A Pirates Life for Joon

With the latest update for Sea of Thieves and the new ‘A Pirates Life’ tale, I decided to get back into the game and see what Adventures Captain Jack Sparrow had up his sleeves, and in tow, I had my wife aboard as the ship's driver while I navigated on our trusty sloop.

The tale is split into 5 chapters, each of which took us a varying amount of time, mainly because of certain factors, which ill get into a bit further below. Each chapter offered something different which made the whole thing feel refreshing and we looked forward to coming back each evening to complete another chapter. From exploring caves and solving puzzles to the firefights and ship battles, this Tall Tale had everything you would expect from a Rare and Disney collaboration. One thing I really liked about it was the fact that some of the audio was taken from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland.

Now, in terms of gameplay, there isn’t anything really different from the standard Sea of Thieves experience. The new Tall Tale introduces some new enemies to fight along the way who also now show up in the overworld too. I’m not sure if these are going to be temporary or whether they will stay in the game remains to be seen. 

As Intriguing as I found the story, which I felt was quite limited in terms of length, which I feel is due to the fact that it was spread between the 5 chapters, and each of those was probably meant to be quite equal in length. Now, there were a couple of things that did bother me when it came to A Pirates Life and one of the main things was the bugs and glitches that I encountered. One of the main fights you have, when you face the Kraken, sees you on a wrecked ship which you have to try and winch to the top, simple in concept but in execution me and my wife found this fight very frustrating for this reason, we found a lot of the battles frustrating at times, but that's something I'll go into later.

Now, with this battle with the Kraken, there were several times in which my wife found herself being glitched out of the arena we’re fighting the Kraken in which lead to her being killed (and she could see the outer of the Kraken, which I am sure she shouldn't have been able to). Another issue with this section was that when raising the boat up, the chests that we were meant to carry on with us, floated down and below the ship making them inaccessible to us, which then halted some of our progress and made us a bit confused. If there weren’t any of these glitches then this would have been a brilliant segment to play through.

Other glitches we came across happened in a chapter after this where you go into a town and have to pick up a key to open a door further down the line, by the time we had got to said door, the key had disappeared, weird, we thought, so we retraced our steps back and forth (just in case we had accidentally dropped it) for around half an hour and couldn’t find it, it was only when I left the game and rejoined it did the key turn up next to the first journal you find in the first building you go into. This hadn’t been there before as I had rechecked that book several times on the retracing of my steps and we were sure we still had hold of the said key after this point.

Another frustration I found with the battles was that you didn’t know how close you were to finishing them off or how long the fights were going to be as there are no indicators of health or anything. One example of this was the Gold Hoarder battle, now I had read that with just 2 people it can take up to 20 minutes to defeat him, I’m pretty sure it took twice as long as this for me and my wife. Mainly because things kept respawning, we didn't have a chance to pick up supplies or ammo and his hits took more than half health off you and by the time you knew it, you were back on the ferry of the damned. I didn’t mind it taking as long as it did, but some indication would have been nice as I believe we didn't actually defeat him, he was called back by Davy Jones, so it seemed quite a pointless fight in the end as he didn’t turn up after this.

I did have a lot of fun playing A Pirates Life, I like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise so seeing the characters in Sea of Thieves was a nice treat, the puzzles and world was stunning to look at, it was just the bugs and glitches that we encountered hindered our progress and ruined part of that experience, and I don’t know if I could play through the whole thing again to suffer the same let downs. Maybe at some point, I'll go back to claim the commendations I didn’t get the first time around.