Sea Of Thieves jettisons half its cargo - a reason to return?
From 47GB to 27GB
Remember Sea of Thieves, Rare's piratical, sandbox sorta-MMO? I do, what with reviewing it and all, but only as if a dream. Emotive, fragmentary scenes of waves and sunset and accordions. A blissful boredom. Actual detail of the things I did, found or fought? Not a bit of it. Maybe there were some skeletons once?
I think often of going back, part in curiosity about whether its many updates have added meaningful #content, and mostly because standing on the prow of a lonely boat, staring at the quiet horizon, is deeply appealing in These Times. I usually make it about half way through the long 50GB download before the impulse fades, or life gets in the way. Now that it's suddenly been slimmed down to 'just' 27GB, I reckon it could well be a sailor's life for me once more.
Obviously, game file sizes increasingly incline towards the massive these days anyway, but SOT's 47GB manspreading across our hard drives felt particularly unreasonable given that there, well, weren't many different things in it.
The new 27GB PC client seems altogether more apt to me - both in terms of waiting times for a reinstall and not having to uninstall three other games to do so.
The bad news, if you are a particularly salty seadog, is that whole shebang needs to be redownloaded even if you have the 47GB big boy already installed. Apparently it's a spot of rough seas now for smoother sailing later (man, so many mixed pirate metaphors in this article), in that the new filestructure means future updates can be significantly smaller.
The new client goes live on February 6, so prepare your hold in readiness. My guess? They only just realised they could run Winzip with the variable 'ocean*.bmp'.
Further details here, or, if you're into listening to dudes talk about filesizes for a full three minutes, here's one of the SOT devs explaining the ins and outs of the new client, along with news on how they're tightening the thumbscrews on cheaters and tweaking combat and the Arena a smidge.
