So I got this game off of the game pass. I didn’t play any of the betas, but I watched a couple streams. I didn’t want to get any expectations for it so I wouldn’t be terribly disappointed. It’s actually really fun so far. My friend and I pulled an all nighter sailing around searching for buried treasure and dodging other players and it was a very rewarding experience. We got ambushed by a galleon full of douchebags camping an outpost. We managed to kill half of them and escape with most of our loot (RIP that one captain’s chest and a pig). Then sailed around some more and ran into another galleon that was pillaging the same island we were supposed to target. My friend hopped off the ship to grab the chest while I managed to sail circles around them until he got back. We then almost managed to sink them (after they fired the first shots, of course 😉) but chose to simply circle around and leave with our bountiful booty. It was an amazing feeling every time something like that happened and we would sail away with a hold full of chests. There are definitely some negatives that I can see already though, like swimming in a wrecked ship is kind of clunky and frustrating, galleons of douchebags are able to just camp near outposts and steal all your loot 5 ft from the drop point (but hey, it’s a pirate game. That’s expected), the rewards per chest are pretty low, and the character customization is a little iffy. Other than that though, the graphics are fantastic and the ship controls are nearly perfect. Those are the two main things I was worried about, but they turned out really well. Anyone that’s on the fence about it should really consider buying it. Or at the very least, shell out $10 (or $1 if you haven’t used your discounted month) for a month of play. I’m sure that’s more than enough time to accurately gauge your interest. Edit: P.S. As others have said below, it is majorly focused toward multiplayer experiences. Though it can be played solo, it’s much easier/exciting to play with friends. By myself I’ve been able to pilot the sloop easily, and the galleon with a little practice, but if you’re piloting the ship solo, there’s not much time to do anything else. Edit 2: Last night my friend and I were finishing up selling our loot at an outpost when we saw a notification that the server would shut down soon. We thought “Hey, we should go find a shipwreck or something real quick before the server shuts down.” While searching for a shipwreck, we spotted another player’s sloop close by. We decided to forget the shipwreck and sink them. So we engage, start chasing them around, they start sniping at us, and eventually we just end up ramming them(big mistake, as that apparently does more damage to the rammer than the target). We blast a good 5 holes in their ship and then hop on board. My friend only finds one mid/low level chest, and we see that there was only one guy on the ship. I go back to our boat to find that we’ve almost completely sunk, so I end up getting dragged under while my friend stays on the other guy’s ship. I manage to track them down with our new ship and chase them to a nearby island, where it appears that this guy is trying to complete a skull bounty. We kill the guy, fight the skeletons, and collect his reward. Then we book it back to the outpost with about 5 minutes till shutdown. We make it back at 2 minutes, and instead of parking I just ram the ship prow-first into the dock and my friend leaps off and turns the skull in with about 30 seconds to spare. The reward? The lowest level skull in the game 🤣. We had just harassed some poor noob on what was probably one of his first quests and practically killed ourselves to get the reward in on time, all for a basic skull, and it was probably more fun than anything else we’ve done so far. If that doesn’t sum up this game, idk what does. Final edit: So after a week of playing, I’ve come to the following conclusions: 1) It’s a lot more fun with friends. 2) It gets really repetitive, but only if you let it. 3) It will die very quickly if they don’t live up to the promise of constant updates. I think that Rare has already shown better judgement/integrity by not promising anything specific. That way if they aren’t able to deliver on any of their ideas, it’s not a NMS situation where they falsely advertised many features that were never in the game.