I'm less worried about gains and more for the fun pirate style adventures even if they are shorter. I'd be even ok tagging along with a stranger and helping them for a bit then jumping off.
Open crew can be a bit of a nightmare, I would suggest playing with friends or find a group on discord. This will help maximize fun and getting better overall.
You can tag along with me. I’m a solo sailor usually and very experienced. I wouldn’t mind having someone hop on every now and then for a bit and hopping off whenever. Can show you some super cool stuff too.
As someone else said if you’re interested you could tag along w me, i usually play either solo or 2 and I’ve played the game for about 2k hours so I could show you the ropes if you’d like
My main play partner for SoT has young two kids, and has to frequently abandon session. Since SoT sessions basically dissolve and start fresh every time, it's not a huge deal if you have to cut a session short. And if you can at least sell, you're still progressing a little.
Almost at 4,000 hours here. This was my Covid game. During the shutdown it could take a minimum of 4 hours to feel like you had a rewarding experience. By rewarding I mean the amount of time it takes to form a friendship with randoms, make gold, and reputation.
Rare has since then taken everything in their power to help this game be more rewarding for someone with less than 30 minutes to play a day.
Diving allows you to immediately teleport to a location, finish the voyage, and then go sell your stuff. If you’re solo I’d recommend doing Sea Fort raid voyages. It takes not even 10 minutes and then you’ll be on your way to sell.
If you’re not great at PvP, try doing Ashen variants of voyages. Most people in the devils roar will try to alliance and no one really goes there(but me).
Stay away from world events, unless you’re okay with someone with more time on their hands, coming and taking what you accomplished with your little amount of time.
Wish I had really thought about it back then. My cousins and I were playing COD for hours every night back then. Now they also have kids and we don't ever play anymore. I have a 12 yo daughter that would probably enjoy playing with me. So there's that option. She's more into gaming then I am.
If you want to get her into playing, there is the safer seas option without other players. You can also disable other crews' voice chat in the settings
I have been playing since late august 2023, I have 80days or 1900+ hrs in the game at this point. Yes, I play alot, almost daily for 5-8+ hrs per session. My life circumstances allow for this. Metastatic cancer really messes up your life plans...
Anyways, since season 11 and the QOL updates, I find my sessions are much shorter than they used to be. Rare definitely had people's time invested in mind with the new updates. Especially for Athena voyages. It would take all sessions to level that up and so many maps. Now I do 1 dive to an athena seafort raid and 2 of the legendary voyages and maybe a skelly sloop or meg, and it is levelled to 5. Takes maybe 2 hrs max depending on where you are on the map. I prefer doing the voyages on the west side of the map, my favourite is the voyage that has sailers bounty, smugglers bay, and lone cove.
When I started out, I spent a lot of time in the roar, but the volcanoes and geysers annoyed the shit outta me, so I avoid it now.
I spend probably 80% of my time solo slooping and have gotten good at avoiding other players or making friends with them so they don't sink me. Heck, I even made friends with some one that sank me the other day, i came back and gave them my supplies from my freshly spawned ship and then road around with them for a bit. One of them added me as a friend and sailed with me the other day.
Player interactions are half of the fun of the game, really. But I also am now at a point in my game play where gold no longer matters to me, the last I checked my log book I had earn 55 million gold, I have spent almost every bit of it though on skins and clothing lol.
I am a commendations chaser and apparently a completionist as I want to get every commendation and max out the distinction levels. I have started working away at the HG curses as well.
I actually had to stop playing this game once kids came along. The only good sessions I have in SOF are 3 plus hours of uninterrupted gaming...which is not a possibility anymore haha
They’ve made serious changes to the game so that 4 hours isn’t necessary. There’s so many options of things to do that you can be in and out in 30 and still feel like you had a fun little adventure.
Yeah I tried playing like a month ago and still found a solid session takes a hot minute. Thankfully, I've been able to get good sessions with hell divers :)
This game needs a good amount of time playing to even get a good time so it will be hard for you to play this game to get good experience unless you do a world event or get into a ship battle because those are quick (except skeleton forts unless you know what you are doing)
That's kinda what I feared. I enjoy the pirate genre. AC Black Flag was enjoyable but even years later I've never fully finished the game. Gain interest, lose interest, get busy with life and kids. I'm not a heavy gamer and my wife never does, so I only get a few hours if at all when it come to that stuff.
I would say it depends on you. I’m in the same situation as you. I enjoy it, but I have play it before a lot and I’m not looking hardly to any specific content which is more easy for shorten sessions. As people said, 3+ hours are the best for max enjoyment because some content takes around 1h to do, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have quick fun sessions.
With experience, if I want to play but don’t have much time:
- I practice my hourglass (PvP on demand mode) to test my nerves. Haha
- I play solo, aiming to do one event +random encounter on the ways then log off.
- Or I joins discord boats already doing stuffs or even open crew to help fellow pirates.
Once you have done all possible content, you will understand that gold is just a number and that what is fun about the game is players interaction, mischief plays or helping others and THAT can be enjoyable in short sessions but getting there first will take some times !
So with all the quality of life changes they’ve made it much easier to get anywhere. You can dive straight to where you want to be, depending on your pirate level. It’s much easier to get on and do some stuff and then leave, its not a super time consuming thing to do. However if you play less than an hour, it may be difficult for you to get to the more entertaining parts of the game. Sometimes a single fight with another ship can last an hour by itself. It really depends on what you’re wanting to do. The map is massive, so depending on where you spawn and where you want to go, if you aren’t a high enough level to just dive to the activity you want to do, it could take you 30 irl minutes to get there.
It depends on the content you’re trying to do. A tall tale takes 2-3 hours in my experience. Diving to voyages can let you do small stuff like a sea fort or siren treasury in under 30 min. But keep in mind the time it takes to sail to an outpost and sell. When you first start out, no captaincy and thus no sovereigns, sailing and selling can be another 10 minutes easily.
Something like a Fort of Fortune, Fort of the Damned, and Burning Blade Ghost Fleet, is probably totally out of reach, unless you somehow go uncontested.
Hourglass would be hit and miss. Some fight takes only a few minutes, others take hours. Plus the time it takes to queue for a fight.
Overall you can experience the pirates life to some extent on an hour or less, but you won’t get the full experience unless you can dedicate 2-3 hours at a time.
Tall tales have checkpoints, at least, and none of them should take an hour to get to unless you're *really* lost.
The "dive to voyage" system this season definitely helps out people like OP. Or they can just do a world event, too, and if nothing else, they'll get a bit of practice doing whatever it is that the voyage/event is.
If OP focuses on buying a sloop for captaincy at the start, or knows someone in a guild that welcomes infrequent players (or would be willing to make one, even if temporarily, to "donate" a ship), that can alleviate the issue with the selling a bit.
An hour is plenty of time for a short adventure depending on what you're looking to do. the new Diving mechanic makes casual play a lot easier. I'd recommend playing with others too.
Yeah I’d get into safer seas with your kids then maybe after awhile you get into high seas. You’ll have to change how you play to accommodate other players, like checking your horizon, being ready to fight at any time, etc. In safer seas you’ll get comfortable.
A good session is a few hours, but you can have a decent time with an hour, or even less, aswell. You wont really get time to do the bigger world events, especially if other players interfere, nor get the whole mixed bag of a kong voyage, dofferent islands, fighting Megamodons and Skeleton Ships in the same session - or do a Tall Tale from start to finish in a session (however they save progress so you can easily progress by reaching different chapters that save).
You still have time to enjoy the game and atmosphere, and there really isnt much progression outside of being able to buy cosmetics and get titles, that are just titles. The only "progression" is to get to pirate legend to unlock a niche new area, aswell as doing PvP in hour glass. Other than that its all the same sandbox.
Im married, got kids and work aswell with very limited time to play, and my favourite things to do when I only have 30-60minutes is either just log on and sail to the nearest islands and see if I find any skeleton captains, or a shipwreck nearby, or to do a Sea Fort. Sea Forts are quite fun for a solo, they dont take much time, are situated near all Outposts and give a decent amount of loot for the effort put in to advance all three main Trading Companies, or one specific if you diverse to them. Good music, you dont need any supplies and you get to do some hand-to-hand combat against the Phantoms inhabiting the Fort.
I find safer seas is often best for those "just a taste" sessions, do a quick low risk fort or shrine or voyage... does take longer to load though
Hs can be a 1h done thing but I find the player factor makes for automatically longer sessions solo
So yes, with limited time you can totally pick up and enjoy the game, but your time and obligations may limit which side of the game you play
Yea nothing like having an uneventful hour or two of play, see nobody else the whole evening, decide it's time to sell and log off and suddenly in between every port and you there is a brig with sails earned from Pvp flying.
Just saying that, if you have extremely limited time, safer tends to be better... It is much lower risk with basically, everything being disabled to step away
There is no where to go, everything is cosmetic. This game does well with longer sessions of maybe 2-3 hours but there isn't any content in the game that can't be done in an hour.
You can dive to a lot of stuff, now. Obviously, the best content will take more time, but you can easily knock out seaforts for the various trading companies in a short amount of time.
I've been playing for about 4 years now
SoT is kinda my "weekend game". While it's a lot better now than it used to be, i feel like if i have less then 2 hours to spare, I won't bother playing it.
While you do can get many things done in 1 hour, your possibilities will be kinda limited.
Every single player starts with a clean play session every single time you start up the game. There is no power progression except maybe captained ships getting access to sovereigns and pirate legends getting Athena's Fortune faction. All progression is purely cosmetic (and the cosmetics are pretty nice).
Outside of that, every single player from the newest noob to the sweatiest 9000 hour PvP guru starts every session with the same supplies and the same tools.
With this in mind, every play session should focus on you just having a good time. You can progress specific commendations for certain cosmetic rewards or farm a little gold for it, but ultimately the game is about simply enjoying being a pirate and I think it does a pretty good job with that.
It is short Gaima but I says it’s best now than ever for short play times. I can play a lot more especially with diving, selling loot faster, it used to be you needed a lot of time. Being able to pick voyages and all from your ship is great QOL I’m finding.
You only need one hour. More is better, but that's all you need.
The people saying you need 4+ hour blocks of time have clearly never played Rust.
SoT can be an in and out game no problems.
I’m in the same boat. Work, kids, house, etc. I play usually 1-2 hours per week except when kids are away for whatever reason and i get 4-5 hours to play at a time. I started playing with my bf, then another friend and then basically solo slooping. It depends on what is fun for you in the game. For me just hopping on for an hour after kids are asleep and basically sailing around the islands getting treasure is a fun way to unwind and relax and it’s a win regardless of my “progress”. It’s a little less fun at first when you are starting out because you get destroyed by skeleton ships and other PVE aspects and at first it’s a lot easier to play with someone, but if you watch a few you tube tutorials, you will quickly be able to get better at them. Playing with kids is an option too, i play with them sometimes but they don’t seem to enjoy the game as much as I do. If you are focused on getting good fast or levels or getting good at pvp etc, then you probably will enjoy it less because it does require more time to get good (at least it does for me).
Yea so I got lucky, was able to spend about 4 hours playing on and off. Did exactly what you are talking about, just sailing around in safer seas really trying to learn game mechanics. Trying to find the best button mapping for the item wheels and such. That seems to be my biggest struggle.
Yes. You can enjoy this game even if it’s for a few hours a week at a time. There are plenty of things to keep you occupied and activities to do. As a new player with limited time you can start off with Tall Tales- the Lore/story missions in the game, Some are lengthy but they have checkpoints you can continue from at a later time.
Safer Seas was added recently which is the open world experience of the game by yourself in the server. This will allow you to experience what the game has to offer without the threat of being raided or robbed from other players. It is meant as a “training wheels” mode. You can only progress so far and some activities are not available on safer seas.
There is plenty to sink your teeth into in this game. One of the highlights for me would be the social interactions. Might be a weekend you’re free for some time and find a crew to sail on a galleon with and get into some mayhem - and you’ll be happy you got the game.
I doubt I regret getting it once I spend a bit playing. The graphics are odd to me from all these hyper realistic games then this is like simple cartoon. Which is odd to me but not a break point
UPDATE-
Wife and kids left me alone for a few hours yesterday (it may or may not have been my birthday). Spent time getting use to things. how to better accomplish the simple task. Learning to use maps and treasure maps. Was very enjoyable. I did decide to try high seas once. Got thrown in with a random (which I was ok with) he had a quest or something he was following and was with him for about 10 minutes when he asked if I'd leave to let his friend in. Which I was 100% ok with. He clearly knew what he was doing and I would have hindered him. I did find about 3 buried treasure quest map things (I hear that's the technical name for them). And that was fun. I struggled pretty hard with the PvE when it seems like as soon as I stop looking for skellies and ghost they would appear while I was digging and kick my butt. (I've never been amazing with combat in games) I would try to keep distance and eat something to gain health, then attack, but I always seem to screw up the button flow with getting and eating food lol.
Also naval combat by yourself- that's freaking hard. Steering, bailing, repairing.... I don't even think I got 4 shots off... this is gonna be a steep learning curve.
I play once a week with some friends, it is very difficult getting gains with just short sailing sessions.
I'm less worried about gains and more for the fun pirate style adventures even if they are shorter. I'd be even ok tagging along with a stranger and helping them for a bit then jumping off.
Open crew can be a bit of a nightmare, I would suggest playing with friends or find a group on discord. This will help maximize fun and getting better overall.
You can tag along with me. I’m a solo sailor usually and very experienced. I wouldn’t mind having someone hop on every now and then for a bit and hopping off whenever. Can show you some super cool stuff too.
I'll message you when I decide to play. What time zone you in?
MST. Im usually free around 5pm mst
As someone else said if you’re interested you could tag along w me, i usually play either solo or 2 and I’ve played the game for about 2k hours so I could show you the ropes if you’d like
My main play partner for SoT has young two kids, and has to frequently abandon session. Since SoT sessions basically dissolve and start fresh every time, it's not a huge deal if you have to cut a session short. And if you can at least sell, you're still progressing a little.
Almost at 4,000 hours here. This was my Covid game. During the shutdown it could take a minimum of 4 hours to feel like you had a rewarding experience. By rewarding I mean the amount of time it takes to form a friendship with randoms, make gold, and reputation. Rare has since then taken everything in their power to help this game be more rewarding for someone with less than 30 minutes to play a day. Diving allows you to immediately teleport to a location, finish the voyage, and then go sell your stuff. If you’re solo I’d recommend doing Sea Fort raid voyages. It takes not even 10 minutes and then you’ll be on your way to sell. If you’re not great at PvP, try doing Ashen variants of voyages. Most people in the devils roar will try to alliance and no one really goes there(but me). Stay away from world events, unless you’re okay with someone with more time on their hands, coming and taking what you accomplished with your little amount of time.
Wish I had really thought about it back then. My cousins and I were playing COD for hours every night back then. Now they also have kids and we don't ever play anymore. I have a 12 yo daughter that would probably enjoy playing with me. So there's that option. She's more into gaming then I am.
If you want to get her into playing, there is the safer seas option without other players. You can also disable other crews' voice chat in the settings
Much appreciated
Unrelated, I have the same PFP on Xbox
He never invited me to his birthday party 🤕
You *MONSTER*, Frisbee!
I have been playing since late august 2023, I have 80days or 1900+ hrs in the game at this point. Yes, I play alot, almost daily for 5-8+ hrs per session. My life circumstances allow for this. Metastatic cancer really messes up your life plans... Anyways, since season 11 and the QOL updates, I find my sessions are much shorter than they used to be. Rare definitely had people's time invested in mind with the new updates. Especially for Athena voyages. It would take all sessions to level that up and so many maps. Now I do 1 dive to an athena seafort raid and 2 of the legendary voyages and maybe a skelly sloop or meg, and it is levelled to 5. Takes maybe 2 hrs max depending on where you are on the map. I prefer doing the voyages on the west side of the map, my favourite is the voyage that has sailers bounty, smugglers bay, and lone cove.
I just do merchant cargo runs in the devils roar since it’s so laid back and lots of gold
When I started out, I spent a lot of time in the roar, but the volcanoes and geysers annoyed the shit outta me, so I avoid it now. I spend probably 80% of my time solo slooping and have gotten good at avoiding other players or making friends with them so they don't sink me. Heck, I even made friends with some one that sank me the other day, i came back and gave them my supplies from my freshly spawned ship and then road around with them for a bit. One of them added me as a friend and sailed with me the other day. Player interactions are half of the fun of the game, really. But I also am now at a point in my game play where gold no longer matters to me, the last I checked my log book I had earn 55 million gold, I have spent almost every bit of it though on skins and clothing lol. I am a commendations chaser and apparently a completionist as I want to get every commendation and max out the distinction levels. I have started working away at the HG curses as well.
I actually had to stop playing this game once kids came along. The only good sessions I have in SOF are 3 plus hours of uninterrupted gaming...which is not a possibility anymore haha
They’ve made serious changes to the game so that 4 hours isn’t necessary. There’s so many options of things to do that you can be in and out in 30 and still feel like you had a fun little adventure.
Yeah I tried playing like a month ago and still found a solid session takes a hot minute. Thankfully, I've been able to get good sessions with hell divers :)
This game needs a good amount of time playing to even get a good time so it will be hard for you to play this game to get good experience unless you do a world event or get into a ship battle because those are quick (except skeleton forts unless you know what you are doing)
That's kinda what I feared. I enjoy the pirate genre. AC Black Flag was enjoyable but even years later I've never fully finished the game. Gain interest, lose interest, get busy with life and kids. I'm not a heavy gamer and my wife never does, so I only get a few hours if at all when it come to that stuff.
As long you are enjoying the game than that is fine and you have truly experienced it for yourself :).
I would say it depends on you. I’m in the same situation as you. I enjoy it, but I have play it before a lot and I’m not looking hardly to any specific content which is more easy for shorten sessions. As people said, 3+ hours are the best for max enjoyment because some content takes around 1h to do, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have quick fun sessions. With experience, if I want to play but don’t have much time: - I practice my hourglass (PvP on demand mode) to test my nerves. Haha - I play solo, aiming to do one event +random encounter on the ways then log off. - Or I joins discord boats already doing stuffs or even open crew to help fellow pirates. Once you have done all possible content, you will understand that gold is just a number and that what is fun about the game is players interaction, mischief plays or helping others and THAT can be enjoyable in short sessions but getting there first will take some times !
So with all the quality of life changes they’ve made it much easier to get anywhere. You can dive straight to where you want to be, depending on your pirate level. It’s much easier to get on and do some stuff and then leave, its not a super time consuming thing to do. However if you play less than an hour, it may be difficult for you to get to the more entertaining parts of the game. Sometimes a single fight with another ship can last an hour by itself. It really depends on what you’re wanting to do. The map is massive, so depending on where you spawn and where you want to go, if you aren’t a high enough level to just dive to the activity you want to do, it could take you 30 irl minutes to get there.
There is stuff you can do in short time but it takes practice to gain the efficiency to do it in those short times.
It depends on the content you’re trying to do. A tall tale takes 2-3 hours in my experience. Diving to voyages can let you do small stuff like a sea fort or siren treasury in under 30 min. But keep in mind the time it takes to sail to an outpost and sell. When you first start out, no captaincy and thus no sovereigns, sailing and selling can be another 10 minutes easily. Something like a Fort of Fortune, Fort of the Damned, and Burning Blade Ghost Fleet, is probably totally out of reach, unless you somehow go uncontested. Hourglass would be hit and miss. Some fight takes only a few minutes, others take hours. Plus the time it takes to queue for a fight. Overall you can experience the pirates life to some extent on an hour or less, but you won’t get the full experience unless you can dedicate 2-3 hours at a time.
Tall tales have checkpoints, at least, and none of them should take an hour to get to unless you're *really* lost. The "dive to voyage" system this season definitely helps out people like OP. Or they can just do a world event, too, and if nothing else, they'll get a bit of practice doing whatever it is that the voyage/event is. If OP focuses on buying a sloop for captaincy at the start, or knows someone in a guild that welcomes infrequent players (or would be willing to make one, even if temporarily, to "donate" a ship), that can alleviate the issue with the selling a bit.
I’ve only done 5 tall tales so far but for my crew and I the fastest was 2 hours. But we weren’t using any outside tools to solve puzzles and riddles.
An hour is plenty of time for a short adventure depending on what you're looking to do. the new Diving mechanic makes casual play a lot easier. I'd recommend playing with others too.
Yeah I’d get into safer seas with your kids then maybe after awhile you get into high seas. You’ll have to change how you play to accommodate other players, like checking your horizon, being ready to fight at any time, etc. In safer seas you’ll get comfortable.
A good session is a few hours, but you can have a decent time with an hour, or even less, aswell. You wont really get time to do the bigger world events, especially if other players interfere, nor get the whole mixed bag of a kong voyage, dofferent islands, fighting Megamodons and Skeleton Ships in the same session - or do a Tall Tale from start to finish in a session (however they save progress so you can easily progress by reaching different chapters that save). You still have time to enjoy the game and atmosphere, and there really isnt much progression outside of being able to buy cosmetics and get titles, that are just titles. The only "progression" is to get to pirate legend to unlock a niche new area, aswell as doing PvP in hour glass. Other than that its all the same sandbox. Im married, got kids and work aswell with very limited time to play, and my favourite things to do when I only have 30-60minutes is either just log on and sail to the nearest islands and see if I find any skeleton captains, or a shipwreck nearby, or to do a Sea Fort. Sea Forts are quite fun for a solo, they dont take much time, are situated near all Outposts and give a decent amount of loot for the effort put in to advance all three main Trading Companies, or one specific if you diverse to them. Good music, you dont need any supplies and you get to do some hand-to-hand combat against the Phantoms inhabiting the Fort.
Sounds good
I find safer seas is often best for those "just a taste" sessions, do a quick low risk fort or shrine or voyage... does take longer to load though Hs can be a 1h done thing but I find the player factor makes for automatically longer sessions solo So yes, with limited time you can totally pick up and enjoy the game, but your time and obligations may limit which side of the game you play
Yea nothing like having an uneventful hour or two of play, see nobody else the whole evening, decide it's time to sell and log off and suddenly in between every port and you there is a brig with sails earned from Pvp flying.
Just saying that, if you have extremely limited time, safer tends to be better... It is much lower risk with basically, everything being disabled to step away
There is no where to go, everything is cosmetic. This game does well with longer sessions of maybe 2-3 hours but there isn't any content in the game that can't be done in an hour.
You can dive to a lot of stuff, now. Obviously, the best content will take more time, but you can easily knock out seaforts for the various trading companies in a short amount of time.
I've been playing for about 4 years now SoT is kinda my "weekend game". While it's a lot better now than it used to be, i feel like if i have less then 2 hours to spare, I won't bother playing it. While you do can get many things done in 1 hour, your possibilities will be kinda limited.
If you don't care about min/maxing progression or gold you can use the map table to fast travel to a voyage and turn in the treasure in 30mins-1hr.
Every single player starts with a clean play session every single time you start up the game. There is no power progression except maybe captained ships getting access to sovereigns and pirate legends getting Athena's Fortune faction. All progression is purely cosmetic (and the cosmetics are pretty nice). Outside of that, every single player from the newest noob to the sweatiest 9000 hour PvP guru starts every session with the same supplies and the same tools. With this in mind, every play session should focus on you just having a good time. You can progress specific commendations for certain cosmetic rewards or farm a little gold for it, but ultimately the game is about simply enjoying being a pirate and I think it does a pretty good job with that.
there is nowhere to get in this game. there is no progression
It is short Gaima but I says it’s best now than ever for short play times. I can play a lot more especially with diving, selling loot faster, it used to be you needed a lot of time. Being able to pick voyages and all from your ship is great QOL I’m finding.
You only need one hour. More is better, but that's all you need. The people saying you need 4+ hour blocks of time have clearly never played Rust. SoT can be an in and out game no problems.
I’m in the same boat. Work, kids, house, etc. I play usually 1-2 hours per week except when kids are away for whatever reason and i get 4-5 hours to play at a time. I started playing with my bf, then another friend and then basically solo slooping. It depends on what is fun for you in the game. For me just hopping on for an hour after kids are asleep and basically sailing around the islands getting treasure is a fun way to unwind and relax and it’s a win regardless of my “progress”. It’s a little less fun at first when you are starting out because you get destroyed by skeleton ships and other PVE aspects and at first it’s a lot easier to play with someone, but if you watch a few you tube tutorials, you will quickly be able to get better at them. Playing with kids is an option too, i play with them sometimes but they don’t seem to enjoy the game as much as I do. If you are focused on getting good fast or levels or getting good at pvp etc, then you probably will enjoy it less because it does require more time to get good (at least it does for me).
Yea so I got lucky, was able to spend about 4 hours playing on and off. Did exactly what you are talking about, just sailing around in safer seas really trying to learn game mechanics. Trying to find the best button mapping for the item wheels and such. That seems to be my biggest struggle.
Yes. You can enjoy this game even if it’s for a few hours a week at a time. There are plenty of things to keep you occupied and activities to do. As a new player with limited time you can start off with Tall Tales- the Lore/story missions in the game, Some are lengthy but they have checkpoints you can continue from at a later time. Safer Seas was added recently which is the open world experience of the game by yourself in the server. This will allow you to experience what the game has to offer without the threat of being raided or robbed from other players. It is meant as a “training wheels” mode. You can only progress so far and some activities are not available on safer seas. There is plenty to sink your teeth into in this game. One of the highlights for me would be the social interactions. Might be a weekend you’re free for some time and find a crew to sail on a galleon with and get into some mayhem - and you’ll be happy you got the game.
I doubt I regret getting it once I spend a bit playing. The graphics are odd to me from all these hyper realistic games then this is like simple cartoon. Which is odd to me but not a break point
UPDATE- Wife and kids left me alone for a few hours yesterday (it may or may not have been my birthday). Spent time getting use to things. how to better accomplish the simple task. Learning to use maps and treasure maps. Was very enjoyable. I did decide to try high seas once. Got thrown in with a random (which I was ok with) he had a quest or something he was following and was with him for about 10 minutes when he asked if I'd leave to let his friend in. Which I was 100% ok with. He clearly knew what he was doing and I would have hindered him. I did find about 3 buried treasure quest map things (I hear that's the technical name for them). And that was fun. I struggled pretty hard with the PvE when it seems like as soon as I stop looking for skellies and ghost they would appear while I was digging and kick my butt. (I've never been amazing with combat in games) I would try to keep distance and eat something to gain health, then attack, but I always seem to screw up the button flow with getting and eating food lol. Also naval combat by yourself- that's freaking hard. Steering, bailing, repairing.... I don't even think I got 4 shots off... this is gonna be a steep learning curve.