The Most Boring Video Game I've Ever Played - Sea of Thieves
This guy really gets it in my opinion. The video itself is more intellectual than the title lets on. I don't necessarily agree with all the random spitballing of content ideas towards the end, but it was just that: spitballing. Some of them were actually good.
This video expresses perfectly how I view SoT in its current state. The video covers two major points: Creating your own fun and progression.
Creating your own fun is very much a cop-out excuse. Like Actman said, creating your own fun is something you do when you're bored. A lot of people in this community like to insinuate that you just don't have a good imagination if you find fault in SoT's gameplay. I'd like to counter that with a short personal story:
When my friends and I were around 10 years old, we played with action figures quite heavily. We would play with them in a "normal," story-driven way, but when we got bored of that, we used our imagination. One game that I came up with was called "army spies surprise." We would have one kid sit in a bedroom and play pokemon or something while the other kid hid humanoid action figures around the living room. They would be arranged in such a way to where they were mostly hidden, but their lines of sight would peer across the room. The hider would keep a mental note of their minions' sightlines, and think of them as tripwires. Finally, the other kid would come out and need to move across this room, trying to carefully plan their next step while staring at potted plants, the fireplace, bookshelves, and any other notable hiding spots so as not to be spied upon.
Let me just say that I have an amazing imagination, and that has extended into a lot of things I have done in SoT. Creating your own fun is not a valid gameplay metric. It is a cherry on top of the core game, it should never be marketed in and of itself.
Moving towards progression, Actman really opened my eyes with the Starcraft analogy. Starcraft's campaign really would have been terrible if you only had 3 basic units throughout, and it's a perfect analogy to SoT's quest structure.
Many in this community are terrified of the term "progression" because they immediately equate it to MMORPG stats and such. I'm not sure where this absolutist narrative is coming from, but it needs to stop. In Actman's video, he showcases a handful of progression systems that almost don't even feel like progression systems. The Stars in Mario (or jiggies in BK) are actually harder to get the further through the game you are. Climbing Mumbo's Skull for a jiggy vs. swimming into the Rusty Bucket's fanblades for one is an element of progression. There was also a good point about stretching the content you have by making you do the same thing but faster. That's also an element of progression. SoT is an open world game, so like Actman said, why isn't there a portion of the game world that you actually have to prepare to get into? Why is the spooky Wilds just as neutral as anywhere else?
SoT has nothing of the sort. The only thing we got was the poorly designed Order of Souls missions where a basic skeleton takes 8+ bullets to kill instead of 2. That's artificial difficulty and it's one of the only forms of progression that gamers tend to hate. And by "hate" I mean pretty much no one finds it to be redeeming. I don't like MMORPG stat-like progression that much, but I can see why its audience likes it. Artificial difficulty has no fans in that same sense.
Overall, this was a very enlightening review that expressed many of my thoughts perfectly. I know there's still plenty of players that love SoT, but I would really like it if people dropped the extremist tribes that they are assigning themselves to. You can say all this negative stuff about the game like I do and still like it for what it is now.
