It started development a year before sea of thieves did. It’s basically the duke nukem forever of pirate games.
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arguably it’s not an original game as it’s an extension of the ship combat from later AC games
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This kind of answers my question of “why is there crafting and armour upgrades and classes and dressup and PvPvE and a social hub and gathering and hunting and character builds and trading and treasure maps and Dynamic Events in this game”
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One of them comes with a nice looking cloth map.
Oh yeah definitely. But from the trailer at least it looks like the only time it really does the over the shoulder cam behind the guy thing is when you’re in the town. All the combat and resource gathering looks like you’re just commanding other people to do it from the ship. It makes it seem weirdly RTS or sim like for a mainstream game. I guess maybe sea of thieves is kinda like that too?
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No, Sea of Thieves is pretty different. The fundamental distinction is you, as a player, aren’t a ship and aren’t a crew. You’re just one guy on a ship that’s very intentionally designed so that it takes a full assortment of players coordinating to properly maneuver it.
Of course each ship has more interesting spots to be at than the maximum crew count so you’re gonna have to make choices about where to allocate people in different situations, like properly going at max speed at all times means one man at the wheel (who, it bears mentioning, doesn’t really see where they’re going on bigger ships) and everyone else adjusting the sails so you can’t defend yourself, plus your crewmates might be busy cooking or fishing when you really need someone watching the horizon or dropping the anchor.
This extends to all mechanics in the game, they all promote collaboration within a crew (and much looser collaboration between crews; the alliance system is intentionally as fuzzy as can be and betrayal is common).
That’s the thing Sea of Thieves gets best about pirates, and what largely made its success: everything revolves about you and your buddies being a loose coalition of individuals mostly brought together by greed and/or a desire for entertainment on the high seas, with an ad-hoc chain of command dictated by events. In other words it’s all about being jolly fellows on a ship, and it’s laser focused on that.
They did try a competitive PvP mode and it closed down some time ago because almost no one was playing it, since it was missing all the downtime and allowance for random crew idiocy that comes with adventure mode.
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zote is cool and the worst thing about the us release was that awful dub
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ZZT3 is pretty dour! It is a lot of information on how to survive an earthquake though.
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I don’t know that this counts as news, but Marketplace, the NPR stock market show, used Earthbound music this morning, an event that my brains spiraled out from very quickly.
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I went to an O’s game yesterday and they used straight up SMB music clips. The dead/game over jingle when the visiting team fucked up and the victory jingle from beating Bowser when we got a good hit. I felt insane and started looking around at all the 60 year old Baseball Guys with bug eyes expecting them to self-immolate but it’s like they didn’t even notice
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earthbound music is used in like every 10th tiktok its wild
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I remember years ago I was in a supermarket and they played Still Alive from Mirror’s Edge (not Portal) on the store radio
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The avs use the mushroom power up sound every time they successfully kill a penalty
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yeah, for whatever reason the sanctuary guardian music gained traction as a video meme punchline a few years ago and it still trips me up encountering it in that context
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I always get tripped up at gas stations that have a speaker on the register whenever they make a sale and its a dead ringer for the Sonic ring pickup sound. It takes alot of will power to not to the finger wag in response.
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yeah Sonic ring gas stations are the best
always wondered what the story was there. is it actually a Sonic thing or did they coincidentally just make the sound using a Yamaha (like when i accidentally figured out that the Taco Bell bell noise is just factory settings DX-7)
i’ve already told the story abt hearing F-Zero SNES music in a car radio installation place in the 90s. still haunts me
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I’ve also probably told this story before, but one time I was standing outside a pizza place in Boston that had closed for the night like an hour before, and it slowly dawned on me that their external speaker was blasting the Legend of Dragoon soundtrack out into the street.
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My favorite local movie theater played Chrono Cross music before the previews started for many years. It was a second-run theater (between the normal ones and the dollar ones).
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I feel like I saw a small article about it through some random tweet or google search. I don’t remember anything conclusive but I think the accepted theory is some sound package made its way through a few corporate exchanges and trickled down to whatever system is being used in these stations.
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