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S3 Ep204: Sea of Thieves
81 Plays4 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they set sail on the high seas and claim what is rightfully others in this week's episode!
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Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
Introduction & Personal Stories
00:00:31
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of soapstone. My name is Jake, and I'm joined by my host, as always, Dave.
00:00:37
Speaker
How's it going today, Dave? I am really fucking tired. Yeah. We just got off of the tail end of a conversation talking about last night's escapades. You want to recap them briefly for the entrapped and raptured. Yeah. It's gone. So for the uninitiated who don't have me GPS tracked. You want to join that. Check out our Patreon for
00:01:04
Speaker
So last night I went to a show in Baltimore, went with a friend. She was kind of to take me down as like a birthday present. And we
00:01:15
Speaker
saw the bands play and it was all good, but it was obviously a decent amount of travel and I got back at like 2 AM.
Sleep Habits & Challenges
00:01:22
Speaker
So between like 1 AM and 2 AM I was driving and then my brain's like, hey, good luck sleeping, fucko. So sleep throughout the evening was kind of scattered. I definitely tossed and turned a bit and then I woke up fully at like 8.
00:01:37
Speaker
And though I did my morning routine and then laid back down, I just kind of stared at the wall. I'm like, fuck. So I've had more gas station food and some caffeine and I'll get by. But when a Jake initially called me on the Zankasha link, I just kind of like stared at him like, yeah, reluctantly click. So do you do you
00:02:02
Speaker
I guess one would be the cutoff for you where you could fall back to sleep because I have a completely different experience where if I will it, I could pretty much fall asleep. If I will it will be so. Right, but that's probably the most noble reading of literal sloth that could be done.
00:02:25
Speaker
I mean, if I really needed to, like if I was super tired, I could kind of like stay in bed and keep resting. I don't know if I could necessarily fall back asleep completely unconscious because the body clock is set in its own weird way. I'd have to be like really fatigued or exhausted to do that. But like even like right now or on any given day,
00:02:50
Speaker
I could just lay down for like a little bit, rest, and maybe have it turn into a nap. But I just avoid that because I don't believe in fucking up your sleep schedule. And for me, it would be like a wrench down, a very complicated system of steampunk engineering.
00:03:08
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's fair. I wouldn't say that my system is more correct. I usually sleep in on Saturdays, at least to like 10, 30, 11. And Sunday, maybe the same.
00:03:25
Speaker
But Sunday's where it hurts a little bit more because it's harder to sleep Sunday night. And I'm pretty sure that's the cause just cause I'm sleeping in late on Sunday. So it's not ideal. That boggles me. Cause when do you get up for work on weekdays? I wake up at seven, 50 to eight usually. Um, if I'm feeling particularly tired and I don't have any early meetings, which is rare now, um,
00:03:52
Speaker
I could, my maximal is 8.20. I need exactly 40 minutes or I am less coherent in whatever call I join. Okay, and when do you normally go to bed on weeknights?
00:04:06
Speaker
It's actually probably a little bit better than it used to be, but recently, okay, no, actually, that's not true. Recently, it's been more like 1 p.m. Oh, 1 p.m., you have lunch and you're like, good night, everybody. Good night, no more work. Goodbye. I do 1 a.m. often, but sometimes it's kinda like 1.32. If it goes to 2, I feel it a lot.
00:04:34
Speaker
Okay, and then on weekends, is it that much later? I guess it's usually around the same time, although we stay up late periodically for all playing a game or something like that. Okay. Not Sunday, so just Saturday or Friday night, Saturday night. What bogs my mind, though, is that people could, or what you're describing, you go throughout your week with like, this is when I wake up, this is when I go to bed, this is my schedule. And on the weekend, you're like,
00:05:05
Speaker
I'm doing like the Hang 10 on my hands. And you're sipping some caffeine and some brewskis or whatever and you essentially stay up way later and then you sleep in later for like two days. And then you're like, alright, body, just kidding about that, back to the old stuff. And your body be like, oh yeah, that's fine.
00:05:25
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I guess what I was saying is it doesn't. Oh, yeah, it's fine. Monday is oftentimes the transition day. And this week I've probably gotten less sleep in general. But but yeah, like the transition into Saturday happens very, very easily off of Friday for some reason. Like no problem sleeping in late Saturday. I think it's like there is a differentiation between the work day sleep schedule expectation, because I will like actually
00:05:55
Speaker
Um, start to wake up a bit before my alarm goes off sometimes. Right. Like I know my body knows when I need to wake up, but it's completely different on
Unusual Sleep Patterns & Stories
00:06:05
Speaker
the weekend. I don't wake up at like eight on the weekends. So it was weird.
00:06:13
Speaker
Maybe we have week schedules and not day schedules. That might be it. That might be it. We'll get our top men on it. I actually have a year schedule. Just wait until May 22nd. That one's a doozy. Incredibly specific. I just sleep for the entire day.
00:06:35
Speaker
That used to be, those were, that was like summer as a kid. I don't know if you ever like had, you didn't do that. I'm getting like a vigorous head shake. Um, I had like a period of time over like summer break or something like that, where there was no classes where I'd literally just invert my day and night schedule. Let's sleep into like 4pm. Um, and then just be awake all night.
00:07:00
Speaker
I mean, I definitely had some summers where it was more shifted because you didn't have responsibilities and you're like, oh, friends are around. And like the evening was yours, right? There's less adult people around. You could just hang out at a park or just- Take those guys. I hate the adults. Even though I very quickly became one. In theory, yeah.
00:07:25
Speaker
And I think I've mentioned this at some point to you before, possibly on the podcast, but back when we did land parties, this is like high school stuff where like we do Xbox and Halo, um, stayed up throughout like the entire evening, got back home. So like somebody gave me a ride and I was like, Oh, I've been awake for 24 hours or something. Like I'm going to, and
00:07:52
Speaker
I meant to sleep for like four or five hours and then kind of like a rally and then resume my Saturday or whatever and then When I woke up, I had no sense of what time it was. It was dark. Uh-huh. I was like, oh is it? No, it must have Even like recalling the story remember how fucking hazy it was Yeah, I had no sense of the time and I was like, hey like what time is it? What day is it? And mom's like, oh it's um
00:08:21
Speaker
that day, but the whole day had gone by and I had slept through everything. She's like, oh, your friend even came by to drop off your bike. I'm like, what? I didn't realize events had transpired while I was just not existing. Then I went back to bed. I was like, I guess we'll just start tomorrow. Just throw this one out. Write this one out.
00:08:46
Speaker
We I was still like so tired and drained. So I think I like had like a brief very late dinner. Just like have calories. My bodies don't wake up and bear mode went back to sleep. It was a weird time. No, that's tough. I do find like you have to be you have to be seriously exhausted, I think, to like have a big sleeping block and then be able to get back to sleep. I had like a minor form of that this weekend because like basically at five
00:09:16
Speaker
On Friday, I laid down. I was like, all right, I'm just going to check some work stuff on my phone, make sure I'm wrapping out these conversations before everyone starts their weekend. And I just passed out for three hours. And I stayed up to 3 AM. We were playing bear trauma with the lads. And it was really fun. And I was like, I'm kind of tired. I'm going to go to sleep. And went back to sleep and didn't actually have any problem sleeping. And slept through.
00:09:46
Speaker
I get that. Exhaustion is something that can overcome. Usually, if you've got something close to an actual balance, a nap can throw you off. It reduces all the thing that makes you sleepy. Serotonin. You said melatonin? Melatonin's a drug that induces serotonin. But yeah.
From Sleep Science to Politics
00:10:11
Speaker
Isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, it is. I thought so. I was second, second guessing myself there, but you can wipe it out with a short nap and then it ruins your ability to sleep later, which I put myself through a long time. Yeah. I think any depressants during the day. Uh huh. So much. I actually bought some more melatonin today because I had, I had just run out and I don't know how much it helps, but it tastes nice. Uh huh.
00:10:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's, it's mixed. My parents gave me some like as a kid because realistically, the issue was I wasn't really burning myself out during the day and I was staying up doing stuff at night. And that was the main reason my sleep schedule was garbage. It wasn't that I needed chemical balancing, but whatever. Um, yeah, so this is soapstone podcast where we talk about, uh, sleep science. Um, neither of us are doctors.
00:11:05
Speaker
But we don't need to be, because this is the internet. And even actual doctors give garbage opinions on the internet. I mean, we're not going to be put in the trial of Congress for anything. So we can say whatever we want. Right. Even if we were, we probably could, apparently at this point.
00:11:25
Speaker
Well, this that was a quip on like the recent Marjorie Taylor green. Not like it's been a reason that she's been like saying dumb heinous shit. Uh huh.
00:11:37
Speaker
Yeah, I don't recall saying that. What a dumb, dumb bitch. It could be a little cleaner probably. Politics, everyone loves them, especially when it relates to video games. And in fact, I would say we should establish a faction against
Introduction to Sea of Thieves
00:11:57
Speaker
mainstream politics and the authority of rule. And we should take that faction to the open seas
00:12:07
Speaker
and live our best lives independently. This is like watching an unoptimized traveling salesman. I'm like, where's it going? How's it getting there? Yada, yada, yada. Sea of thieves. Sea of thieves. That's it. That was my transition. You have the next part. I hand you the talking stick and walk away for a second.
00:12:33
Speaker
You should treat me like a pirate and give me that booty. Okay.
00:12:38
Speaker
It's been it's been fun. We played some a while back. And by we, I mean I played it like once after everybody was going very much in the pain with it. Yeah, because it it's not my type of game. Typically, it is very much a first person multiplayer. You go on ship expeditions and you do you have different types of quests or objectives you can do. Yeah. But each time you start a session, it is fresh. Your cosmetics persist and that's pretty much it.
00:13:06
Speaker
So it depends on what you want to do. But what I have enjoyed with it is it is very cathartic to just be on a boat with some people. Yeah. And like steer the boat and just chill on the waves and play your instruments. And then everything else on top of that is just icing on the cake. If you like cake and icing. Yeah, it's I guess like to take a step back and kind of define the game. Pretty sure rare.
00:13:33
Speaker
I actually made this, if I remember correctly. Or published. Or published it, yeah. And it is largely, I mean, like some of the controls are very evocative of like, you could tell that they were PC first, and it's got a big Xbox following, which is fine, but there's a whole genre of games that are pirate games. You know, Sid Meier's Pirates, Tortuga, a bunch of other stuff like that.
00:14:02
Speaker
But for the most part, they're not like this one, even like Assassin's Creed Black Flag, right? Technically a pirate game. It has piracy in it, I guess. But this is very much more of a simulation type game than like Grand Strategy or anything like that.
00:14:20
Speaker
In fact, strategy probably isn't a word that would go in here, at best tactics, at best tactics for CSEs.
Game Mechanics & Player Interaction
00:14:29
Speaker
And like Dave was describing, you load in, you have like a group of friends, the ship that you get
00:14:36
Speaker
Um, the size of the ship is determined by how many people you have. You could always have a large ship and just be one person, but nobody does that because that's actually very self harming and not at all useful to play because the larger ships have more maintenance, right? Um, like they take more effort to, uh, to maintain and adjust sales and things like that. Um,
00:15:02
Speaker
So usually you're going in with a fixed crew and then you set a goal, make money, log out at the end of the night and maybe had a story. That's the top level overview of what Sea of Thieves is, but there's a lot to dive into, I think.
00:15:17
Speaker
dive into. Also, the other two don't want to try and weave them in naturally. It's not the size of the ship. It's how you use it. Right. And it's sloopy. It's more it's more of the motion of the ocean.
00:15:32
Speaker
Which is actually, as a random aside, I really love the wave physics in Sea of Thieves. No, they're really fun. Because if you're going to get treasure and loot, you actually are being lifted with the elevation, instead of it being a static thing where it's completely flat and just animated. So if you get cast overboard or something, it feels like, oh, shit. Now, to be fair, you will be able to float. You will be fine. But it is very much more the feel of,
00:16:02
Speaker
actual waves are coming in. Yeah, there's actually I don't know if we had it in our play sessions or maybe you experienced it in a previous one.
00:16:09
Speaker
But you can be in a storm and during storms, there's massive swells like that will completely change. You know, the verticality of the ship, you got water pouring in. You have to like, uh, bail more than you'd have to, or you would usually only have to, if you'd taken a damage below deck. Um, but if it crusts over the top of the ship, you will get water in your ship. Yeah. Or if it's raining or something like that is another factor.
00:16:34
Speaker
And it could be harder to move. It could be harder to traverse below decks when the ship is at some obscene angle. So it's really fun. And you mentioned going overboard. There's a couple mechanics around that. I realize that could have been a segue to anything, actually, if it was being figurative instead of literal. But the game is very much going back to that smooth or
00:17:05
Speaker
slow experience, you're just there in the moment type setup. Like a mermaid or a merman will just show up in water if you get far enough away from the ship and like warp you back to the ship. It's a huge concession. Is there an explanation for it? Not really, but it's just so you can keep having fun.
00:17:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's nice because conversely, let's say you're going at full speed from objective A to objective B. Johnny is drinking and falls off the ship. To stop and go pick up Johnny, you have to finagle the entire boat. It's a pain in the ass. Usually, like Jake said, we'll require multiple people if you're going to drop anchor, turn around, cut the sails. Meanwhile, Johnny's trying to swim to the ladder to get up or
00:17:52
Speaker
You leave Johnny's ass behind and then he can later just be teleported to the ship. Yep. And you can't use it to really cheat things because you can't have anything in your hands when you get teleported. So you can't like grab a chest off of another ship, for instance, dive into the water and then take a mermaid back to your ship. Um, but, um, it is incredibly convenient in all the, all other situations because then rather than in convenience, like, ah,
00:18:21
Speaker
He's overboard. Crap. We all have to put all this effort in. You can laugh at him. OK. Yeah, that was my pivot. I was going to say, you can laugh at him. You can just keep the jolly experience going. It's not a disruption to the gameplay at all.
00:18:36
Speaker
It would only be one instrument less on the ship and that's fine. You can still play Flight of the Valkyries on anything else. Or Happy Birthday. We were actually playing Happy Birthday during the play at that time. I don't know if you noticed or not, but I was excited. Oh, I did. Okay, good. I do not like Happy Birthday musically as much as I like Ride of the... Is it Flight of the Valkyries or Ride of the Valkyries? I think it's Flight of the Valkyries.
00:19:01
Speaker
It could be wrong, though. But let's find out. I want to say Ride of the Valkyries and Inflate of the Bumblebee. I think we should get them inflated. There's a bee somewhere. So, Fly to the Valkyries by burning the Burning Witches or Burning Witches. And then Ride of the Valkyries is from Star Wars. Also, Apocalypse Now, Richard Wagner. Hmm.
00:19:27
Speaker
They both work, apparently. I don't know what the classic one was and I'm not going to be able to look that up. We don't, we don't deal facts here. You know, that Valkyrie jam, that one. Uh, there's, there's so much you could talk about here, I guess, as far as the game play is concerned. We should also mention that, um, see if these is always online and it is PVP.
00:19:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's like a big open map. So while you and your friends are doing whatever on your ship, there are other people doing stuff on their own ship with their friends. So when we were playing, we were doing gold hoarders, which is usually we'll go on a treasure hunt and maybe stop a different couple islands, fight some baddies, but we're trying to like accumulate treasure and then drop it back off at a port, sell it off.
00:20:17
Speaker
Yep. If we accumulate too much treasure, there's another faction. I don't know the name here. The Reapers. Yep. Which their goal is specifically is to hunt down ships and shoot down players and then steal their flag and like cash that in. Yep. So we try and avoid them typically, but if we can collect enough accumulated wealth, we will show up on the map and then be like, oh,
00:20:41
Speaker
fuck that guy and they kind of beeline it to you because you also have a lot of gold so you become the target. But even when Jake and I were just playing the two of us, we stopped on an island and I thought there was like a ghost ship that went by or something off in the distance. You don't know what a player's affiliation is just by like seeing a bow in the distance. You just try and like play it cautiously. Yeah. And we parked our ship and
00:21:05
Speaker
in an inconspicuous spot, kind of like we're going around the island. And then I go back to the ship and I see like four cannonballs simultaneously hit like the exact same spot and our ship exploded. So we got fucked over by some players. I made a massive, massive tactical error because I was like, yeah, we can park in this little like inlet between this rock and we should be fine. But they straight up got like a broad side on us. Like it was against a little sloop, so it wasn't going to hold up much anyways. But
00:21:35
Speaker
There was no chance our ship was making it out. I was going to add one clarification. You can tell the faction affiliation of a ship if you can get the spy glass on their flag because then you'll see whether it's a Gold Hoarders or Reaper or
00:21:51
Speaker
uh, order of souls or whoever. And then they were definitely too far away when we initially spotted the ship in the distance. Exactly. At least that's what I will tell you. Um, that's, that's what I'm willing to believe. If we're on copium, I'm here, I'm here for it. Yes. 100%. Um, have you played a reaper at all? What was that? Have you played as a reaper? I actually have not, like not at all. And we've actually even suggested it at times. I think part of it is because.
00:22:20
Speaker
even if you're playing the other factions, you can PvP. When we were playing... Oh yeah, you can still hunt. Yeah, when we were playing later, we actually saw a moment of advantage. A player ship, I don't know what their affiliation was, it was probably like one person, maybe two people, go down to, I think it was a pirate ship, like an NPC pirate ship, a skeletal ship, something like that. And when a ship goes down, all of the treasure
00:22:50
Speaker
is just there open in the water and you can see it kind of like glinting on the horizon. And so we drove by and picked up all of this guy's treasure, which included like an end of session. There's a culmination to a quest line for like gold hoarders, which is like, here's a vault, right? It included a vault key. If you have a vault key, you know exactly where to go to find the island, then you just have to find the entrance to the vault.
00:23:18
Speaker
and you can get tons of treasure. So this guy was at the end of his session. He was about to cash out with maximal rewards and he sank to an NPC ship. And then we took all of his stuff. So we were not reapers, but one could argue that we were.
00:23:32
Speaker
Engaging in some sort of you know, there's soldiers of fortune and there's soldiers of opportunity. Yes, we were both in that case It's like we were literally just watching that happen and then we're like we could probably pick that up uh-huh and then like three people like jumping off of the ship to collect rewards and
00:23:53
Speaker
And the ships also will have harpoons. So you can harpoon a player onto your ship if they fall off in the water and you're stopped. Or if there's just treasure sitting there or something else, you can just yeet it to the ship. So it's another convenience for making the gameplay not stagnate by, oh, I have to wait to do X.
Combat & Tactical Gameplay
00:24:15
Speaker
And I would interject for people who haven't seen the art style, this is basically a cartoony game. If you're harpooning a player onto the ship, you're not stabbing them in the chest and reeling them in. They just get like yeeted onto the ship. This is probably the best way to put it.
00:24:28
Speaker
It's an instant transmit. It's a friendly scorpion get over here. It is, yeah. It is instant though, like you said. You can just be doing whatever if you have your back to the ship and then someone hits you with a harpoon and it's like welcome here. Do you know what would be fun? I don't know if the angles or the speed of this is possible, but since you can harpoon players,
00:24:50
Speaker
your friendly allies to the ship. And you can also launch players from a cannon. Okay. All right. I've never tried that. Shoot them and catch them. That would be really funny. The cannon fire is pretty quick too, though. It's not instant, so it might be possible.
00:25:09
Speaker
That would be hilarious. I don't know what the point of that would be outside of like just a skill check. Yeah. If it is possible. It's completely within the point, like within the tone of Sea of Thieves though, right? You can be tryharding and sometimes we do, we really want to cash in our treasure.
00:25:26
Speaker
Oh, I was going to also mention in relation to gold hoarders, one of the reasons that that guy was probably waiting to cash out is the more treasure you bring onto your ship, the higher your rank goes with the faction. And then everything that you have on your ship is more valuable when you turn it in, you get better rewards. So there's an incentive.
00:25:47
Speaker
to wait to cash in, which increases the tension, which increases the risk, rewards to other people that might be coming after you. It builds anticipation. It is tantric pirating. But it's very much in the spirit of the game. You can also use the harpoon to try to get some crazy 90 degree turns off around a rock or something like that. We've done that in Escape before.
00:26:14
Speaker
It is, I don't know if you're trying to turn a whole fucking ship. But when you turn the wheel, it's not like a car. It's not instant. It doesn't have four wheel drive. You have to wait for, you're basically changing the angle at which you're going to intercept the water going forward. So it takes a long time for that turn to essentially take effect. And then trying to balance out, it's the same thing. But if you're like eaten by something,
00:26:43
Speaker
You can essentially just harpoon and it will hook you around because you're now tethered to that point. You can kind of launch off of that. But it's really nice for like quick turns around something. Yeah. I don't think you can use it as much for, oh, I fucked up. We're about to hit a rock because then what are you tethering to? Right. Yeah. Well, we'll we'll just get this over with. Pull me into the rack. Oh, maybe it's like a just cause to
00:27:11
Speaker
where you're about to hit like an island, but you quick grapple to it and then you're fine. Right. That joke is specifically if AJ is listening. Yeah, it's it's true, though. You could be parachuting in that game, cancel your parachute, be it terminal velocity and then grapple to the ground and be OK. You're just like, yeah, you know, science grapple makes you safe. Mm hmm.
00:27:39
Speaker
Um, but yeah, uh, open water. Uh, there's a couple of things you can do. You mentioned, we talked about some of the roles, like adjusting the sales to be into the, uh, have the wind at your back. There's obviously someone at the wheel. There's also no map present all over the place. You have to have someone literally at the map table calling out a heading.
00:27:59
Speaker
So oftentimes you have a navigator and someone at the wheel. And there's a bunch of other stuff you could do. You could fish, which is okay. You can cook food down below decks, which is useful because it heals more than like the fruit. You can kind of just pick up from islands. Mm, cooked fruit, go on. Well, you can. I don't think it actually makes the fruit any better.
00:28:26
Speaker
But cooked meat in particular is significantly better. It usually has multiple portions to it and it fills a lot of your health.
00:28:36
Speaker
Like it feels good feels easy. I mean, yeah, I'm here. I'm here for it But if you're Those roles are as I want to say Jake was implying it are more ancillary because as you're going around and exploring islands you will find loot and like random drops so you can find
00:28:57
Speaker
fruit and meat, or it'll be like on the island you can kill for meat. So it's not like you have to fish or acquire food or like maintain that as much. There's not a health food bar, right? Right. And even if you die, like there is a resurrection mechanic. So if you are just playing PvE with some friends, it's not a requirement that you maintain that. Yeah, which is nice.
00:29:20
Speaker
You actually the respawning area is the Flying Dutchman And Davy Jones locker and there's just a timer and you can actually talk to Davy Jones and then After the timer elapses a door will open and if you go through the door you'll respawn on the ship now if your ship is still in combat that can be like an active combat respawn where you're like right back in the thick of it and
00:29:46
Speaker
If your ship has sunk, it will be a new ship and it will be somewhere else. Yeah. It's always great when you're like watching the ship go down and you're like, I don't think I can go back. When the ladder stops working, the interact. Oh, not an entity. Yeah. But you can also, I want to talk about the ship a little bit. Yeah.
00:30:13
Speaker
There's like a lot of supplies on the ship form. Like there is some built in. There's like a food chest. There's a wood chest. So if you take damage, if you're like me and you run into islands, you can repair that. So you're not taking in water. If you do take in water, you have a bucket and you can kind of eat that water off your ship. Cool.
00:30:33
Speaker
Let's say the ship catches fire because you hit a rock really fast, or maybe it's... Yeah, that's why you use ship lubrication. But let's say it's...
00:30:50
Speaker
If your ship catches fire, you have a bucket on your person, but the ship will have a little water tank. So you can pump water in, grab that water, and then put out the fire instead of jumping off the ship into the ocean to grab water to then put the water on the boat. Right. And cannons.
00:31:17
Speaker
Cannons are the other thing. That's an active role, right? We talked about some of the passive things or like the wind and all of that. But if you're in combat, you probably want people on cannons.
00:31:28
Speaker
Basically, anybody who's not driving goes on cannons. Yes. Yeah. But the person who's driving, I mean, outside of sales has the best view of, oh, I'm going to steer the ship so that, oh, they'll be on our right. So everyone will go to, sorry, starboard and make sure the cannons are loaded and get ready to aim and fire. Uh-huh.
00:31:50
Speaker
We actually had a, when we started, we were using port and starboard and we reached a point where like, is the immersion worth the fact that all of us are taking a moment to realize like what side it actually is. And sometimes the call outs wrong. No, probably not. Let's use left and right. Port side. But wait, we just left the island. Is that left or right? Attack the port.
00:32:19
Speaker
And the other factor is if the opponent is fighting you back be they an NPC or a player ship And you're taking damage with cannonballs There's again part of the full simulation if it's above deck on one of these larger ships You might be able to wait a little bit because you're probably not gonna hit a swell where water would come in through that hole but if it's below deck and
00:32:41
Speaker
Now you've got a problem. Now you're immediately leaking and you need to send someone down with wood to start patching up. You're leaking air from the ship. I think that's what Archimedes established. I've really only been in a situation where boat is, I'm going to use the term driving, is driving fine or it's sinking.
00:33:08
Speaker
Is there an intermediate point between those two, where if you're taking on water, your ship will be more slow when sailing? I believe so. It's usually the reason I have to say I believe, even though I've put a fair amount of time in the game at this point, is because when the ship has that much water in it, I'm not running experiments. I'm bailing as fast as I possibly can, where people are frantically searching for wood.
00:33:33
Speaker
And it's either a recoverable situation or it's not. Oftentimes it's not. But yeah, the problems tend to compound in Sea of Thieves if the situation is out of control. Sometimes you make it. Yeah, sometimes.
00:33:52
Speaker
I also like that like your mask can be shot down. Yeah. And a little bit like crack and tip over. But if you, you know, use wood and just click and hold the animation, it will actually start to go back up. Yeah, it's like it's in process. It depends on the ship size, actually. I think for the small ship, you can just repair it. But for the large ships, you have to like grab the ropes first and like pull it back into place. OK. Then get the repair.
00:34:22
Speaker
But it's cool that that exists because obviously if they don't have a mast, they can't really use the wind to their advantage to move anywhere. Uh-huh. They can actually also do damage to the wheel itself, I think. And then you have to replace some of the spokes with wood panels and things like that. It's really good.
00:34:45
Speaker
No, it's really cool. I like the ship-to-ship combat. I'm not the most good PVP-er. And by that, I mean I'm probably in the bottom 25%, but it's always engaging.
00:35:02
Speaker
And the skeleton ships are fun. Although it's weird to board them because it's just like, all right, I went from being on my own ship to surrounded by skeletons. How have I improved our situation? Just clicking the whole left click. Because skeleton ships don't have treasure, correct? They will drop some stuff if they are sunk. They have some NPC loot. There's a couple useful
00:35:28
Speaker
differences about the ships. Well, okay. Useful or not useful. Uh, they don't patch is my understanding. Like they will not keep their ship from sinking. Um, but that does mean that they're pretty much all on cannons and there's more of them than there are of you. So it can be bad. Well, I mean, like, is there an advantage to boarding a skeleton ship versus just thinking they're ever living fuck out of it and then letting the loot spawn?
00:35:57
Speaker
Um, well, the advantage to boarding it is you can kill all the skeletons that are on the cannons. You can like, you can kind of cripple their offensive capabilities while the rest of the people on your ship continue to sink it. So you can shoot a teammate onto the ship to kind of disrupt their operations. Oh yeah, absolutely. Um, and in fact, like we've done that, uh, again, climbing and I guess we kind of jumped to climbing into cannons, but you mentioned it once earlier. It's a fun, it's a fun activity.
00:36:27
Speaker
It's just it's silly and entertaining but also like literally it's good for mobility. Yes. Yeah a lot of times you end up on an island and You can actually like super glide sort of too if you do a charge sword attack off of a ledge into water You'll propel yourself like crazy fast through the water But launching yourself with a cannon onto the island is always fun
00:36:53
Speaker
I think do you still take fall damage for that or are you immune? I think you get like resistance to it. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but you don't straight up die. I know that. Good. Yeah, that would be less useful. All right. It's like I'm going to board. I will bury you on the island via cannon. Right. What's been your favorite mission type so far as far as acquiring loot?
00:37:24
Speaker
Um, so it's kind of, maybe it's a boring answer. I do like the kind of peaceful sort of treasure hunts, um, that lead up into the vault missions. Um, again, we kind of shortcutted the whole process because when we got the vault key from the other guy's wreck, we didn't have to complete all the missions to get, to end up there.
00:37:45
Speaker
Um, but usually you have to go like island by island. There'll be some X's on a map, uh, for the particular island. And you try to find roughly where it is, dig it up and bring it back to the ship. Um, then the final vault, which we did have the, uh, uh, experience of playing.
Treasure Hunting & Vault Missions
00:38:01
Speaker
I think that, I think the last time we played, we went through a vault, right?
00:38:05
Speaker
Yeah, because that guy's vault key. Yeah. Um, but yeah, we actually made it to the vault in that instance. Yeah. Dave's like, are you crazy? Like, of course we did. The thing that you said earlier that, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We got his key, but I've done a lot of vaults on, I couldn't.
00:38:22
Speaker
quite recall whether we actually cleared it out or not, but we did. Well, this one was special to me cause it was my first time. Do you want to describe your first time in the vault? So basically it's a, it's a big room of treasure. And once the vault opens, you have a set amount of time to try and get everything out of that. So there'd be a variety of chests, some loose gold, maybe some other trinkets. And I think do each of them have a puzzle you can solve for bonus lists? Okay.
00:38:52
Speaker
So they always just getting clues to say like, oh, it's these three shapes is the passcode for the bonus loot. Yeah. I think the way there's like, you can find three of them and there's always four options on the walls. So you have to guess the last one. Okay. Can you do it any number of times the guesses? I believe so, but you're not going to be able to clear out the vault if you're sitting there guessing.
00:39:16
Speaker
Yeah. So I mean, if you have like a huge group of people, it becomes a lot more feasible. Yeah. Like when we did the vault the other night, it was everybody just like hosed through getting everything out. And then we had enough time to also do the puzzle. Yeah. So we just got everything. But I've definitely with less people where it's like, yeah, that was probably our most successful vault clear ever. We literally picked up all of the gold off of the ground as well as all of the treasure chest and the bonus.
00:39:45
Speaker
But it would be tough to guess it randomly because there's 16 combinations, and you have to run over and interact with a pillar to spin it to change the combination on the wall. And then you run back to the center to guess again. So you're describing my playthrough of Myst. I'm going to try literally every variation because I don't know what the fuck to do.
00:40:08
Speaker
But there's something satisfying about having like a ship completely loaded up with treasure and then ferrying it all over to a rowboat at the end of the session and cashing out. Um, and it's also, you know, on the opposite side, if you have all of that and you know, you're approaching the end of the session, it's incredibly tense. If you see another player ship and you're like, I might be about to lose all of it. Yeah. It's.
00:40:38
Speaker
I, Grant, a lot of times when we played, it has gone pretty, pretty well. And we have been able to cash out from our endeavors. But there, there's been a couple of times too, where, uh, you just get your shit kicked in. You're like, that's unfortunate. That broadside. I don't know what you were mentioning earlier against this loop. Yeah. Tuck us out pretty quick.
00:41:00
Speaker
We had a decent amount of treasure on the boat at that time. So it was unfortunate. And then when we respond, for whatever reason, it makes no sense. Yeah. The game put us on an island that had more treasure on it, like on the shore next to where our new boat was spawned than we had previously acquired through effort. Yeah, it was incredibly weird.
00:41:25
Speaker
Cause the way the treasure was laid out, it was like, it was kind of spread. So maybe it was a random spawn, but I've never seen that. Like it had to have been players dropping it off. Nothing else makes sense. Um, but I don't know. I'll take it. Thank you. Thank you. It is just panned out. Well, I think.
00:41:46
Speaker
But yeah, I should give probably like a brief overview of some of the other content types. Um, I gotta go into crazy detail, but some other things the game has are, um, the fortresses, which I think we did for the first time together. That was a new edition. Um, which was pretty cool. Um, that's just like a small fortress Island that you kind of siege and then loot from. Yeah. A lot of, a lot of ghost pirates on there.
00:42:15
Speaker
Um, but there's pretty good payout for like the effort involved. It was a lot less than like a vault chain of missions. You can just go to a point of interest on the map and claim it. Um, which was pretty good. There's also a like mermaid treasure vaults, which involves out of ship activities. And this is the one I'm like, not sure about. I know we didn't do it in our play session, but.
00:42:38
Speaker
Um, you can dive down really deep and go through this sequence of like caves and essentially like wave defense. Um, no pun intended there of like these aggressive mermaids. Um, and then you just get a bunch of treasure, a bunch of like aquatic themed treasure. Um, and you can bring it all up onto the ship. There's kind of like a warp type system to get it all up there, but here's the problem.
00:43:08
Speaker
You either send everyone down there, in which case you're committing yourself to like a 15 minute activity where your ship is completely helpless above the water or you leave someone up there and someone is subjected to 15 minutes of not doing anything except keeping an eye out while people clear.
Fortress Sieges & Sea Creatures
00:43:30
Speaker
And that's not super great. I mean, just as far as like a gameplay.
00:43:36
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Because if you lose your ship or if people come along and sink your ship, there's no counterplay really to that. You guys were all deep underwater fighting mermaids. Yeah. Because you maybe do shifts? Yeah, maybe. It's kind of a big swim up and down though. So it's almost like a dungeon.
00:44:00
Speaker
and the way it operates down there. So I guess the hope is that you can park your boat somewhere where it won't be spotted easily.
00:44:10
Speaker
It pretty much has to be open water. You kind of have to park above it because otherwise it'll take forever to get out to the, uh, there's like a little vortex thing where the mermaids are. So mermaid dungeons are shit is what I mean. Unless there's a mechanic I can't think of, which might be, might be true. Maybe your, your, your, uh, ship is cloaked or something like that, but I can't imagine that's the case. Um, I've only done those a little bit. I like the ship content a little bit more.
00:44:37
Speaker
There's also, did we mention the skeleton battles? There's ghost fleet battles. What was your impression of the ghost fleet battle? Because we did that one as a group as well. Eh, not great. It was kind of like repeated shooting at ships. Like what I described earlier, somebody would drive. The other people would be on cannons and switch sides depending on where the next upcoming boat would be. And you just shoot at it. And if you hit enough times, it goes down.
00:45:06
Speaker
Yeah. The ships would also be shooting at us, so we'd have to occasionally stop and repair with wood, patch any holes.
00:45:15
Speaker
It didn't feel like the most engaging combat versus if it was a player ship and it would be a little more active where like maybe they would try and jump on our boat and fuck us up or use an explosive barrel or use some type of tactic in the moment versus Ghost being like, you got me. Right. I'm like, OK. I think the ghost ships, you can hit them anywhere three times and they like dissipate.
00:45:42
Speaker
essentially, and it feels a lot cheaper than the simulation of like taking on water and patching and all this stuff. Even the the skeleton ships, I think, had more feedback than that. And skeleton ships, they have like a really good show up animation. If they do jump you, they'll literally just like come up from beneath the water, like next to your ship, which is really cool. Mm hmm. Like I love that. It's so cool.
00:46:12
Speaker
but I had the same impression of ghostly. I probably won't be doing that one much more.
00:46:16
Speaker
But there are also some sea creatures, I know. Yes. I think in a previous session, like we did encounter a megalodon, which is code for big ass shark. Yep. And you just kind of have to wait for it to surface and then try and deal with it and then patch like a motherfucker when it disappears again. Yeah, it likes to ram the ship, causing a bunch of damage.
00:46:43
Speaker
Has great meat though. If you cook that stuff, it takes a while, but it's a freaking choice. So I have to kiss. You have health regeneration for the rest of the sessions. Your loved ones will no longer die.
00:47:00
Speaker
That's an interesting fight, but you can kind of run away from them if you don't want to fight it. You might get some other treasure from it as well, but it won't go too close to islands. I don't think any of the creatures will. The other one is, I think the more notable of the two, it's near the borders of the map, is the Kraken.
00:47:20
Speaker
which we're supposed to unleash, I think. I think that that's another political reference, actually. I've definitely uncorked some Kraken. Is that the same? It's very similar. Very similar. Okay. But just a really big octopus like creature. It will grab people off of the ship and swing them around and others have to like hit the tentacles holding people.
00:47:47
Speaker
Or else they'll be like, um, I think they're like bitten or something for a bunch of damage. I can't remember exactly what the outcome is, but I know that you're pretty well helpless while they're up there. Kind of just like swinging the sword. Um, it'll do pretty consistent damage to the ship. And in general is a very big threat. You can, you can look up a video on YouTube or play the game and experience it yourself, but, um, it's very imposing.
00:48:14
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds kind of cool. We definitely have not encountered that when I've been playing yet. Yeah. And I'm glad because I don't want that much of a C challenge.
Open-Ended Gameplay & Player Choices
00:48:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:27
Speaker
It's good at like tailoring the experience. You can kind of like pick how risky you want to be and how chill you want to be and whether you just want to run other people's days. Um, and the PVP it's very much choose your own adventure in that regard. You could just brighten somebody's day and like basically chase a ship and they're like doing evasive maneuvers and you get close and then you shoot some fireworks at them and then play some music cause you drive by. Yeah.
00:48:54
Speaker
I keep saying drive instead of sale, and I know. There's no such thing as a sale by, it's a drive by. Right, yeah, it's true. I know it didn't happen in our play sessions this week, but we have had experiences with friendlies, and there's like a chat wheel, so you can call out like friendly.
00:49:16
Speaker
Um, where people are just, you know, playing instruments, um, helping each other, you know, dig up treasure, stuff like that. And we've had some really, really friendly people we also encountered. It's just, it's very much like you run across someone in the zombie apocalypse. Should we trust them or no? Are they just going to like shoot us and take all of our stuff? Um, those are fun games though. They, they, they lend themselves to good interactions like rust or anything else in that space.
00:49:45
Speaker
Yeah, where we have explicitly used deception to our advantage to fuck people over, which is why I'm wary of other players. It's like, what would I do in this situation? I'd do a long con. I'd do a long con. It's the guy standing behind himself with the gun. Yeah, we were talking about this the other day. It seems to be that Sea of Thieves is very much a unique experience as far as
00:50:13
Speaker
I couldn't think of another game where it is kind of choose your own adventure when you hop on. You're like, oh, do you want to go murder people? Do you want to just sail and explore and get some loot passively? Or do you want to just role play as a pirate, make somebody's day, ruin somebody's day? Whereas a lot more of the other games I could think of or have experience with are very much this is what it is. Yeah.
00:50:39
Speaker
Like with Elden Ring, we had to make a mention. You can choose how you want to approach the game, but like the game is still, you're doing combat to progress through the game. Right. You could just trade and see if these, if you wanted to. I think it's the most boring past time. It's literally like you have to water plants or these are silks and they cannot be watered or they will become waterlogged silks and no longer acceptable.
00:51:07
Speaker
We call them soggy silks. But yeah, it's really up to you when you play it. And we did touch on the currency system a little bit and how every time you start it's fresh. It's not quite that. At some point there was a patch, so you can spend gold, low amounts of gold, to buy cannonballs, wood, and I think the most basic kind of food.
00:51:34
Speaker
Now, no one had any trouble acquiring these at the start of a mission anyways. You can literally take a box around and like fill it up for all of the random spawns from barrels on an island. And you've accomplished the same thing, but it was literally just a convenience ad. Other than that, everything is cosmetic. All of the gold that you're getting is for buying cosmetics for your weapons.
00:52:01
Speaker
Uh, like the blunderbar bus or the like musket looking sniper thing, um, or your captain's clothes or the flags or the ship itself, but it's all cosmetic. Yeah. It's.
00:52:19
Speaker
It really doesn't matter. I chose to be an old lady for my design. With a beard. Yes, a bearded old lady. So it's just what color I want my Peggy Leggy to be. That's about it.
00:52:35
Speaker
I think recently I got a purple pistol flintlock. I'm like, Oh, this reminds me of a covenant weapon. And that's it. That's the, those two seconds of enjoyment I got from him. Like, Oh, that's cool. Uh-huh. Cause like in the moment, you're not like seeing a lot of your character design. It's more so something that you'd have benefit of like playing with friends or like, Oh, your thing looks cool. Yeah, it does. Thank you. Uh-huh. Yeah.
00:53:02
Speaker
I barely ever spend the money now, honestly. It's fun in the experience, it's fun getting the treasure. There's a bunch of stuff I still could buy, but I'm very often not the one spending obsessions, so I don't care about ship cosmetics or anything like that. I'm just there to have fun with friends, and that is weird sometimes in modern games. It feels like you have to be getting some sort of meta progression.
00:53:24
Speaker
And while that kind of exists, you're ranking up the covenants or whatever. I think you can become a legend and get access to like a secret area. If you max them all out, like none of that matters really beyond like the personal accomplishment. It's not numbers getting higher. Um, so it's not payday too. Mm-hmm.
00:53:46
Speaker
It's more of this funny thing happens when we played last night. Exactly. It's entirely about the experiences. It's a story maker. That's a good way to put it. And I wish there was more games like it. It's actually really cool for it. Like if you don't want to play it, you don't feel like you need to accomplish whatever your dailies were.
00:54:11
Speaker
There's no reason to play if you don't want to, because the only thing you're really getting out of it is the enjoyment in the first place. And not a lot of games do that anymore. Yeah. If it had dailies, it would kill it for me. Because I would see a thing. It's like, you've got to go play your instrument. You have to play Happy Birthday five times. I'd log in, do it, be like, this fucking hate this game. And I'd log out. Yeah. I'd be like, I've done my thing. Yeah, see your thing's perfect. But then,
00:54:42
Speaker
Cause it's weird to have an experience like that. You're playing with friends like, hold on. I have to play happy birthday five times. It feels weird to like force that into just what is very much an open ended experience. Right. Hey, do you want to go on a walk to the park today? Yeah, it sounds nice. All right. You better make sure you pet five dogs. I've only seen three. It's like, it's dumb.
00:55:06
Speaker
Yeah. Although I think if you set yourself the requirement to pet five dogs, if you go to the park and you accomplish that, that probably is worth it in real life. That might be a good goal to set and attain. What if it's one dog five times? That's also pretty good. It's probably a pretty, pretty good pupper.
00:55:26
Speaker
It has to be five separate instances though. You can't just pet them five times. You have to come across that dog again. I'm just imagining you're like jogging to the park while someone's like playing with their puppy and you're like, oh, you like stopped by pet the dog or like, and then, then wave resume jogging, jog, like pass the tree into like a bush line or something.
00:55:46
Speaker
Like one minute later, come back on the opposite side and walk over and pet the dog. You just keep switching t-shirts out of your bag. Uh-huh. Yeah. And just like the most basic Hanes tea of white. Oh, this one's blue. This one's green. This one's red. It would be really good. I like this hypothetical. Have you seen any of my other, uh, my other twin siblings?
00:56:11
Speaker
They also love dogs. We all come jogging here on Saturday. We don't jog together though. It's something we're working on. Yeah, right? Not since the incident. And then you just go like a thousand yard stare.
Comparisons & Final Thoughts
00:56:25
Speaker
Looking at your other sibling in the distance.
00:56:29
Speaker
But also, you can have a dog in this game. But I believe that is paid? Yep. Actual money? Yes. This is if you want to continue to contribute to their own personal war chest. You can buy a pupper. I know Ian has Oreo. And you can pick up and pet the dog simultaneously. It is emergent gameplay. It is the future.
00:56:55
Speaker
It is just nice to have like a ship puppy. Oh yeah. You get a mascot. Um, I think they'll bark if you're playing music too. Um, they'll, there's a bunch of animations and interactions. I'm also legally obligated to say you can shoot them out of the cannon. Um, they'll respawn on the ship. They just reappear. I wasn't sure if they could attack at all. No, no, it's no actual mechanical advantage.
00:57:24
Speaker
You're just better than the other team. Or you kind of hold up your dog. If somebody's going by, it's like, don't attack me. I have a dog. And they'll be like, fair enough. Friendly. Yeah. It's so you inflict emotional damage on the opponent. If they kill you and then they see that your dog is right there, they're like, oh, no. Be filled with regret. That's the PVP aspect. But Sea Thieves is a great game.
00:57:52
Speaker
Um, and I respect when games go out of their way to do something different. And this is very much doing something different. I, I basically guarantee you at the boardroom multiple times, someone was like, I bet we could make more money if we allow people to buy better guns for their ships, or you take a spaz 12.
00:58:15
Speaker
Into combat. Like maybe the Thanatos or the .50 cal anti-material rifle would sell pretty well in our Caribbean simulation. But they shot it all down. I don't know how they did it, but the game is as it is.
00:58:41
Speaker
And for anybody who's still listening and wondering, yes, it's better than Raft. Raft is a shit game with no options and other issues. Whereas every time I have played this, it might not be like my favorite type of game, but it's always a fun experience with friends. Yeah.
00:59:01
Speaker
Just a random piece of podcast trivia, actually in a preparation, or extensive preparation that we do for every episode, Dave tries to slide in, it's better than Raft because X, and this is the one we were like, okay, it is actually better than Raft. We'll let that one go in. Yeah, there's some debate around the Elden Ring thing, where it's like, Jake, rush from the side, and you're like, I don't know if we can really compare the Zoo. You're right. No, it's good. Given Raft's deep lore,
00:59:31
Speaker
Deep. That's the reference. We're still on double meanings here. If you have examples, perhaps though, of games that are better than Raft, we could stop, actually. And Dave has one more thought. What was your thought, Dave?
00:59:47
Speaker
I was going to say, if you want to join us on the Pirate Bay, so to speak, and speak to us peer to peer, you can do so at soapstonepodcast.gmail.com or join the discussion on Facebook at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. Couldn't have said it better myself. Have a good night. Have a good night.
01:00:25
Speaker
We sail together, the worst of warning now It's the broken angel, creatures of the broken self Until one is free
01:01:26
Speaker
I'll see you soon.