Recent reviews by OnkerDonk

Played a couple hundred hours now and i've become pirate legend so i thought i'd give my two cents.

TL:DR Sea of Thieves is an amazing open world pirate game to play with a group of friends, and will give you a fun long lasting experience.

i will refer to Sea of Thieves as SoT for short

The mechanics in SoT are pretty basic and doesn't take a lot of time to learn. Most players can figure out how to sail and fight within the first couple hours and there is a pretty good tutorial that teaches you the basics. Despite the simplicity ,there are still a bunch of tricks that you can learn and utilize as you get more experienced for example using the sword charge to jump longs distances. SoT is really open ended in a way where you can follow the main story tall tale quests and work with the companies in the game, or just set sail and see what happens. A lot of things is randomized making every play session unique. This includes things like the enemies you encounter the loot you find and the events and quests available to you. Some times a skeleton ship just jumps out of the water and starts shooting you.

SoT is multiplayer game but not in the way you would usually think. Servers only allow a max of 16 players or 5 ships or less at a time. Players can leave and join at anytime. if your server is low on players the game will perform a "server merge" where all players in to servers gets placed in one server. This can be a bit wonky sometimes and world events are server specific so a event you might want to play disappears.

THE BAD

There is two major gripes about SoT that bring it a bit down. The first is the technical issues and the second is game design and/or community problem.

The technical issues
Any day with high player activity or with an event (like the recent community day) will result in some kind of matchmaking issue, which makes joining SoT take a very long time or just not work at all. This is a bit funny because SoT is hosted in Microsoft Azure datacenters which is probably one of the most reliable and redundant to host anything these days.
When you can play the game you will sometimes experience jumps in ping which will usually result in your character being misplaced if you were moving. Your game client and the server actually often disagree where your character is in the game world. The last issue which is related to also related to ping is the hit registration. Sometimes when you shoot an enemy your shot will just not deal damage, this is because the server did not register you shooting that enemy, but your game client did.

The PVE and PVP debate

SoT is by design not PVP focused game. you cannot always progress forward by only attacking other players. Unlike in Call of Duty and the likes.
PVP is always on and you can attack anyone that you can get to. This is so you can try stealing other players loot or settle grudges on the sea. Most interactions with other players are usually peaceful. I think this is in theory a really good idea. The problem is that a subset of the community exist only to sink ships and kill other players over and over despite them not having any loot to steal or fighting back, usually while yelling racial slurs over the ingame voice chat. Rare (the developers) tried to remedy this by creating a PVP only gamemode (Arena). However most of these toxic players stayed in the main gamemode (adventure) and now the arena gamemode is being closed due to the lack of players. I don't know how to solve this issue, but it is pretty clear that part of the PVP players do not care about the game and only care about being bullies to everyone else. The best solution right now is just report them when you meet them. Due to their love of the N-word and other slurs any recording of them using them can be sent to Rare for a guaranteed ban of their account. However this toxic minority should not keep you from buying the game.

Just returned to Apex Legends after a two and a half year long hiatus: I was glad to see that the game had generally stuck to the same design philosophy. Still one of the best battleroyale games when it comes to movement and gunplay.
However EA and Respawn has apparently not scaled their server capabilities to accommodate the now huge playerbase, despite Apex Legends being a extremely profitable game considering it is F2P. This makes it a dice toss to whether or not you will stay connected to a match when you find one. Sometimes you might get into a match but your squads connection drops, and they can't rejoin the match.Everything is here for a good game: The infrastructure to support it is just extremely lacking, only because EA won't invest to the money in keeping the game running smoothly.

Apex Legends is like nice sports car, except some dumbass didn't tighten the wheels probably, so they fall off often and you end up crashing into a tree and dying.

I have played 220 hours so far and I still suck. I give it a spaceship out of 10

An absolute masterpiece and a worthy addition to the Half-Life Series despite not being the long awaited sequel to Episode 2. Raises the bar for Virtual Reality games and is a must buy for VR newbies and veterans alike

Played it as a child i loved, and i stil do when there now is a optimized version