Season 11 Has Been Great
Season 11 of Sea of Thieves has been great. There, I said it. I’ve actually been meaning to do an overview of the season for a while, because, well, it’s actually pretty big.
Season 11’s biggest change is how you get voyages. It used to be that you had to go to an outpost and buy a voyage to do, or go to one of the Tall Tale folks on the same outposts to start a Tall Tale. Now, all of that can be done on your ship, and for zero gold cost. You can also unlock and sail to specific world events, switching servers to do so. So if you want to do a Legend of the Veil and then a Skeleton Fleet, you can do that without leaving your ship, even if there isn’t a Skeleton Fleet on your server. Sure, you can’t cause Megs, Krakens or Forts of Fortune to spawn, but most voyages and events are there. The best thing though is that all voyages are now free, meaning you can get the Skull of Destiny voyage to do the Fort of the Damned for free, rather than paying 300 Doubloons for a single skull.
Another thing that came with season 11 is more levels for emissaries. Now, instead of going to rank 75, the main emissaries (Gold Hoarders, Order of Souls, Merchants Alliance, Reaper’s Bones, Athena’s Fortune) all go up to level 100, and, at 101, your rank resets, you get a Distinction and you get a cool ring to show how awesome you are. You can obtain five distinctions (and thus 5 rings) for a technical max rank of 500. On top of that, there are new items and titles between ranks 75 and 100 and they are all great. The ship crests are awesome, I use the Reaper’s one a lot, but the plushies are adorable too. You can also more easily buy all the different faction cosmetics, although I find it a tad annoying that you have to go to the Reaper’s Hideout to buy their stuff.
On top of that, loot has been somewhat rebalanced. Sure, you do technically get less of it now, especially if you only dive to specific locations, but you get more money AND reputation for what you pick up. A lot of it is faction-specific loot which gives you even more reputation, but in all honesty, the Kings Chests and new Bounty Skulls are also great. Good money and cool-looking models.
The one thing I WILL complain about though is the diving. It just doesn’t fucking work for me. I’ve seen other ships use diving to voyages to escape combat, I’ve seen them dive literally right in front of me, but whenever I dive? Nothing works. Out of all the times I’ve actually dived, I found myself near the location I want to be a grand total of once, and not once have we been able to use it to switch servers, which we have 100% seen other people do. Nope, 90% of the time, when I dive, I either end up exactly where I left off, or I find myself at the nearest outpost. Because of the failures to dive to normal events, I haven’t even bothered attempting raids, knowing that they too just won’t work.
Also, I don’t know if it’s just me, but whenever I dive, sometimes the black loading screen doesn’t work, and I can see my faster-loading crew running around, often T-posing. It’s weird.
Aside from that though, it is nice having so much more to do, and being able to more easily do it. We got rid of a somewhat clunky and pain in the ass voyage system and made it all so much more accessible via the quest table. And the changes to emissaries mean that everyone has something to work on for a long time, rather than getting to 75 and not caring any more.
So yeah, good season. Way better than season 10. Season 10 contained pretty much nothing, so it would have been easy to make a better season, but season 11 definitely did a good job.