I maintained a blog about game design for years (Anyway Games). Over time, it developed a central theme: the importance of dynamics. Variables combining with variables can provide unique, memorable, and refreshing experiences. Such gameplay breaks from script to empower individual players and to create a living world with events worth sharing.
Dynamic content is why Sea of Thieves provides such rich ground (water?) for player stories. We all encounter skeletons, snakes, ship battles, megs, and the kraken. We all battle the wind and waves. We all meet other players in the game. But those elements combine in so many ways that we are constantly sharing fresh and personal experiences.
Yesterday, a particularly challenging experience both thrilled and concerned me. I had been trying to hook a Shadow Stormfish for weeks. On advice, I followed a storm to the center of the map and finally snagged one!
But before I finished reeling it in, lightning opened a hole in my sloop. Then a skeleton ship rose from the water, just beyond my stormfish. I finally had the fish in my hands... and the kraken arrived.
Somehow, miraculously, I didn't lose my ship. I kept the sloop afloat, sank the skeletons, and escaped the kraken (even after stupidly returning to the ink to finish it off with only seven planks left).
That's a tricky balance in game design. Pushed just beyond a player's limit, failure isn't fun. But pushed right to the edge, a hard challenge survived is a proud tale.
I survived that challenge. And, as a solo sloop captain, I've beaten other combinations of kraken and skeletons, meg and skeletons, storm and skeletons (I really should return that funny bone). At some point, long ago, I even defeated two skeleton galleons simultaneously. But that was before fire bombs!
The dynamics are great. But there is a limit to how much one player or even one crew can do. Dousing fires, plugging holes, loading and firing cannons, repairing the mast, eating to heal... it's a lot to manage at once.
Keep adding dynamic content. I'm eager to see new beasts, new environmental threats, new weapons, and whatnot. But at some point artificial limits will become necessary. Impossible situations are thrilling occasionally, but annoying if common. If a meg and kraken and skeleton ship and storm all hit at once, I would simply not survive. Defeat would be guaranteed.
This hasn't been a problem yet that I've experienced in Sea of Thieves. It's just a potential problem that might be better avoided in foresight than in hindsight.
