if you haven't done the quest chain and fought the new AI threat I highly suggest doing so, and going in blind to find it out for yourself. You can only go in blind once.
You have been warned, here's my story. It was my first attempt to find out what was going on, I talked to the new tavern NPC and he gives you a spot to go to. (I'm being as vague as i can so you can experience this)
So its me, our faithful captain, and one other crew on our galleon, the swollen sasage. We head out and find good ole' merrick and he gives us a bit of a riddle and a story. also sets us off trying to piece together what happened to him as he is reluctant to send us to our deaths.
With his warnings in our ears we retrace his steps and hit some taverns to talk to the barkeep, as our friend merrick seems to have left information with them. We decipher some more riddles that they tell us and are able to pinpoint the locations we need to go for more clues.
I'm really glad they used those uncharted islands for this as we hit 2 of them for some of the clues (totally dope and atmospheric.) So then we have to return to merrick and make him spill the beans and tell us what we need to know.
He gives us another riddle (and a drum). Forgot to mention he had given us the speaking trumpet already. Then he told us how to summon the beast that put paid to his crew...and his legs. We have to play a shanty! in a specific spot, easy peasy.
Not so. It has to be HIS shanty he's playing so you have to play his song and sail all the way to where the riddle says near the edge of the map. Oh and by the way, you need 5 people to play the song at once.
Since we were only 3 on our galleon we had to wait for another ship to show up. we waited for probably 30 min before deciding to head back to merrick to wait over there, when we see a ship at plunder out post.
We hail them with our shiny new speaking trumpets and strike an accord to hunt the beast together. They still have to solve all the riddles so we wait around merrick for them to come back.
Finally we have enough people to do this so we head out, me playing the drum with merricks shanty until we reach our destination. A few false starts from the other crew but then we all get on the same song.
Immediately the music changes and A HUGE SHAPE leaps halfway out of the water between our 2 galleons and slams back down. It is on. It was fast, with glowing eyes and a massive gullet that looked like it could swallow a sloop whole.
It's steel gray body cutting the water like a knife as it circled our 2 ships. THEN it rushed our galleon as we are firing upon it with cannons. It slammed its mouth into us off our port bow knocking our captain into the ocean and knocking our ship around like a rubber duck in a bathtub.
I rushed below and we were taking on water fast. I madly repair the holes and bailed water while the first mate keeps firing. Our Captain screamed like a little girl and swam as fast as he could to get back aboard. honestly the music was so good, we were REALLY into it.
The rest of the fight was the hungering one circling us and charging either of the 2 crews and diving down low and scaring the c**p out of us. It felt like it was toying with us and pushing us around. I was legitimately excited/scared it was SO fun. Dare I say it, I thought the difficulty level was close to perfect, not easy by any stretch but not too hard
You have to be pretty good with cannons at a medium range to hit it and we went through 80 cannonballs, 70 planks and 45ish bananas. Not sure how much the other crew used but it was so frantic and awesome and thank you rare for this.
It has a pretty cool death animation and the corpse stays around a while. There's also rewards you can get that I also won't spoil. Would highly recommend to everyone
