I'm saying this based on the experience of ~30 hours from the beta rounds: The underlying sailing and multiplayer combat simulation, three factions giving three different styles of mission, the message-in-a-bottle quests with physical puzzle hunts, undersea wrecks for harvesting, and dozens of islands and reef shallows to explore seems like plenty of content for a game built around social overlap like this. The end-game pirate legend content seems like it may be a separate phase of the game, as well. Even in earlier stages of the beta, I had a ton of fun with it, and that was probably 70% random players. I normally don't feel all that engaged by multiplayer games. I play Elite Dangerous in the solo-sandboxed mode. And Elite Dangerous may be a great comparison for a lot of reasons, though there's something cool about the interaction space here, and it's hard to describe. A game where you can have two groups of people riding enourmous ocean-guns just wave to each other as they pass going opposite directions to bring chickens to shore is the kind of oddball I like.
Few other games have as clear a picture of what to expect from the volume of streaming (and multiple betas), or as low a bar for entry because of Game Pass. You can literally play the game for 15 days for free, or play the game for less than $10, or just buy it normally at the store. That makes me cast more scrutiny than usual on people lamenting the enigma of what's in the game, or being insulted that it's being sold at all. Which isn't to say some people just won't enjoy what's there, but I honestly question how someone engaged enough to play the game at launch is confused at what's on offer, or feels taken advantage of by the pricing.
