So the thing is that I'm in the front row seat for stuff like this. Exploration focused game where the primary goal is to sail around the world looking at cool stuff? I'm your guy.
And yeah, at heart if that's what you want this delivers. Explore the world, check out famous landmarks, occasionally fight a pirate, it's undeniably compelling! I'd be lying if I said I didn't have fun with it.
But Sagres still makes a lot of questionable choices. The ability to only have one active quest at a time is irritating and the need to go back and forth between Lisbon every time unnecessarily drags the early game. This is alleviated somewhat once you gain a mid-game upgrade that lets you accept and turn in expeditions from any city that has a guild, but is still a huge issue any time you're dealing with the Americas and Africa particularly.
The second act, where you're stuck in the Americas, is a horrendous grind. The trading mechanic is something you won't need to deal with most of the time because of how generous the rewards are for expeditions, here they force you to essentially find an optimal trade route and go back and forth on it for in-game years. Real bad time.
These problems melt away once you reach the late game. Your goals become open-ended and exploring becomes far easier. But you've got to put up with a lot to get there.
And then there's some of the cultural depiction choices. I want to stress the developer clearly aren't being malicious here, but a bit more thought could have gone a long way. Sagres sorts the world into broad language groups, and I get why it does this, but, for example, slotting Indigenous Australians into the "Incan" language group, which uses Plains Indians portraits stands for the Americas as a whole is not fantastic.
Furthermore, it's obvious that the developer doesn't think the European conquest of the Americas was a good thing, but in drawing attention to the actions of the Spanish specifically it bizarrely glosses over the actions of the Portugese at this point in history, even going so far as to paint a colonial administrator as a benevolent champion of human rights. If you want some nightmares, do some reading in how the Portugese managed Brazil sometime.
So yes, I had fun with Sagres but would not blame anyone for not putting up with its early game friction, nor being turned off but its unfortunately ham-fisted cultural choices.
And yeah, at heart if that's what you want this delivers. Explore the world, check out famous landmarks, occasionally fight a pirate, it's undeniably compelling! I'd be lying if I said I didn't have fun with it.
But Sagres still makes a lot of questionable choices. The ability to only have one active quest at a time is irritating and the need to go back and forth between Lisbon every time unnecessarily drags the early game. This is alleviated somewhat once you gain a mid-game upgrade that lets you accept and turn in expeditions from any city that has a guild, but is still a huge issue any time you're dealing with the Americas and Africa particularly.
The second act, where you're stuck in the Americas, is a horrendous grind. The trading mechanic is something you won't need to deal with most of the time because of how generous the rewards are for expeditions, here they force you to essentially find an optimal trade route and go back and forth on it for in-game years. Real bad time.
These problems melt away once you reach the late game. Your goals become open-ended and exploring becomes far easier. But you've got to put up with a lot to get there.
And then there's some of the cultural depiction choices. I want to stress the developer clearly aren't being malicious here, but a bit more thought could have gone a long way. Sagres sorts the world into broad language groups, and I get why it does this, but, for example, slotting Indigenous Australians into the "Incan" language group, which uses Plains Indians portraits stands for the Americas as a whole is not fantastic.
Furthermore, it's obvious that the developer doesn't think the European conquest of the Americas was a good thing, but in drawing attention to the actions of the Spanish specifically it bizarrely glosses over the actions of the Portugese at this point in history, even going so far as to paint a colonial administrator as a benevolent champion of human rights. If you want some nightmares, do some reading in how the Portugese managed Brazil sometime.
So yes, I had fun with Sagres but would not blame anyone for not putting up with its early game friction, nor being turned off but its unfortunately ham-fisted cultural choices.