Instead of giving players a deep, involved character creation tool, Sea of Thieves generates groups of eight pirate characters at a time, of which the player can choose one. One might think that would make character selection easier. One would be wrong.
It’s a character generator locked on random. There are no sliders for body size, muscle tone, gender or age. There’s no drop-down boxes for hair’s colour, style or existence. The infinite pirate generator controls all of these things, and players are along for the ride.
My first run through the generator gave me several promising prospects. A large, burly woman with an impossibly wizened face caught my eye, and I particularly liked the guy with the large, jiggly tummy and copious beard stubble.
I like the body, but I want a fuller beard. I hold down the right trigger on my game pad and …
… eight more randomly generated characters appear. One of them has the beard I want, but he doesn’t quite have the paunch.
I guess I should just hit the right trigger again – but wait. Check out this guy.
Red hair and a mustache? Hrm. Maybe I want a mustache now. A couple more right trigger presses, and voila!
I like him! I kind of wish he was bald, though. I press X to favourite the character – you can’t lock attributes, but you can hold on to a character between respawns – and try a few more times.
Well dammit, now I’m all mixed up. All I know now is my character needs a mustache and a side undercut. Unless I get distracted and go chasing after some other identifying feature.
I get why Rare did it this way, instead of offering more traditional character creation. The studio wants each character to feel like a fully-realised Rare creation. Too much futzing about with sliders could kill the aesthetic.
Still, it would be nice to be able to settle on a combination and start playing Sea of Thieves seriously sometime soon.
I’ll get there. Eventually.
Comments
25 responses to “Choosing Your Pirate In Sea Of Thieves Is Hard”
It’s a shame this is an Xbox One thing.
I can’t bring myself to want an Xbox one. Only console I’ve ever skipped.
I know more people with Wii U’s than Xbox ones.
Poor Rare.
PC too. So there’s that.
Yeah, if you are ok with purchasing it off the Windows Marketplace. So for a lot of people that is a hard no.
You can buy CD keys online (I got one for $85 AU, while on the Microsoft store its $100AU) and just use that to activate the game (although you have to activate in the Microsoft store anyway)
And I believe this is classified as ‘play anywhere’, which means apprently if you buy Xbox version and install on your console it will apparently allow you to play on your PC as well.
Do you live in Japan? If not your friends are a bizzare statistical annomaly.
Also its a PC game too. Surely you don’t own every console ever (except the Xbone) but not a PC?
Why is that a bizarre statistical anomaly? Outside of Japan, Sony’s sold twice as many PS4s as MS has sold xbones.
Frankly, the only reason I’ve got one is for the 4K UHD blu-ray player. The MS exclusives are pretty uninspiring for someone who’s not a sports/racing fan, and everything cross-play runs better on the Pro than the 1S.
X is a new and different story, but hell if I’m buying another bone. Maybe when there’s a good trade-in value on my S and the X is in a good bundle, such that I’m only out one to two hundred dollars depending on my mood, for something with a UI I hate.
Math.
Never game on the PC, man. It’s been a no go for me since the early 2000’s. I use the PCs for art/work so I need there not to be distractions installed for productivity.
And I do own most consoles (no N-Gage and still need a hybrid Turbografx). I’m a longtime collector. It’s costly yet rewarding.
I know more people with a Wii U than Xbone too. Most of them tend to have a PS4 for non-Nintendo gaming, if anything.
(and fwiw that’s across dozens of people, rather than just a small handful)
Ok but you do get that there’s a lot more Xbones then there are WiiU’s everywhere but Japan, right?
Wherever they are they’re hiding pretty well 😛
I do wonder why?
i have all the consoles and PC… and Xbox one is the one i prefer to be on if it is multi-platform.
I’d like it if they used an evolutionary approach – show you 8 completely random ones. Pick one. It shows you 8 more that are based on that one. Pick one. Rinse, repeat and you’ll easily hone in on a look you like. No sliders, no complexity. Just click a few times…
That really should be how it works (combined with a ‘none of these’ to wipe and generate 8 new ones from scratch) but apparently not 🙁
Or… now stay with me here, because we’re about to get fucking crazy… OR… they could just make a fucking normal character generator and let us pick from all the options for what we want instead of having to roll the dice for hours until boredom and impatience forces us to pick something that leaves us the least dissatisfied, but still fucking dissatisfied.
Fucking insane, I know.
Yeah, like I get not handing over complete control so you don’t end up with all these godawful horrific creations people like to try and do with character creators… but at least being able to check some features you want or don’t want like facial hair, scars, tattoos, gender, hair colour, etc would have been nice. Throw some parameters into the generator if we want, we know they’re there.
Well that kinda sucks.
What a pointlessly frustrating nuisance of a system. Who the fuck came up with this bullshit? Was this some sort of compromise the developer came up with since the court frowned on their torture of animals and insisted they find a more socially acceptable way of being sadistic pricks?
Microsoft has been pushing Sea of Thieves like crazy. Beta this, beta that, character generator this, Twitch that… I wonder if there is substance underneath the hype. If only there were a reputable and impartial web site to give me that information…
Actually I don’t mind this approach…I’d probably end up making my standard boring stubble tough guy if I was left to my own devices. I kind of like being forced into a weird and wonderful combo.
I love this. It’ll get me to pick an interesting-looking character and start playing instead of spending three hours getting the height slider just right before I can play.
For me it’ll mean three hours refreshing the pirates trying to find something I like. And then still not liking any of them.
It wouldn’t be so bad if we could go in and change them again later (“alright this’ll do for now let’s just fucking play already”), but as far as I know you can’t?
Seems a bit backwards in this day and age not to let you create your own character in a game like this.
This is a ridiculous lazy creation system under the guise of some clever roleplaying experiment. I cant even chose hair colour or anything like that. Its so frustrating and pointless. Considering the only rewards you get in the game are cosmetic, its extra annoying
Theres just no reason to do this outside of laziness. Theyre trying to spin it as some cool way to create more differences in what people chose, but all it does is leave everyone with a character that they happen to give up on and say “good enough”
That’s a no for me then…