My initial thoughts so far for anyone that cares, only after like about an hour or so of game play.
Pro's:
- Game looks gorgeous, quite the artistic design. Everything from the water to the lighting is incredible. Shows Rare still got it from a technical & artistic perspective.
- Freedom to just go off and do what you want is nice.
- Ship combat is fun, keeps you on your toes.
- Runs extremely well on my X, haven't noticed any of the screening tearing some mentioned.
- Sound is very immersive.
Cons:
- While the game looks beautiful, I'm surprised by the lack of things to look at. How do you make a game revolving around water and sailing and adventuring and make it kinda empty? There's hardly any sort of aquamarine life (like really) and underwater is extremely bland.
- Doesn't seem like much to do on islands so far, I was hoping for bigger outpost with NPC's that walked around and do things, even if they were scripted. Having towns and bigger islands that feel alive and like a living world would be beneficial to this game.
- Lack of weapons, not much variety...can we not use the shovel as a weapon? I'd like to see the utility based items get more clever usage.
- I can see this game being a SP nightmare, rather than have you re-spawning close to the same campers, should maybe teleport you another sever or something.
- Enemy variety, need more than skeletons. They can easily have other enemy types in the game that won't break the lore such as giant crabs and other sea creatures that can attack on land and in the water.
Again, initial impressions...maybe that will change but so far I can see this game getting very mixed reviews. I'm def gonna spend more time playing the game, grinding rep and hopefully syncing up with some Era folks. I don't want to be to judgemental yet. However, I do hope that Rare has a nice roadmap laid out with some big updates planned soon.
Will see how the rest plays out.