What will we do with a terrible game? (x3) THROW IT IN THE TRASH CAN! Way-Hey, Where's the content? (x3) NOT IN SEA OF THIEVES! Update the game and hope it gets better. (x3) ONLY TOOK YOU FOUR YEARS! (Seriously?) What's up everybody? This is THE ACT MAN here... And today... (You Okay Dude?) I am shocked. I am disappointed. I am bamboozled, I am flabbergasted, and, I am just outright confused. What in God's name happened with Sea of Thieves, alright? This is not gonna be a traditional Act Man video, alright? This is not gonna be a... In-depth review where I just really go at it, and really think about the game and and write all this stuff And, you know, scripts and great fancy editing It's not gonna be that, you know why? Because there's not much to fuckin' look at and talk about with Sea of Thieves That's the problem. Now, everyone probably knows this already, kind of goes without saying, but Sea of Thieves has like no content There is nothing to do in the game, just about. And that's basically in a nutshell why the game sucks, and why it's bad. *epic joke xd* You don't need like a 30-minute review of me talking to tell you that to get that point across, that it sucks because there's nothing to do. Man... You might not know this about me, but I fucking love pirates "Only the Captain can lay eyes on the map!" "Okey-dokey then!" "Arrr... A pirate doesn't say 'Okey-dokey then', a pirate says 'Arrr!'" I fucking love pirates. Pirates of the Caribbean is my favorite movie of all time I like playing Gangplank in League of Legends, you know? And.. and there's just.... barely any good pirate games. Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag... the greatest pirate game I've ever played. One of my favorites as well. And it's like, okay well what else is there? What other pirate games are out there? Maybe the Pirates of the Caribbean Disney MMORPG? Maybe that? I never even played it, so I can't say if it's good or not (It was) But, like... you see what I'm saying? There's no fucking pirate games out there. So for Sea of Thieves to come out and just be like... *yawn* It's disheartening, man. Because the concept... the concept of Sea of Thieves is beautiful. I'd say perfect. The idea of running around with three of your friends in a pirate adventure getting treasure, fighting enemies, boarding ships, shooting cannons, swashbucklers, and just... Everything that we think of when we think of pirates. And to have that in a video game that you can share with your friends It's an amazing concept. It is an amazing concept, and you know what, I'll get some positives out of the way. Sea of Thieves looks pretty good Graphically it looks good. It has a nice charm to it. It's the type of graphics we might look at, you know, ten years from now and say wow that still look-- You know it looked good. And that-- so that's a plus. Aside from that, playing with your friends is fun, but... Nothing else. Now, one thing I'll say is I'm giving Sea of Thieves a fucking harsh time because they priced it at 60 bucks. Honestly, right out the gate. I'm gonna say this game should either be free-to-play or like $15 Maximum. But because they're charging 60 bucks for it... You ain't getting away with that. Now if I had to sum up Sea of Thieves in one sentence, I'd say this: It is the best game ever for about three hours. After that, it is the most boring game ever. And it's like, how does that happen when you have... The first experience in this game is just so incredible, like you're into it, you love it. And then everything after that... is just inferior. How does that happen? I'll tell you how it happens. Because the game has the most boring, lazily designed gameplay loop. Now, what do I mean by gameplay loop? Well, what is a video game at its core? It's a loop, right? Whatever game it is, there's a loop involved where you do this certain thing over and over again in varying different scenarios, so think of Halo. What's the gameplay loop in Halo? Well, you run around shooting aliens. But you do that with a bunch of different weapons, you shoot different aliens There's different locations, vehicles, all sorts of things to use. Now I'm not just coming up with this out of my ass You know, take it from the horse's mouth. Jaime Griesemer In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over and over again So, if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game. And so, you can have all the great graphics and all the different characters and lots of different weapons with amazing effects But if you don't nail that 30 seconds, you're not gonna have a great game. He talks about Halo, and having 30 seconds of fun. And what he's talking about is that gameplay loop of shooting things, right? If it's Mario Kart, it's the gameplay loop of racing through the tracks, you know? If it's a game like World of Warcraft, the gameplay loop is killing enemies, doing quests, you know, all sorts of stuff. But in Sea of Thieves, the gameplay loop is taking this from point A to point B That's the gameplay, that is the gameplay loop And that's the type of thing you would see in throwaway Skyrim quests. Like that's.. that's the type of gameplay loop At its most basic functional level. It feels weird to talk about like the fundamental basics of a video game because you know you think that stuff is self-explanatory and a gameplay developer that is as seasoned as Rareware would be able to understand that. But what.. what does a game need to do? In my opinion, it needs to do two things Alright? It's gotta give you a reason to play it and a reason for you to keep playing Alright? So Sea of Thieves gives us all a reason to play it, that exciting four player online adventure pirate game. That's the reason to play it, for that. What's the reason to keep playing? What is the incentive? Cosmetics? So let's bring up some other games to illustrate this, Overwatch has a cosmetic progression system, yes. But the incentive to play Overwatch is because it's fun It feels good to do well in that game There is a competitive mode where you can rank up You chase a number, the incentive is chasing that number. Call of Duty, the incentive is the progression, the fun, the killstreaks, you know? Unlocking new attachments and getting new weapons and building all these custom classes Every game has a selling point, i.e. why you should play it, and incentive, why you should keep playing it. The Last of Us has a great fucking story, you want to figure out what happens you know? So you keep playing it for the story. The problem is Sea of Thieves' reason to play it is not supported by the incentive to keep playing it Which means, you get fucking bored, because all you're doing is fetch quests There's no story, alright? So you're not playing it for a story, you're doing fetch quests for cosmetics That's not a reason for me to play the game, I don't feel better when I have blue sails as opposed to white sails, you know? You need something else, you can't have cosmetic only progression in a video game and expect it to entice people to keep playing. Like, if you think about it, Sea of Thieves has one quest, and it's bringing stuff from point A to point B And they split that up into three different variants of that. You kill skeletons, you pick up pigs and you find treasure chests And that's not satisfying. That's not fun. It's not engaging It's not immersive, it's.. it's bare-bones, alright? Now here's the other thing When you play a video game, you want to feel like you're doing better as you play it The game should throw increasingly more difficult challenges at you as you get further in. So for example, you think of Starcraft or Warcraft, or any realtime strategy game where you command troops. So in like the first few missions of Starcraft 1 you're given marines, fire bats and SCV's Ok, you've got three units out of a total nine that you can use But as you play through Starcraft, as you go through more and more missions, you get more units you can build, more buildings. The levels get increasingly more difficult, or they have different objectives Now imagine if Starcraft 1 had 30 missions and you only had the same three units you could build That would get boring real fucking fast, right? Because there's no increasing difficulty, there's no progression. That's what Sea of Thieves doesn't have. The most basic and hilarious example I can make is Tetris Yes, motherfucking Tetris. Born in an age were high scores was the incentive. And you know what, that's kind of fizzled out in later years, but that was an incentive to keep playing. When you play Tetris There's nine levels and each one of those gets progressively more difficult So in this sense, Tetris, a game made in the 1980s by a single dude has a better progression system than Sea of Thieves You know it's.. it's like there's so many reasons people play video games and Sea of Thieves just doesn't offer any of that There's no incentive to PvP unless you're just griefing because most time you don't get anything out of it There's no story, so you don't play it for that There's no progression system so you don't play it for that And you could run down the list of a thousand reasons why people play video games and at the end of the day Sea of Thieves offers you the ability to play with your friends. That's its main selling point. It is the most boring video game I have ever played, and I'm not exaggerating. I used to think Diablo 3 was the most boring video game ever because when I first played that, there was no challenge But this takes the cake, man. It's fucking boring, and I don't take pleasure in saying that but that's how it is You know, I'm not hating on the game to hate on it I'm hating on it because this is how I see it. This is how it is You know? You know if I were to show you my collection of games, every single one of them has something to offer Even if they're not the best, even fucking Superman 64 that's sitting up there You know what, playing that is fucking hilarious because it's god-awful. But Sea of Thieves is not god-awful in the same sense It's bad because it's just boring. And that's the thing, I've never encountered a game that gave me so few reasons to keep playing it But you know what? If the ability to play with friends and "make your own fun" is the only thing your game has to offer It doesn't offer much because I can do that with any game, I can play any game with my friends. We used to fucking switch off controllers playing Halo: Combat Evolved when we only had one controller We did that, we shared the game that way, we played with each other Wait that sounds weird... Not like that, folks. And I'd like to talk about the sort of tag line that's been attached to Sea of Thieves, "create your own fun". And it's like, oh you're putting this on me? I've got to make your game fun after you've already released it for 60 bucks? The thing people don't seem to realize is... you create your own fun when you're bored of something. The stupidest game me and my friends came up with in junior high when we were like 12 13 14 years old, it was a game called flarp, okay? Now that should be sign enough that this.. this story is not going anywhere good When you got a game called FLARP, alright? Now what FLARP actually was, it was a brilliant concept. All you were supposed to do is throw fucking basketballs at each other as hard as possible. It was like dodgeball, except a thousand times more unsafe. Alright, and you know what? We had fun doing that stupid shit You know why? Because we were bored. We created our own fun But you know what, at the end of the day... We were just throwing fucking basketballs at each other and at the end of the day, with Sea of Thieves, all you're doing is going point A to point B You see what I'm saying? Creating your own fun doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything It's just an excuse for shitty game design You know at least with some games that I don't personally enjoy or find fun I can see the value in them, I can see why people play them. Like Civ. 5, I.. I don't enjoy it It's not my type of game, but I see what it has to offer I don't see that same thing with Sea of Thieves, I'm like... How could anyone not get totally fucking bored of this, like five minutes? But you know, it should be pretty clear what Sea of Thieves' faults are and I don't want this video to just be, you know, circle jerking hate boners, alright? Let's.. let's actually give some ideas and.. and think about what could have been, alright? You're gonna fucking love these. You know because it's an open world pirate game with all these different islands. How many creative things can you put throughout this open world? Well, I had the idea of factions. There should be more AI ships and stuff going on Imagine you have a choice of being part of the East India Trading Company or the.. the British Navy and as part of the British Navy, your goal is to track down and hunt the Pirates You're equipped with better ships, but you're not as good in hand-to-hand combat with swords You know, stuff like that, create different factions that offer different rewards Maybe there's some type of ghost pirate faction or a normal pirate faction I mean.. I mean something, something to get us attached to the game Imagine how cool it would be if you're sailing around on your puny dinghy boat, and you see this massive Warship with 30 people on them, and it's an AI ship You're gonna be like "Oh shit, I don't want to go into that." You know, create those tense moments by offering high level things to kill, to be attacked by. And that's another point. You need some kind of progression system. This type of game should take notes from like Runescape Honestly, there should be an economy, there should be like mining and shit You should be foraging for supplies and stuff if you want to. You should be getting money to upgrade your ships, to buy new ships, to maybe buy a hideout somewhere, or you know a base of operations. Something, just something. New weapons, swords, equipment, armor, anything. I mean, you could have.. you could create the most simple type of skill tree where it's like, you know, four different paths Maybe one path is more geared towards combat, maybe one's geared towards ranged combat with guns and cannons Maybe another one is better at repairing the ship and, you know, actually manning the ship and sailing and all that and a fourth one is like a utility guy I don't know, something, some type of progression system Also need more in-depth PvP Again, if you took lessons from Runescape and.. and adapted that to Sea of Thieves, it would be fucking great Remember the wilderness? Remember how there was one part of the entire world of Runescape where shit could just go down and if you went there, you better be prepared. Imagine if Sea of Thieves had that, like troubled waters where you go into this area and anything can happen, you can be attacked by anybody you could fucking die and lose a bunch of your stuff. That sort of risk reward is what the game needs To add meaning to the PvP combat, there needs to be risk involved You know you think of a game like Witcher 3, just as a basic example, even World of Warcraft There's certain areas of the overarching open world that are higher level than you at some point, right? Sea of Thieves should have that, it should have some more PvE Like areas that you need to level up or get better weapons and armor in order to go into And if you go in there unprepared to get your ass whooped It should have more risk. It needs to have more depth, more meaning, more challenging experiences. Next point, more fucking content. Don't just give us one fetch quest and chop it into three pieces Give us something different, something unique, awesome. I mean as simple as this is, Super Mario Galaxy did this where you'd go back to a world that you got a star in and there would be an additional challenge, like complete it in this amount of time Or complete it without getting hit once Just do that, offer like increased challenges for what's already there That's such a simple way to recycle content, but you know, still give players an incentive to replay that content. You know, more quests, just an actual story. You know, it's so bare-bones. Better quests, more AI throughout the world, and just the idea of being able to upgrade a ship or have multiple ships, like why is there only two? You have this massive pirate game that you're trying to sell and you only get two ships? Small and big? Where's like a warship, where's something like the Interceptor, that's unmatched in speed or some fucking ghost ship like the Black Pearl The Flying Dutchman, where.. where are any of these like unique cool ship designs Where's.. where's anything?! And more weapons, items, like you only have one healing item: a banana. How simple is it to have like soup or apples or just different healing items that do different things? Give you reasons to pick them up instead of the bananas. Different weapons, you know they have perks or... fucking something. I think at this point, I'm just like rambling on because the game is so bare-bones and boring that any sort of idea Basically any idea could work with this game because it is so basic. You know, I fucking love pirates. I wanted to love Sea of Thieves. I'm just so disheartened and.. and butthurt, you could say at this game that I decided to just fucking rant Was gonna write a script, but you know what, I just got to get it out of my system I just got a rant about it. One last thing I want to say is You can't rely on updates to fix this game. It's already got a bad taste in my mouth I'm probably never gonna go back to it. So, you know. It's dead out the gate for me It's dead out the gate. And you think about how much shit we gave Destiny 2 after we all realized how little content there was in the end game. It's shocking You know, I got.. I got 40, 50 hours plus maybe out of Destiny 2. I got about four out of Sea of Thieves before I was bored. That should say something, alright? But, you know, Sea of Thieves had a brilliant concept. It just didn't execute right. It just didn't execute anything. It just didn't provide anything. And that's the.. that's the great shame, that is the tragedy of this world. And that is why I think Sea of Thieves is the most boring video game I've ever played But what did you think? What possible ideas do you have to improve Sea of Thieves? I want to read that shit in the comments. I just want to imagine. I just want to picture it in my head What the game could have been, how good it could have been. The.. the things you could do in Sea of Thieves I just want to picture that, so please leave a comment down below. If you liked the video, leave a like. And subscribe to The Act Man for more awesome content. Alright everyone. That's all I got for today. This is The Act Man signing out, peace!
