the people trolling them. Why is that fun?

The one episode when they needed Dan. He would have handled those rapscallions.

@number_one: I would play it all the time if I didn't have to worry about PVP, I get that their vision is to always have that sense of danger but it's just not fun to work on something for hours and get nothing out of it because of trolls.

Really enjoying this feature. I hope this isn't the last episode. If they allowed Dan have them suffer through 18 episodes of Mario Sunshine, I hope Abby gets more than 3 episodes out a series she seems to have a passion for.

Mm. Hard to say people are trolls straight up. But, yea, very much a sad thing to see people disliking their experience because of them. I will reiterate that they really need a silent ringer to do all the boring stuff. Like stock their ship first, answer basic questions, help watch the ship. Not to spoil anything, just to be the help. Would immensely help. Think of it as when they brought people in to help when they first did murder island.

On the "plus" side, in some ways, I appreciate that y'all push through. It's actually really fun to see you guys try to problem solve around other people and stuff. It's interesting that this is one of the only features where you guys are always engaged with what is happening. There's little to no idle chatter, even when you're sailing. Positives and negatives to that, but hope you guys stick with it (and maybe set up some help). These get better as you continue.

(but yea, totally get the frustration of losing progress)

people upset people are being pirates in a game about being a pirate.

They should just add a "pacifist mode" so there's still other people around but no PVP.

Then again, I doubt they want to split the (small?) playerbase.

I don’t understand the “pirate” thing when people obviously really aren’t pirates - just trolls. If it’s obvious that people are on a mission and don’t do any harm to others it’s just silly to attack. And the guy following Abby on that island there, while she was fighting 12 skeletons... that’s just a person that seems to be veeeery bored. I’ve got nothing against pvp and “being a pirate” but if there’s not even anything to gain or any reward in it... why bother people?

In RDR online they also always say “we’re cowboys” but following me in a hotel and using dynamite at the butcher isn’t a cowboy thing, sorry...

@kblosnack: maybe something like “mission triggered” should just activate something like a passive mode or something, would help a lot the last mission was hard enough without pvp :D

@cyrribrae: totally with you on that - I think I would’ve stopped the whole thing frustrated and not just because of the other players, the fighting in this game is just awful when it gets harder than “two hits, done”

Some thoughts: This is what turns me off from the game. Obligatory PVP. Adventuring as pirates with friends in a PVE environment is fun. PVP just never feels 'authentic' no matter the theme (pirates, medieval warfare, military shooters). There's no role-play. As a player who dislikes PvP and would prefer PvE, without that option, I'm just not going to buy or play. Not my thing. That's a lost customer, so I see no reason not to have PvE as an option. Let the PVPers do their PVP on PVP servers. I don't enjoy playing as fodder.

@ybbaaabby This Pirate Captain sucks and whats worse is that shes stronger the more people you have with you. Its bugged, or mismanaged in the way that she has an extreme amount of health and can heal forever. If you dont mind gaming the system a little bit to make it easier, if you have someone on the boat shoot her with the harpoon over and over (Easier if you get her out on the shore near the boat) it will keep stunning her and she will never be able to heal. I hope that helps!

I didn't realize that "real pirates" were annoying teenagers killing the same people over and over again just to annoy them. :b Also, if you want to get into "real talk" about pirates and pirating -- no pirate ever just randomly attacked anything that moved. The vast majority of pirates where employed by wealthy nation-states to attack the shipping of other nation-states that were the enemies of their employer.

Really, though, the fault of all the trolling that takes place on Sea of Thieves is on the developers; people knew that players were going to try to seal-club lower other players at any possible opportunity since the days of the first MMOs (i.e., Ultima Online) over twenty years ago, and it's mind-blowing that modern game developers will go and make the exact same mistakes.

The PVP is just kinda part of what Sea of Thieves is. I wish it was more like GTA where the missions were separate from the open world (or at least have an option to do that) Also, there is a good chance these people were straight up stream sniping which creates a miserable experience.

I know you guys can't for this feature, but crap like that is why, if I'm just trying to get through a game like Dark Souls, I unplug. I just want to play the game the first time through, if the PVP is that alluring I'll try it the second time through.

Also, one of my favorite new features, keep up the good work!

SoT has a constant stream of apologists, but for a whole lot of reasons they know in their hearts, they are objectively wrong about SoT not having any sort of private or PVE only mode being a good or OK thing. The design of this game is uniformly awful and doesn't take griefers into consideration at all and offers no protection for newer players from hitting a wall early on of basically just never being able to play properly. This is shit game design, period, and I'm not just talking about the mistake of scaling Briggsy to your ship-size (protip, do it in a small boat, her level goes down), but rather the entire concept of making it dramatically easier to play this game as a total asshole than as a legit player. It takes less time for even a single player to fuck up the progress of numerous players than it does for an organized team just to make basic progress, that is a serious, severe balance issue.

I know games don't have to appeal to everyone, but I can't muster the same kind of enthusiasm Abby seems to have for this game. Combat is very bare-bones, the puzzle-solving seems light, samey environments and enemies, no progression system, purely cosmetic upgrades. The coop sailing stuff seems cool, but you can tell the crew are starting to get bored with it, and I can't imagine it'll be better after another 5-10 hours of sailing. Whatever story is there seems pretty generic. GB has used "an aesthetic/tone in search of a game" as a descriptor a few times, and to me it fits SoT pretty well. To people who've played a lot of this game, what am I missing? Is there a lot of cool content they haven't hit yet?

Plus there's the PVP. Don't have a problem with it in theory, and I'm guessing it wouldn't have been such a problem if the crew had a better handle on the combat, since they all got constantly murdered by a single guy. But having this happen during a tough, cheap boss fight was shitty. The way it's implemented here just seems poorly thought out: no opting out, bad checkpoints, no instanced sections, and there doesn't seem to be a way to discourage or defend against these kind of attacks aside from just having a bunch of people stay on the ship. What happened in this episode isn't even griefing, since it's actually encouraged by the game. But games that have this kind of aggressive PVP are usually structured to make it feel rewarding for everyone. Here that's not the case; it just seems like something to do when you run out of content.

I appreciate the effort that the crew are putting into making this feature fun, but it's starting to feel like it's in spite of the game, rather than because of it.

Hope ya'll continue the series. It's great fun, a shame the bad PVP keeps getting in the way.

Oof, not sure which is worse, the trolls or the seemingly invincible quest enemy.

This game still feels like a kinda neat idea with mediocre execution.

It seems like Abby's view is cut off slightly.

Honestly, I'm not really seeing trolling here. I'm pretty sure it wasn't targeted screen-sniping either - if it had been then the onslaught would have been much more noticeable/persistent. What I am seeing is other people playing the same mission and things getting more than a little crowded.

I play Elite: Dangerous as well as Sea of Thieves and in both games there are people very quick to jump to claims of 'tolling' where it's really just a case of them not liking other people playing in 'their' game (both games being PvP open worlds).

On the up side I find these games to have a tension when playing them that is sorely lacking in many others (whether you are engaging directly in PvP or working to avoid it). On the negative, I'll admit that occasionally you do have to deal with some random ass-hat, but in my experience this happens far more infrequently than naysayers would have you believe.

In short, if you play SoT or any similar game like it's a single player game that revolves around you and you alone, you are basically asking to get mugged. Play it expecting trouble (and act accordingly) and the likelihood is that you'll rarely actually see any.

I hope this series does continue, although would understand if the GB crew decided it was a bit too stresfull for an ongoing live stream. For my money SoT is quite unique and the episodes to date have been a lot of fun to watch.

Vinny: There are all these piers here.

That's because the game uses a pier-to-pier client.

Well, this is the last live-streamed episode of Sea Beasts.

Them having to restart the whole quest because they didn't finish it is some...very poor design taking into account how long it is. Kinda baffling.

I love the treasure hunting and exploring, but this game REALLY needs an option to turn off PVP, in my opinion.

The dude who boarded your ship was a total dick, don't get me wrong, but I don't think they were stream sniping. You were both doing the same stuff and you were, as a result, following them the entire time. You can hear them firing their cannons at something else when you arrive on island after picking up rowboat vinny.

@vinny You might want to put proximity chat on push to talk, and unbind the transmit key. Kinda gross that can't be turned off properly, considering the internet.

The other people sucked but I hope this isn't the last episode of Sea Beasts.

Okay, I'm finna get raw here for a sec.

It's clear that the only reason people are upset are only because the hosts are getting upset. Streamer plays game -> Streamer gets upset about something regarding the design of a game -> Streamer voices their disdain of said item -> Audience parrots sentiment. You see a lot of this in the popular streamable games where one dude has an opinion that his/her army begin to mimic these ideas onto places like reddit or discord (my main example is Apex Legends and it's subreddit). It's a difference of expectations. Abby, Vinny, and Alex are going into this game thinking not only that just because they are doing a story mission (or anything for that matter) that they are going to be left alone but that they SHOULD BE left alone. Why? Just because someone is playing the game in a way that the game encourages you to you label them a "troll"? No, guys, if that's the case then it's clear you are watching people play a game that isn't for them and are getting frustrated and you share those opinions. Those people they got in a scuff with are obviously not trolls and are just playing the damn thing in a way that's possible for them, just as the Beast crew could play that way, too. The Beast crew are obviously not interested in interacting with ANYONE they come across, but this game THRIVES on the chaotic interaction that can unfold. I hate to say that anyone is "playing the game wrong" but they are. You aren't seeing fully what Sea of Thieves is about and I hate that this game is being painted in this light that is factually not accurate. It's not about just trying to get through the story or the story mode for that matter, remember, this game was doing JUST FINE before it even had one. Sure it helps, but boy, all the zany stuff that happened to me and my friends even before the addition of a story mode are too numerous to count. It really is about "player-made" experiences and stories that unfold as you come across the various offerings this game has, and HOW you handle them. I mention that last key bit because it's obvious the Beast crew isn't handling rando interaction well at all. You have to put a positive spin on things and just laugh it off. PvP IS an inherent design of this game and it is NOT going away. Me and my buddy go into each interaction with a smile on our faces and that paints the preceding moments in SUCH a different light than having a furrowed brow and scowl like the Beast crew had...

To give an example of typical Sea of Thieves experience I had just last night: me and my buddy (we'll call him Ace) load in wondering what we should do for the night; we talk about maybe doing a new Tall Tale, hitting up a previous one to find the hidden journals, or maybe just even let the winds of adventure carry us where ever they may lead us. Eventually we settle on something still recently new with us: parlaying an alliance with other players, meaning, we would go up to other ships and try to talk to them (lolol wait what?!?) and set up an alliance which has been in the game for a bit now where crews can share treasure gains. So, the first sloop we run across is instantly hostile. Me and Ace are just smiling, having a good laugh while we try and calm these boys down, we don't fire on them though. Eventually they leave and we stop to recuperate, but we also step away from our computers for a second too. When we come back Ace goes to the map and laughs, "Did you draw this penis on the map?!" and I, incredulously, say "No.. what the hell are you talking about?!" I go and check out the map sure enough, there was a big ol' one front-and-center on the map. We are talking to each other, still in disbelief, when Ace turns around and all of a sudden yells, "wait... there's a guy here!" Turns out, one of them sloop boys was messing with us and hiding on our ship. We killed him, found out he was streaming on Mixer, saw that he was French, and we tried to message his stream with "join our alliance." lol

Later, we ran into another sloop and we made an offer of some "stanky green" (really just a merchants crate of Tea in-game) and they claimed to be a seafaring bakery. We made pleasantries, formed an alliance and did a few shenanigans together. One of those bakery boys was a fiery one though, a chaotic-neutral, as it were. He was messing with us, sure, popping a bomb on occasion, going off on his own only to come back randomly and ram us, but hey, me and Ace loved it. We were making a story that was our own that won't ever be replicated.

And that is what I'm talking about. You can say all you want about how every player you come across that kills you is a troll, but that ain't true. In my opinion these people are just having fun playing the game in a way that is most fun to them, and me? Even I like to set the table before going in of who I'm going to be that play session, whether that is a goofy negotiator or a bad PvPer. Tell me this, would you have found the stream more enjoyable and bearable to watch if something like the above unfolded? Just a series of seemingly more insane events that unravel over time? The reason it wasn't enjoyable was because the hosts themselves weren't fully enjoying themselves. Until they can come to terms that this ISN'T a single-player-story-mode game and should NOT BE TREATED AS SUCH, I think they and you dear audience will continue to just barely find this game enjoyable.

/edit

Sorry, but not sorry. I'm not about to let this game get trashed by people who probably don't even play it.

Also, if griefing by "trolls" is such an issue, then just server hop. Once you figure out a puzzle the actual mission takes next to no-time at all to complete and are actually really short. If you find that happening too much, than take a break and do something else in-game. I guarantee you won't be bored.

Does tossing buckets of water on her rust her like the other gold skeletons?

The crap in this video is why I am so torn on the idea of Online/Offline mode in games like Elite Dangerous

In theory, an always online world with strangers in the night multiplayer is great and I have had some awesome impromptu adventures where I just wander around a system and shoot the shit with people in chat or help a newbie find a barnacle (or get helped). Same with periodically fighting off someone who is interdicting me or even helping someone else out.

But then I just turn on offline mode because I realize I am going to a hot spot for the current live-ish events or need to grab a rare resource for an Engineer and don't want to get camped by a bunch of min/maxed griefer ships

And that basically results in there being no good reason to NOT be offline or playing on a private server. Which means playing in open is for newbies and griefers going after newbies.

A lot of times I think The Division may have the best model (at least on paper). Most PvE is free of PvP. And the PvP zones provide significant benefits to actually encourage folk to opt-in.

The episode in which Vinny unknowingly figures out the sailing maneuver of "Tacking".

I don't think they were getting trolled or stream sniped specifically. I think they were just finally getting the full Sea of Thieves experience where you're trying to do something and get attacked by some random crew and get wrecked.

These comments.

Oh boy.

@frankie_musix: I think a lot of people would enjoy being able to run these quests without interference. And it's OK for them to want that. Not everyone is into PVP.

That's great that you're enjoying your experiences. I personally would feel just as frustrated as Abby in this situation.

Playing a PVP game and complaining about PVP ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I mean i dont like PVP either.. thats why i dont play these games

@dhutch:

I get that too. The ONLY thing I could see being changed is having the story-centric items go into your "key item" wheel, so that players don't lose essential items to progress the story missions.

25:20 i wonder

@frankie_musix: Long explanation that basically mirrors my thoughts. And this is from someone who hasn't played SoT but understands the global mechanics.

Historically, pirates were not nice people and the game reflects that. If Channel of Marauders, a vikings-based arcade simulator for this thought experiment, happened, we'd have people complaining that they can't grow crops/raise livestock and enjoy the seaside hamlet life in peace because the trolls keep raiding them.

@capstan: brilliant

@frankie_musix:

I think it comes down to being "soft" coupled with not getting the time in to learning how to play any particular game well enough to have a positive experience without a lot of hand-holding. In the case of Sea of Thieves, they're probably the only players in the entire SoT community that are only playing an hour per week with no more than a few cumulative hours under their belts. Even in cases of multiplayer games where there's some form of skill-based match making present I suspect their play sessions are so few and infrequent that they fall well outside the norm of what those systems need to seed them properly. You see a similar problem in single player games like Hitman or Dan+Drew's MGS series where they struggle to accumulate competence from one episode to the next; each session is almost like relearning the basics from scratch.

Hopefully the E3 break will let them rethink this series a little bit. First of all, they definitely need to have 4 on the crew. This will help with all aspects of these tall tales and deal with the PVP. Abby or someone should also run through the Tall Tale first ahead of time to get an idea of how to complete it as these can be very long the first time you run through it. Otherwise, they may need to pre-record and edit the video.

I also think the amount of PVP in this episode was higher than normal, so I wouldn't expect them to have as much trouble in future episodes. Since the Anniversary update and Arena mode, my crew hasn't been bothered a whole lot in Adventure and most other crews are just content to let each other do PVE.

Just because a game allows you to spawn camp doesn't mean it's not trolling to do so.

Yo ho ho an unfinished mess for me

You see this a lot lately. Its like people on the internet can't think for themselves, they just randomly need to follow someone. It's disgusting.