Posted in: Games, NetEase Games, Video Games | Tagged: china, Hangzhou, Joker Studio, Sea of Remnants

Avast Ye Mateys! We Got To Preview Sea of Remnants in China

We were flown out all the way to Hangzhou, China to try out the most recent build of Sea of Remnants for an extended preview event

Sometimes this job can be really awesome, and you find yourself in experiences you never thought you'd ever have. We have been very fortunate to be invited to different places around the world to check out video games ahead of their release, but our latest adventure is one we could have never predicted. Recently, we were invited by NetEase Games to fly to Hangzhou, China, to visit one of its major development campuses and get an early look at Sea of Remnants. Yes, we flew 21 hours to check out the latest from developer Joker Studio, as we played nearly eight hours of the pirate adventure RPG, which we have our thoughts on for you here.

So let's start with the basics. This is a pirate adventure game where everyone is a living wooden mannequin. The lore of the game is that if you're in the water too long, you lose your memories and have to start from scratch, which your character has done. With nothing but a box of memories and a mysterious friend who hasn't woken up, you set off on a journey to find out who you actually are, getting into adventures along the way. The premise is pretty fun for this world, even though they don't acknowledge there is a grander world out there. Setting everything up in an age of piracy with a large map of islands to visit is exactly what all fans of pirate games and RPG titles could love.

The cast of characters they have designed for this game is insane, as there are over 400 NPCs you can interact with, all with their own unique design, backstory, interaction options, and more. The team went all-out to make the world of Sea of Remnants feel like a living, breathing, functional society that wasn't just filled with a bunch of reskinned copies of characters you already met. Some of them are so out of the norm of what you'd normally come across in a game, you'd suspect they were based on real-life people.

While there are defined characters you'll meet and become longtime friends with, you'll run into others who play a big part in the storyline, others that you'll see travel from island to island and help you out, a few that will cause constant grief, and random people who are absolutely here for the added flavor of the moment. It was the standout things we noticed that we're sure will make the game fun for those who love to go off and explore, seeing how many people they can come across, which will help them in all sorts of ways across the game.

Speaking of exploration, one of the major aspects of Sea of Remnants is that it is very much an open-world title. Granted, you can only go so far as the map will take you, but the designers made sure this title was filled with all sorts of options for you to check out, both on land and at sea. First, the port cities and major destinations are spread out, so walking through them feels like a challenge. Many of the buildings actually have something going on inside them, even if it's just one person hanging out at a desk, or a full bar of pirates just trying to get a tankard of mead before heading back out onto the sea. I cannot stress this enough that they went to painstakingly great lengths to make sure this society feels real. The game does a great job of letting you explore and check things out as side quests for as long as you want before going back to the main story.

"We allow players to wander off from the main quest line and just do whatever they like, even for a very long time. But for the beginner parts, they might need some help to understand and accept this world as it is," said Sea of Remnants' producer Innis. "In the beginning period, players still have some chance to branch out and enjoy the open world, but only when they actually get to the stage where the first Voyage starts, they get to have the complete design of all those open world elements. But even before that, there are still some hidden traces that lead them to the completed design of the open-world part of the game to enjoy."

Hitting the sea is an entirely different experience as you'll go from manning small skipper ships to your own galleon, exploring the many island locations through both normal travel and fast-paced travel, which you'll unlock early on depending on where you're headed. Guiding yourself in the water is very intuitive; they made sure sailing and navigation weren't overly complicated. The real challenge comes when you're working in combat, as you'll need to utilize your best pre-aiming skills when working a cannon to fight off other pirates, or worse, big creatures who happen to be lurking in the sea. There's a bit of a learning curve with this, and we found using a controller to be much easier than trying to do both with a keyboard and mouse. Ultimately, it is a skill you'll need to master.

When it comes to the storyline for Sea of Remnants, you are giving part adventure and part mystery to solve. As we mentioned before, you wake up and create a new identity for yourself while trying to find out your old one. You also come across a woman pirate who looks like a mysterious woman you were found with, who doesn't wake up. Together, and with the eventual help of crewmates you pick up along the way, you'll put the pieces together to determine who you are and what you were doing before fate literally washed your memories away. You'll do this over time by completing several objectives and side quests that all build to something bigger. Like many long-narrative RPGs, there are moments where you can tell you were sent on a fetch quest or have a meaningless task ahead of you to stretch out the story. We're going to be forgiving about this in the preview, because none of them were long-time-wasters. But you come across many of them as time goes on.

Some of them can be enriching, such as helping out a character take care of something that ultimately betters them, or sets them on a better path that you might run into later in the game. Others are here to cause problems you need to solve to move past them. The one that stuck out to us was having to go repair an elevator in a cave, which required finding wood on the island. Not a big chore, mind you. But the game's art design had a ton of wood sitting right next to the elevator that could have been used. But no, we have to go look for new planks somewhere down at the bottom of the island, then walk back up to do the repair. We're not saying that's all the game is, but we are saying get ready for a lot of that.

But it's not all fetching; some of it is puzzle-solving, which is the area we really enjoyed when it came to quests. The Sea of Remnants devs made sure to include a lot of puzzle challenges in this pirate adventure, which we really appreciate. Some of them are super basic, while others require a bit of thought and planning to get right. But when you solve them, it is such a satisfying moment. The team also included a number of hidden treasures, which you can find as puzzles themselves. Some of them are nothing more than a whisp on the wind that you need to follow. Others are the kind where you look at a room, and you realize something is just a bit off. Again, once you figure them out, it becomes a very satisfying moment.

A couple of the areas we didn't have so much fun with in Sea of Remnants were battles and the RPG elements for characters. First, when it comes to combat, a lot of it is pretty easy to grasp if you've ever played any RPG with turn-based combat. The one little hitch is that it seems everyone is on their own kind of timer, which means sometimes your characters get in an extra hit or two before the enemies do. But that can also come back to bite you if the enemy has a faster timer. You can choose to do it manually or have the game auto-battle. We went with manual after seeing that the game would automatically make our healer waste healing moves at the start when nothing happened, so we highly recommend staying away from it unless you make a team of pirates that are fast and damage-heavy.

We didn't run into any battles we couldn't handle, just using a bit of ingenuity to make sure we targeted the right characters at the right time, and plotting moves to best help other characters out. That said, there was a few times where we would choose an attack, and it would amount to very little, either because the enemy had a counter pre-planned or the attack just didn't do what we needed it to. Also, we want to make a quick point that enemies come in all shapes and sizes. We encountered many monsters and forbidding creatures, but some of them grew so massive they put Godzilla to shame. This game basically has its own monster ecosystem that goes from small shrimps to the creepiest megamonsters you've ever seen.

The area we ran into the most problems with is the leveling, job, and abilities system. It would take us way too long to get into every minute detail, but the shorthand is that Sea of Remnants has everything. And by everything, we mean EVERYTHING. A leveling system based on XP gathered, a job system where you can expand what kind of pirate you are, an abilities system where you pick and choose what best to fight with in your arsenal, a body/mind modification system to help your character improve (because you're technically a wooden mannequin), where you can improve your own parts. It is awesome but overwhelming, as you're never really sure if you're improving the right thing at the right time for yourself or other characters in the party.

We also ran into a wall where we had leveled up all we could in a certain area, and we needed to expand to the next tier. But the game wasn't really forthcoming about how we'd be able to do that, which meant for a small period of time, a lot of the XP we were earning went to nothing, and there was no way to tell if we were just banking XP until we found a way to unlock it, or if we were just getting into fights with no benefit from them.

A couple of the smaller aspects of Sea of Remnants we wanted to touch on include the mini-games, which there are several of. Majong is a big part of the game, so if you don't know how to play it, it's best to brush up on the rules, as it becomes a small focal point in the side missions. We also came across a rhythm game featuring squawking birds, where we nailed an almost-perfect score. The game will have several of these that you just happen to run across, and if you do well, you will be rewarded in various ways.

We were also keen to notice that, while it's not set in our world, a lot of what's here does take references from the Golden Age of Piracy, mixed in with a bit of flair and creativity, with the mannequins that really bring out the unique nature of the game. The art style for this is one of the bigger hallmarks the developers can hang their tricorn on, from character creation to the towns to the creatures to the sea itself. A lot of love went into this, which feels like an original experience rather than making something look original only to come off generic in design. There's really nothing negative we have to say about the look.

"The terrain or the geographic location conditions of every island vary a lot, so we have different class classifications of plants, rocks, tarrings, and drums. Basically, geographic features of each island, for example, you have white sand or rainforest, and in these areas, the plants and the terrain will be very different," said Sea of Remnants' lead artist Karios. There are also very strong cultural elements that are at play here. For example, local people will change the shape of how the island looks. There is an idea, like the Taíno people, who are more like the original residents of Cuba, so they will use these woven straw instruments. As decorations, or like utilities, in their daily life. And there's also an island occupied by different clans or factions. For example, you can have a Navy-occupied island, or you can have multiple pirates. Pirate group islands, but they are like living there; they're singing and dancing around the campfire, so the vibe will be very different."

Overall, we had a lot of fun with Sea of Remnants, but we also recognize we only got about six hours with what is probably a massive title. From what we gathered, this looks ot be a pretty cool adventure game that anyone who loves pirates will enjoy, and anyone who loves RPGs will be able to dive into for hours on end. We don't have an exact release date as of the time this was published, but we know the team is aiming to launch the game sometime in the first half of 2026.

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