I suppose since I wrote the post, I'll reply to a few things.
I'm glad a new-ish player chimed in and is finding joy in the game the way I used to. Yes, past tense. I wish I still had that sense of awe the way I once did. It doesn't change the various warning signs I see from Rare as a company, but it does show that the game can pull in a new audience and have some retention.
I did write once that I was considering walking away. And in full disclosure, I'm still very close to, yet still on this side of that fine line. I no longer experience the joy I once did for the game. But it is still "fun" when it works. The infinite black screen was happening every session and was even oving the game from "fun" to just "unfun" and almost had me walking away. And the state of the game still can be more frustrating than fun some days. I want that feeling of "joy" again. And the content itself could deliver it. On paper, the burning blade is fantastic. In practice, it is still imbalanced anda buggy mess.
One person posted that they get said when people scream that the game is dying. I want to re-iterate my first post that I am not making such a claim. I've been in these forums long enough to see it with every update, and the game is still here. But I am reading some tea leaves, and as RealStyli mentioned, it does feel like a bigger change is in the air (or changing of the guard as he put it) and that is concerning. Am I saying the game is dying? no. But am I worried that it might be? Absolutely. And this is the first time I've even wondered that in the six years of ups and downs and politics drama that was here, in reddit, on X, etc. Confirmation bias? Maybe. But that's why I presented the evidence as I saw it. The merchandise was a big one for me, and that coin was a reminder of what we briefly had and lost (pirate perks was so short lived compared to the rest of the merch store.)
I don't want to make this post about me. I posted about the health of the game because I thought it was a conversation worth having. Either in the community, or put voice to thought and see Rare address some of the concerns if I wasn't alone on an island with my thoughts. At this stage though, I think understanding who I am and where I'm coming from may help some people decide how full of it I am, or am not, as the case may be.
I'm a successful small business owner with employees and a growing customer base. I'm not young. Gen X. I was in high school when the original LucasArts puzzle games like Monkey Island got popular. And was born and am still legally blind. Not "blind" per- se, but the legal classification in the US is, as I recall, 20/80 corrected. And I'm at 20 / 200. This basically removed 99% of traditional sports from my childhood. I didn't play baseball, football, basketball, or similar "communities" from my circle of participation. As an adult, friends go to the local park for a game of pick-up (basketball) and that's out for me. Although I guess pickleball is the new rage, but that's a tangent and rabbit hole we might as well not fall down.
That also had a ripple effect. Video games were something I could do and my vision wasn't a significant barrier. ColecoVision, then Atari 2600, then my first NES. You get the idea. Gaming was a part of my identity more than most of my generation. Then in the 90s, Microsoft finally added networking to Windows, and LAN parties became a thing. Suddenly video games were a social outlet as well, and I had a real "community" I could be a part of. College was LAN parties, custom rigs, playing WarCraft, Doom, and Quake with CUSeeMe for connectivity (before TCP/IP become the dominant network stack.) My vision meant I was never going to excel at FPSs, but my hand eye coordination was good enough that I was middle of the pack in many games. And in games that embraced "roles" would often excel at certain roles (sniper, artillary, etc) and would be dominant on some squads. It was literally a life altering set of experiences for someone like me. My brain was (and is) programmed not just to embrace a game, but an experience and be a part of a community built around a game. A thousand small steps led me to be this way.
Fast forward. COD had passionate players, but never a community. Players moved from one iteration to the next on their yearly cadence and fractures any sense of continuity with people one could enjoy playing with. Years went by between games worth building a community around. Orange Box brought TF2 to consoles (my preferred way to play because a large TV is easier on my eyes than even the best gaming monitors), and years later, Titanfall managed to gather a big community. And I played it for years. But it wasn't a live service game, and after the DLC and the black market, like most games, participation eventually dropped. And as the community slowly disbanded, that lack of community meant my interest also waned. Respawn didn't do anything wrong here. It wasn't live service, as I mentioned, so it went through the natural lifecycle that most non-service FPSs go through. But it also meant that there was a void for me in my gaming life.
Which brings us to Sea of Thieves. The game was scratched an immediate itch for me. Adventure in a sea (pun intended) of cookie cutter FPSs. The pioneer program (of which I was never a part) hinted at deep plans for the game. And the community, like any dysfunctional family, couldn't agree on much, but was VIBRANT and FUN. The extremely regular dev update videos of that first year showed a team that was commutted to the game and listening to the community. Bugs happened. Often. But were also fixed. Often. It felt like the feedback loop was solid and the audience for the game was respected. I had as much fun out of the game as I did in the game. When pioneers got turned into insiders, I was immediately all for participating as deeply as real life would allow.
Then the warning signs started. And they started small. The dev updates got cancelled. We still have "SOT News" but for thsoe who were used to a weekly stream, this pales in comparison. Heck, even the podcast is gone now, or has been in hiatus for....over a year? But I digress. Engaging with the audience got deprioritized. Then came one person. Summit1G. Whether you like his content or not, he brought a new audience and that should not be taken lightly. I reall when he posted the photo of the physical Chest of Fortune that Rare sent him as a token of appreciation for his contribution to the community. Then a volcano ruined one of his tucc plays, he got mad, and left while taking his audience with him. But the damage was done. Rare was now addicted to the drug that is streamer influence. And actively started catering to them. In some cases, I think this is valid. The streamers can be a represntative voice of the community. But in other cases, they are only their own voice. But Rare seems unable or unwilling to make that distinctoin when deciding on features. As a longtime insider, I won't give away NDA, but I will say that insider voices have become Q&A, at best, and rarely have influence on what features make it into the game and what gets cancelled.
After the shift to streamers, came the shift to marketing. I have nothing against the emporium. As I said before, I would buy the max ancient coin pacakge every month. Then every season. Now....almost never. And then find ways to spend the ancient coins. I did this to support the game. ....I'm also the guy that would buy the item of the month in Kingdom of Loathing, no matter how bad the item was, because that was a live service game worth supporting. But the mandatory emporium ads when launching the game, the extreme focus at the expense of other cosmetics. The balance was further off, ignoring the community in favor of short term revenue. Maybe this is a necessary evil. Short term revenue is better than no revenue, and if the game is in a death spiral then you take what you need to keep the project afloat. But the perception at the time was, along with the other signs, that the company wasn't doing it out of necessity, but instead out of tone-deafness.
Then came mysteries A feature that was billed as a new way of storytelling. But both mysteries to date were absolutely marketing with very little story value. Sure, the first mystery at least did some lore building. But the actual method of lore building was 100% social media driven. Now is where I will say that not everyone will like very part of an adventure game. Hourglass will work for some, not for others. Tall tales work for some, not for others. And I suppose acting to solve a mystery through social media appealed to a sliver of the community. But the overwhelming feedback I saw was negaitve, and the arbitrary gatekeeping of information in social media was clearly engineered to "drive engagement" and inflate media influence, not actually engage the community. It was so bad that mystery #2 involved what I can only call a gimmick and a bribe to encourage participation in the guise of a "prize" as I think they knew nobody would participate otherwise. And mystery #2 didn't even meaningfully contribute to lore.
Which brings us to the things I've already posted. The merch store and pirate perks getting cancelled shortly after launch. The backlog of technical debt and bugs. Bugs I've listed, but also items wolfmanbush brought up. Key experiences broken, like blank logbooks and ship crest names that STILL don't appear consistently despite repeated attempts to fix. Green skelly model when coming back from the ferry far too often. Things that don't impact PvP at all, but certainly break immersion in a game where adventure and immersion are a major driving force behind community engagement with the game.
For traditional games, game participation drives the community. And as participation naturally falls off, so does the community. But for live service games, the inverse is true. Community drives the game engagement. The new features are important to excite the community, but if the community isn't excited about the burning blade and new ways to engage with it, then the feature isn't going to do much. I find it very hard to believe some random is scrolling X, seeing a BB screenshot, and saying "I want to play that!" after ignoring SoT for years. Yes, there are exceptions that will prove the rule, but that doesn't drive participation in a meaningful way. The community, as fractured and infighting as it is, does.
And slowly but surely, I feel like the community has been sabotaged, and the game is suffering. And how much it is suffering, behind the scenes, with stats we don't know and likely will never know, will determine the game's future. And for that, I have my concerns. I cling on because it does take a special game to capture my attention. And it seems like years, if not a decade, happens between truly innovative games that engage a community. So this is still better than nothing. It isn't "joy" anymore. It is "fun' but flirts with "unfun" far too often. And when it crosses that line, I stand by what I said before. I'll walk away. And I can't envision a future where I'd come back. Because one way or another, I'll invest my time and energy in a new community. As I said elsewhere, 2024 xbox stats I think will already show Diablo 4 topping SoT. Which if you had told me that two years ago, I'd have thought you were high. But alas, here we are. But Diablo 4 doesn't have a community I've felt was engaging. So while I am happy to sink time into it now, I also don't see it being a long term replacement.
I won't lie. Helldivers 2 seems like it has a thriving community and devs that listen and are as engaged with their audience the way Rare used to be. I'm fairly invested in the XBox ecosystem so HD2 isn't effectively on my shortlist right now. But if I cross the rubicon with SoT and walk away, a PS5 may be in my future just for that game. I suspect if I already had a PS5, SoT may already be in my rearview, so Rare is benefiting from my back catalog of games being primarily xbox investments and Microsoft's decision on backwards compatibility. That seems like a slim thread to hang keeping an audince around on. But here we are.
I'm just one guy. I'm not an influencer. I'm not a streamer. Rare won't miss me when I'm gone. And I may be enough of an edge case that I'm not even a good canary in the coal mine as an indicator of bigger problems. But it certainly feels like there are bigger problems. But I also now I have biases, and confirmation bias at that, and am an old cynic on top of it all. So maybe my post, and this followup, are all for nothing. You be the judge. I just needed to write, to get it all out of my head, and give those who care some perspective on why I feel the way I do and why I am concerned, and why I don't "just walk away" to another game. It'd be a hard thing for me to do. I have a lifetime of history on how I got here that makes it a hard thing to do. And something I don't want to do. But I feel it, just over the horizon, hunting me.
Time will tell.
