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Rare Drops Plans To Charge Gold For Player Death In Sea Of Thieves
A pirate's life is hard, but a pirate's resurrection was about to be a lot harder until Rare halted plans to charge gold for respawning.
Planned as part of their very first update, Rare positioned the death cost as such:
Coming soon: Death Cost – A trip to Davey Jones' Locker is going to start costing you gold. The way that you meet your demise will affect how much gold you will have to pay (so dying from a Kraken will most likely cost less than if you were starring at a map and walked off a cliff). Rare does not intend for this gold fee to be applied to any PVP related deaths.
Fans were not happy about this change. Arguments ranged from it being an arbitrary change after players were used to the way the game played, to this not being conducive to exploration, to it exasperating a grinding process that already felt too long and tedious. It seems Rare has listened to the complaints and cancelled plans for a death cost.
Joe Neate, the executive producer on Sea of Thieves, confirmed on Twitter today.
"Letting everyone know we've heard the feedback and the proposed 'Death Cost' in #SeaOfThieves is, well, dead. We messed up with the messaging around this, and it's now gone. Thanks for the honest feedback & discussion on this."
So that's that, pirates can explore away without fear of a poor meeting with a shark costing them their next cosmetic retail therapy. You can read our review of Sea of Thieves right here.
Our Take
While I understood the desire to provide a risk-reward system for the game, that should have been in since before the betas and not just hoisted on players later. It was also pretty bad messaging to release a fairly thin game and outline this as one of the very first updates they were focusing on. That said, it's good they're dropping the idea.
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