Sea Of Thieves Beta
Demi Kemmeries
I'll admit, I'm excited about Sea of Thieves. It's not quite anything I've seen before: an MMO that requires teamwork for even basic tasks, asking you to assemble a crew of pirates and then run around manning a ship with all the interconnected tasks that entails: steering, firing cannons, watching out for enemies, patching the hull, etc. The first time I played my crew sunk in moments, but there was something fun about it regardless, all of us miscommunicating and scurrying about like rats before throwing our hands in the air and then playing the accordion on the prow of the ship as the thing went down. I was looking forward to getting to see a little more of it yesterday, but unfortunately, it's looking like I'm "too early."
The Sea of Thieves closed beta is getting off to a bit of a rocky start as players that pre-ordered the game are being locked out of actually playing the thing. People with beta access through the founder's program appear to have been able to play, but many other people have been getting an error message when attempting to start it up. Rare acknowledged the problem and said that it had rolled out a fix. The fix seems to only apply to people that had pre-ordered the game before, however, and it isn't working for me or other players that pre-ordered since the beta began. Which is a particular problem, because anyone that pre-ordered since the beta began likely did so for the sole reason of accessing the beta.
This sort of thing happens, even if it's not the sort of bug that one expects to see in a Beta: a bug that makes the Beta impossible to access. But it's pretty standard for companies to extend the beta period when things like this happen, which I have to imagine the company will be doing once it gets this problem ironed out. In the meantime, I'm still excited, and check back for more thoughts once I can actually play the thing. I would argue that Sea of Thieves is Microsoft's most important exclusive of 2018, so the pressure is on.
Some players are encountering an Ashbeard error when trying to sign in to their Microsoft account on the PlayStation5 version of Sea of Thieves. Please run through the troubleshooting steps below to resolve:
If you have been recently playing on another platform, such as Xbox or Steam, please wait 10 minutes before launching the PlayStation5 version. This allows our back end services to clear your credentials so that you can log in successfully. Otherwise, please run through the rest of this article.
Press and hold the power button until your console beeps. The screen goes blank, the power indicator flashes white, and then turns off. Remove the power cable and leave the console for 20 minutes. Reconnect the power cable and press the power button to turn on the PlayStation5 console.
REMEMBER! Be mindful that you are using the correct Microsoft account during the linking process, as if you accidentally link the wrong Microsoft account, we are unable to unlink this account.
If you are shown any errors, blocked or blank results for the above tests, please reach out to your ISP as your network may be blocking the necessary connections required to play the game.
Clear local saved data from PlayStation console and relink your Xbox Live account:
***Important - Please ensure that you know the Xbox Live account login details used to link to your PlayStation ID before completing these steps
Some players have reported intermittent stuttering and performance issues since Easy Anti-Cheat was implemented into the game. This issue is happening specifically with PCs that use ASUS motherboards.
After attempting to link your Xbox Live account to your PSN ID, if you receive the Avacadobeard error preventing access into the game, please check that no restrictions have been placed onto either of those accounts preventing online access via the accounts privacy or family settings.
After confirming the above is correctly set for both your audio input / output devices, as well as your Xbox Live account privileges, any crew chat issues should now be resolved. If the issue persists:
As players need to access High Sea's to receive their closed beta rewards, if you do not own a subscription to PlayStationPlus, please use the the 'Raise a Support request' button at the bottom of this article for further assistance.
If you wish to report a player directly to the PlayStation5 enforcement team, or you are receiving forms of toxicity outside of Sea of Thieves such as through the PlayStation5 chat feature, please use the following methods:
When searching for game sessions, players can specify whether they would like to perform cross-platform matchmaking and also those on console can specify if they would prefer to play with other console players using a controller.
As your Sea of Thieves account can now be used on multiple platforms, you may notice that some items will show on one platform while not another. This is due to certain items now being platform exclusive.
Any progress towards a trophy first made on Xbox, Windows, or Steam will not carry over to PlayStation5, therefore the requirements for said trophy need to be met from scratch on PlayStation5. This is due to how trophies are tracked on this platform.
Press and hold the power button until your console beeps. The screen goes blank, the power indicator flashes white, and then turns off. Remove the power cable and leave the console for 20 minutes. Reconnect the power cable and press the power button to turn on the PS5 console.
Please ensure that the game is installed on the console's internal drive, as this will eliminate any potential issues caused by external drives. Reinstalling the game may also help, if the above steps do not resolve the issue.
7) Click \"Ok\" and EAC will install for you. You should receive a User Account Control pop up asking to allow it to make changes to you device, if you are not running as admin. You will need to click \"Yes\"
Sea of Thieves is now optimised for Direct3D 12. On most PCs the game will run with the default Direct3D 12, but older hardware may not fully support it and should automatically run with Direct3D 11 instead. If you find you need to manually switch to Direct3D 11, there are three options described below:
Workaround: Please install the game on the console's internal SSD, or an expanded high speed SSD. A standard HDD is no longer compatible with the game on these consoles.
If you have both of these, when you click the \"Link Accounts\" button on the Pirate Perks page, you'll be presented with the following screen asking you to link your Sea of Thieves account, to the Rare Store account. It will look similar to this:
You will notice that some merchandise will require you to have a certain amount of progression in a specific Company. For example, the \"Registry of Goods\" t-shirt will require you to have reached level 50 with the Merchant Alliance. You can see your progress underneath the item's picture. The button will remain locked until you meet that requirement.
Should you wish to order an item once it is unlocked, click the \"Order Now\" button visible beneath the progress bar. You will receive a notice stating you will be leaving the Sea of Thieves website - clicking \"Continue\" will then take you to the Rare Store where you can view pricing, sizes and then complete your order.
When finding a Captain's Logbook, the contents can sometimes appear blurry or washed out. While these water damaged Logbooks are unreadable, this is intended and these affected logbooks are still just as valuable to the Reaper's Bones company once they are handed in!
Skull and Bones is finally coming out this month (or so we're told), and this week's open beta is Ubisoft's last best chance to convince us that the long-delayed pirate game is worth $60. I played a few hours of it today, and I can't say I'm convinced, though I won't rule out that it gets better in the endgame.
It starts with Ubisoft's typical early game babying: Before you graduate from captaining a dinghy, generic pirate NPCs make you prove that you understand complicated game systems such as pressing F to pick up floating loot, and you're sent schlepping between little islands in search of an acacia tree to cut down. That task took me a while, because other players had already harvested all the nearby acacia groves, and I guess they take a while to respawn. Yo ho yo ho, another stump for me.
Should logging really be one of the first things you do in a pirate game? Probably not, but after acquiring lumber and finally building a proper ship, I could focus on sinking NPC merchants to amass wealth and supplies, which is better.
The combat is simple fun, although it's more like piloting a speedboat than captaining a 17th century ship. I guess I somehow failed to absorb any of the nearly 30 Skull and Bones trailers Ubisoft put out over the past seven years, because I'd been picturing something slower and more dignified, like the capital ship battles of Fractured Space (except on the ocean, obviously).
At first I thought Ubisoft was making a grittier, bloodier counterpoint to Rare's charming, whimsical pirate game, but Skull and Bones isn't really gritty or bloody. It's cheesy and unnatural. After I constructed my first ship, I was shown a celebratory animation in which my character aggressively applauded at the shipwright like a wine-drunk adult trying to get a reaction from a baby. It reminded me of those TikTokers who pretend to be NPCs, or those ads for fake mobile games where the player becomes a Level 99 Boss. I can't imagine growing attached to this world.
So far, I just feel a renewed desire for the simple but thrilling adventures and mishaps of Sea of Thieves, which emphasizes simulation and player agency (aka the freedom of an individual to cause massive problems for everyone else) over the structured progression of Skull and Bones, where I'm running routine quests to unlock ship and weapon blueprints and collect the materials to build them.
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