Sea of thieves is a highly impressive product.
It takes some heat and some of it is rooted in substantive and fair criticism but it is so impressive what this game has achieved overall and this far into the game's life.
A few things,
Dedication to improving the adventure experience,
as someone that has played this game a wild amount of time in a strictly organic adventure play style it is incredible how much they improved it in recent seasons. Substantive changes that increased the quality of the organic experience, years into development, impressive.
Balancing ethical business with sustainability in a difficult space to survive in,
The emporium got pretty spendy but the integrity of the design never really worsened. It's still a live service game that handles transactions far more ethically than many in the space, while still offering free content updates, maintenance, etc
Sustainability post covid shutdowns/etc
It is very tough business after people get back out into the world after spending so much time stuck at home escaping through gaming, twitch viewing, etc. Maintaining interest in a product that has some years on it, in a difficult space, after a situation like the pandemic is impressive, says a lot about the quality of the adventure experience.
My personal opinion on the experience is that they started to hit their stride in season 8 and by season 9 they showed that they were in touch with the organic experience and are dedicated to adding the QoL that was necessary. They long had cool content, they just needed to add the qol that they ended up adding for people that weren't/aren't at the top.
It's not perfect but it's vastly improved. The cheesing that keeps getting worse and worse is more and more disheartening but cheesefests are less harmful than low QoL for people without much power.
Ps5 players won't have the context/history to see how much the experience has improved in the adventure game but it happened. It's impressive and if they find even a quarter of the rewarding experiences that I have been fortunate enough to find here, they are gonna be more than alright.
