Sea of Thieves is both the most interesting game I have ever played, and the worst game I have ever played. There has never been a AAA game with as interesting a concept, and there has never been a AAA game that executes on its concept so poorly. Rare have the greatest imaginations in the industry, and the worst designers.
Imagine a game where you and your friends play as legendary pirates, and go on epic voyages to exotic islands to grab cursed treasure, all while fighting off monsters and thieves alike. Sounds amazing, doesn't it? Now go and actually do it, and get bored out of your mind because every voyage is the same, there’s hardly any piracy, and the PvE ‘dangers’ are entirely monotonous by the third time you have to fight them.
Work Before Pleasure
Bad design waiting for you as soon as you load into the tavern. If you want to do anything, you have to stock up the ship first. After the five minutes it took to load into the game, you have to send another five minutes doing chores.
I Wish I Could AFK.
The fundamental action of sailing itself is mind numbingly dull. It's a matter of pointing the ship in the right direction, making sure the sails are angled, and then doing nothing. Actually, it would be better if you did nothing! That way, you could AFK on your phone until you arrived. But 2 things stop you: The wind changes direction, and the ship slowly turns left or right on it's own. The only reason these mechanics exist are to stop you from AFKing through 40% of the game. They provide no depth. You might say it's more entertaining with a crew, and you're right, but even then it invariably devolves into 1 person doing ship chores while everyone else AFKs. There may be a conversation among the crew, but the game isn't providing or even facilitating that.
Busy Work
The first kind of voyage you might have is digging up chests. These will rely on either your spatial reasoning and map reading, or your memory of whatever island you're on. (Or your ability to look things up.) These can actually be a little engaging, at least the first hundred times. Trouble is, the better you get at it, the faster you'll get through it, leaving more time for all the other, less interesting stuff. Another kind of voyage involves running around an island until you find an animal, which is as in depth and exciting as it sounds. The last kind of voyage involves fighting skeletons, which we'll get to now.
Skeletons, The Worst Enemy Design Ever
Skeletons! This game's only kind of land based enemy! Naturally, because they're the only land based enemy, they’re super in-depth and very well polished. They come in 3 varieties: Stunlock, Hitscan, and Bomber. Stunlock skeletons chase you around, and fighting them comes down to hitting first. That's all there is to it. If you hit them first, you win. If they hit you first, you'll get stunlocked for half your health before being launched away. Hitscan skeletons stand still, then do damage to you automatically. No counterplay when there's a few of them, you just kind of die. Finally, Bomber skeletons (added 3 months after release and 90% of the playerbase quitting) run up to you and explode. Like Gold Hoarder voyages, they're a bit of a diamond in the rough, because they do require decent aim and can be used to your advantage. A big issue with the skeletons is that they are made harder by giving them more health and lowering the amount of time they take to aim. On high level voyages, this means 9 swings per skeleton, and that pirates have 15 frames, or half a second (on Xbox) to react to a gun being aimed.
Pathetic Dave, Pioneer of the Meta
The meta for protecting your loot is to run away. If you and your pursuer have different kinds of ships, you can go faster than them and escape automatically after maybe a half hour. There is no counterplay to that. If you and your opponents have the same kind of ship, you have you keep running away until you bore them into quitting. Not only that, but if you jump off the ship to board, that will give the enemy something to do. It will engage them. Don't do that. The meta for protecting your loot in this game is to bore your opponents into quitting. What the (expletive)!? How terrible do you have to be at game design to actively reward players for BORING others into quitting!? It seems to me the entire design team for this game haven't so much as watched an Extra Credits YouTube video, because this is some first day of game design 101 stuff right here.
PvE Challenge, Or Rather, The Lack Thereof
Twycross, UK
August 2nd
“Remember, No Challenge”
All is calm in the halls of Rare studios, as the developers celebrate the release of Cursed Sails. Suddenly, a noise. Sonic Bob bursts in, panting from an exhausting sprint.
“I… I was looking at Reddit, and… the players… they… the skeleton ships, they… the players are sinking! The ships, they aren't a guaranteed win! They're… CHALLENGING!”
A moment of total silence passes over the studio. Then, the screams. Mayhem erupts. Employees sprint through the cubicles, crying and wailing. The fire alarm goes off. Fistfights and looting starts. One developer crashes through the window, taking a final bite of his plain toast as he plummets 6 stories. Joe Neate emerges from his office, a red glow in his eyes. He savagely lays into his coworkers, tossing them aside as carelessly as he says “um” during developer update videos.
But then, a beacon of hope emerges. With a brilliant beam of light, an employee has an answer. “Everyone”, Shelly Preston declares, “We will nerf the skeleton ships!” Relief settles over the office as this solution is proposed. No longer will players sometimes lose because of a challenge. Once again, everyone can be a winner, even the open crews.
Every PvE challenge has followed this course; It's hard, sometimes people lose, Rare nerfs it because they can't have difficulty, and now experienced players find it monotonously easy. They even do the same thing for their grinds. While I don't agree with arbitrary chore lists, it's even worse to create a grind and then make it easier, erasing the effort of anyone who has already completed it.
There is no challenge from the environment in Sea of Thieves. Get arbitrarily killed by hitscan skellies? Don't worry, life is infinite. Fighting a sea monster? Don't sweat it, they've all been nerfed into oblivion. Sink somehow? Once again, not an issue, you can just sail back and collect your loot. If you have a rowboat (there's one on every other island), you don't even have to sail back.
PvP Issues
While the PvP is exciting, and it's certainly this game's strong suit most of the time, it has a massive list of issues. Hit registration is very bad. On average, about half of all hitmarkers are lies. Sword lunges are particularly hurt by this, as lunges that looked like they hit, and sometimes even ones that did hit often still leave you stunned for 2 seconds. Fights can be decided by a malfunctioning sword lunge. Sword combat in general has been obliterated in the past months, in a misguided effort to shrink the skill gap. Balance is also a mess, as the Blunderbuss is objectively the best weapon in the game for almost every situation.
Ship combat is pretty good, but still lacks as much depth as it should due to the very limited tool set ships have. Rare tried to add depth with destructible ships, but unfortunately disabling the mast and wheel is simply not as effective as putting shots in the lower deck, and anchor dropping with a cannonball was removed because soloopers were complaining.
Crossplay is another issue. Having played on both PC and console, I can assure you there's quite a gap. Other than faster loading times and higher FPS, there's a difference in that using a controller takes some work, but mouse and keyboard is effortless. Strafing, aiming, bunnyhopping, it's just so much easier. Sadly, crossplay cannot be disabled, leaving console players at a serious disadvantage. Rare said opt-out would be released 3 months ago now, and I'm having a tough time believing that it's still happening.
Miscellaneous Thoughts
The Devil's Roar was a failed attempt at adding a more exciting, high risk - high reward area. Rare fell short by forgetting that difficulty requires counterplay. (That's the same issue that this game has with skeletons.) When the island you're parked at starts to smoke, you need to sail away, wait 5 minutes for the eruption to stop, then sail back. The issue is that waiting 5 minutes isn't fun, and staying at the island is not an option. The earthquakes are another problem. There's nothing you can do about the ground shaking. You just move slower, sorry! The skeletons aren't affected though, so a bomber skeleton can still run up and off you, but now you can't hit their barrel or run away.
The Tall Tales were a waste of resources. While they were fun the first time I played them, I certainly don't care to do any of them a second time (except the trickster and the gold hoarder.) That developer time would have been better spent on other, more replayable things.
The Arena would be great were it not for 3 issues: First, the mode discorages PvP and encourages running away. The meta is to dig chests and run away from almost every fight. The second issue is crossplay, which I've already mentioned. A third, smaller issue is that games can be decided simply by which ship is lucky enough to spawn next to all the chests and not be attacked. The unpredictable nature of open crews add another element of randomness, as they choose to attack ships at random, and getting attacked constantly really slows a crew down.
Bilge Rat chores are a mixed bag. The first one, Skeleton Thrones, was my favorite. It added a unique challenge that didn't ask you to do the same thing a million times, and required some cooperation. They went downhill after that, with such treasures of commendations as: Kill 100 mermaid statues. Kill 200 cursed skeletons. Sell 30 mermaid gems each to 3 factions. If Rare goes back to what made Bilge Rat adventures a fun challenge instead of a grind, they'd become one of my favorite parts of the game.
Gilded Athenas’ were great, as they allowed for such high stakes piracy. I hope they come back.
Ideal Sea of Thieves
Those 3 weeks the Cursed Sails event was running were the best time I've ever had gaming. That's because the skeleton ships were interesting, challenging, and emergent. There were many strategies for fighting the ships, they were tough as nails, and there was loads of emergent gameplay and player interaction. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost, sometimes everyone worked together and split the loot, and sometimes everyone killed each other. I could go on for an hour about all the crazy stuff my friends and I did in those 3 weeks. It was challenging, exciting, emergent PvPvE, exactly what Sea of Thieves should be.
But that's gone now. Skeleton ships have been made easy and unrewarding. I haven't seen a ship even attempt one in months.
Conclusion
Sea of Theives has a great core but is severly hampered by poor design choices. If it is to become the console selling exclusive it wants to be, it will have to change make 2 radical changes to its design philosophy.
Firstly, Rare needs to move away from the achievement oriented solooping crowd. This game is held back too much by pandering to those who want to quietly grind levels and avoid player interaction. That's not the optimal experince, and pandering to that playerbase is stopping them from experinceng the PvPvE emergent social game this is supposed to be.
Secondly and even more importantly, Sea of Thieves shouldn't be afraid of challange. It's good to lose sometimes! It defines victory. Make the PvE deadly, so that crews either have to skill up or team up to overcome them. Bring back the kind of difficulty seen in Cursed Sails and the original Megaladon fight. When some monster emerges from the sea, people should go “Holy S**T!”, not “Oh, this again”
Focusing on delivering challanging PvPvE emergent moments instead of quiet lonely grinding will make this a great game. Recapture that Cursed Sails experince, yeah?
