This game is conceptually flawed, and I can prove it mathematically
I used to like this game. I played it during its beta test and was eager to pick it up day one to see what additions they had snuck in. But there weren’t any. The game was the beta. That was a huge disappointment to me as someone under the impression that what I was playing was a beta, as in unfinished. I played it maybe 2 hours total and then quit. A week ago I picked it up again to see what had changed. They certainly added a lot (a lot that the beta testers asked for months before launch) but nothing had changed.
The quest: still grindy
The combat: still clunky
The progression: still nothing
But at least you can redo your tattoos, so no need for a proper character creator.
I convinced a friend, let’s call him Kyle, to join me in my revisit to the game this past week. Kyle and I probably had, in total, 10 minutes worth of fun in our 3 play session. That was all during our last play session when we tried to take a skeleton fort, and got all the gold skeletons into a puddle, and blew them up. The 2 session before that were just doing some treasure hunting. We didn’t necessarily have a bad time, but it wasn’t fun. Not to mention all the fun we had had in the fort was spoiled when another ship engaged us while we were trying to clear it. The ship combat wasn’t what did it though, it was the 3rd time we had to sink the same ship because they just respawned 2 islands away, and came back fully equipped to fight us again.
This is the first, and probably biggest flaw in the games design. Pirates don’t pirate other pirates. This game rewards you for being a [censored]. What’s the easiest way to get gold and gain rep? Let someone else do the work, then just take it. You get everything, and they get literally nothing other than a bad experience. This is the only game I’ve ever played where the best way to “progress”, if you can call it that, is to make sure someone else can’t. Games should be fun to lose. I can lose a game of monopoly and still have fun playing. I can lose a round of [insert fighting game here] and still enjoy the fight. This game is barely any fun to win.
Progression: noun
the process of developing or moving gradually towards a more advanced state.
How much more advanced are you at 40 hours of play time, than you are at 4? You certainly look snazzy with your gold eye-patch and pearl cannons. Has anything changed though, or are you still doing the exact same things. Doesn’t matter if it’s the quest, or pirating. It’s just a bigger number, nothing else. All doing anything does, is make big number get bigger. I know that is a drastic oversimplification of any game’s progression, but this game has drastically simple progression.
At least the other players can know how cool you are when you raid them for their 3 castaway chest and a foul skull. One selling point for this game was you could RPG as a merchant. Make a name for yourself as a skeleton bounty hunter. But no. Merchant quest are by far the worst ones. The best way to level up is to just find stuff and turn it in. No reason to lock yourself into a time restricted mission when you can just passively gain rep doing other things. Not that those things are much better. Skeletons are at best boring, and at worst frustrating. The combat is heavy, sticky, and really just unsatisfying in every way. Kyle and I were trying to think of another FPS sword play game to compare this too, and we couldn’t think of any. I’m not saying there aren’t any. WatcMojo has informed me there are, in fact, at least 10 games with “Amazing First Person Melee Combat” but the fact I had to look it up, and we couldn’t think of any, made us think that maybe, just maybe, there’s a reason the “S” in FPS stands for shooter, and not swords.
Maybe it should stand for sailing though. I may have just spent the last 6 paragraphs bashing every aspect of the game so far, but credit where it’s due, the ship play is phenomenal.
Water: beautiful
Anchor turning: tactile
Sails: weighty, but tight, and satisfying
Ship flooding… fluid, lol
There’s almost a zen aspect to just sailing, even in storms. The cannons are, while maybe not the most intuitive, still easy to use, and have a nice chunky feel when you land a direct hit. The new special ammo (most of them anyway) gives ship combat more strategy to them now rather than just “shoot the other guys”. There are so many good mechanics and systems in this game. It’s just a shame they’re in a bad game.
If you can call it a game. What I described above may certainly sound like a game, but it’s not. It’s a tech demo. It’s things that you put into a game. I can’t tell you what makes a game, a game. I’ve heard people say all it needs is challenge, some say just a goal to work towards. I don’t know, but I know a game when I see one. Sea of Thieves is not a game. It’s a sandbox. There is nothing to do, just stuff you can do. It’s not hard to find gold, so no difficulty. All gold let’s you do is search for more gold, so nothing to work towards. If you can “make your own fun” with games like this, good for you. I’m not here to tell you that you don’t like this game if you do. You just do you. For me, I paid Rare so I don’t have to make my own fun. I kinda thought they made the fun for me.
$60 is how much I’ve invested in this game. $60 and probably 20 hours total. Pirate level 20, and only 10 minutes of memorable fun in the game. Here’s where the math I promised earlier comes in. $60 for 20h, that’s $3/ph. 10 minutes of fun in 20 hours, that’s 19:50 wasted time. 19:50 at $3/ph comes out to $59.50 wasted. $0.50 worth of content is what I feel I’ve been given. $0.50 for 10 minutes is a gumball (a large gumball, but still a gumball). I refuse to believe anyone genuinely thinks they got a game worth the asking price. I am the only of my circle that has purchased the game., everyone else has only ever played it through the $1 Xbox Pass trial. They’ve spent double what the game is worth on it.
I used to like this game, I still really want to. The game just makes it so difficult to enjoy. There’s no easy quick fix solution to make this game better. In fact, I think this game CAN’T get better. Its biggest flaws aren’t mechanical or anything that can just be patched or added. This game is just poorly designed as a pirate RPG. Combat would need a total overhaul, even the ship combat I praised is very restrictive in terms of what you can actually do. The core idea of pirating other players isn’t fun 75% of the time (never fun when you’re the one being pirated, and only 50% fun when you’re the pirate). For those of you who just want to tell me to switch servers if I’m being harassed, because that's what it is, harassment, let me just say this: If the solution to making a game more fun, is to stop playing, it’s a bad game.
I’ll close with this. Kyle, the same Kyle from earlier, said that this was the 1st game to make him angry in a looong time. Not rage. I’ve raged quit plenty games in the past, and I plan on rage quitting many more. But I always come back, because the rage motivates me. Anger just festers, and leads to typing a 1,402 word document explaining why a game is bad and I’m actually really smart on the internet.
Thanks for reading, I would apologize for the length, but it was in the title, so it's really your own fault, and I'm sure most of you picked up on this, but just in case; No, I don't think I'm smarterer than you're. Despite that satire though, I was serious about what I said here.
