i've played probably like 15 hours so far and am at like... level 20ish for each faction. writing this after getting my shit stolen and my ship sunk by another team of pirates so there is salt to taste. i dont have three friends (or any friends) so ive just been playing with the sloop in open games where i join other players/they join me

• theres no way to interact with people outside of your team other than killing them and taking their shit and like, as a player i philosophically do not want to do that because i dont want to make their experience worse, for the sole purpose of making my numbers go up, i prosaically do not want to do that because i dont think combat is very fun. firing the cannons is lame, managing cannonballs is lame, combat on foot is lame with every weapon, especially against other players

• related to the combat feeling bad: i've only connected to a game where my ping was steadily under 100 once. why is the game connecting me with people who are on the other side of the world? is the oceania server full, or something?

• related to combat: fighting skeletons is okay. it doesnt feel like its possible to finish an order of souls mission (where your mission is to collect and return the skulls of boss skeletons which appear after you kill a number of skeletons on the islands that youve been sent to) without dying at least once. this is the case especially when youre fighting skeletons with ranged weaponry, who tend to appear in groups of about four or five, which are very difficult to deal with by yourself (because your crewmates are inevitably doing something else somewhere else). combat with skeletons eventually just boils down to, i feel, spamming left click for a while then eventually running away to cram four bananas (the pirate equivalent of medkits, obviously) into your gullet so you can resume combat. skeletons stay dead/dont heal if they kill you so theres no reason not to throw yourself at them, kill a few, and die in the process, over and over again. again esp with skeletons with guns who can take about a third of your health away in one shot if youre close enough (which you have to be, see below paragraph)

• another combat gripe: you can carry two of four weapons: a sword, a pistol, a blunderbuss (shotgun) and a sniper rifle. all guns have five shots in them before you have to return to an ammo box so you always carry a sword and a gun. ammo boxes appear on your ship and in set places on islands, which are normally about half the span of the island away from where you're actually doing anything. so unless you want to run back and forth to the ammo crate, you're using your sword often and your gun rarely. this is fine until you encounter ranged skeletons (who can deal lots of damage while youre close to them) and skeletons who are totally immune to swords. so you've gotta shoot at em over and over again, running back and forth from the ammo crate, until the next group of enemies pops out of the ground for you to kill.

• more complaints: in order to complete order of souls missions you have to find a single group of skeletons on an island, kill them, kill the next group of skeletons that pop out of the ground near where the first group spawned, kill another group that pop out of the ground near where the second group spawned, and so on. on small islands, that's fine! on big islands, you can run around for twenty minutes before encountering the skeletons that you need to kill. okay thats combat gripes

• going to islands and exploring and finding loot is fun and i enjoy the loop. looking at your map, looking at the environment around you, getting your spade out and hearing the clunk when you hit a treasure chest is the the best feeling. it's a good game to play while listening to music or watching something on netflix, because there are massive chunks of time when you're sailing between islands and moving items from your ship to an outpost or vice versa where nothing happens for about 5-10 minutes.

• i'm okay with that but the time investment involved in finding the valuables that you turn in later means that combat is too risky to enter when youre carrying something worth something (whereas theres no reason for a combat-minded team not to sail around and attack anyone they see, because if they die they lose nothing but the time invested but if they win they gain whatever was on the other teams boat. its like mugging a dude who might have no money on him vs going to work.)

• merchant missions (where a merchant will give you a list of animals to capture and the crates required to capture them. i think there might be missions where youre given like, a crate to put consumable items in and you have to put 50 in and return it so that exists too) are frustrating because theres a time limit involved that doesnt exist for the other factions and you have to deliver the requested items before taking on another quest. this results in a pattern where i'll choose "oh i'll do merchant quests tonight because youre uniquely constrained when doing them" or "oh i'll do order of souls/gold hoarder quests tonight because merchant quests are far too much trouble for my awful brain". in any case: islands (except for outposts, which you bring your loot to, and forts, which might contain a bunch of skeletons who want to kill you) have at least one of the three animals (except sometimes they dont spawn for no reason). this isnt surfaced in the map, so theres no reason not to use an external map like this one. except you need to find animals in certain colours, which might not be on the island, so you need to go to another island. its a frustrating process that isnt particularly profitable (though like many games, money isnt as important as making progress with each faction)

• while money isn't as important as mkaing progress with factions, everything you can buy is super expensive. ship cosmetics like different coloured masts are like 100k (when the best chests you can get give like 1200 gold) and pirate cosmetics cost like 10-20k iirc? though at the end of the day nothing you can buy meaningfully affects gameplay, so in theory earning money matters literally nothing. so youre working towards only making progress with the three factions. the missions havent changed much as i've raised my rank with the factions, so unless things change, you might just be doing shit for the fun of it, i guess. that's fine for some people, it might be fine for me, but probably not for one hundred and ten new zealand dollaroos!! it sells for $60 usd which is $82 nzd so i guess i have to pay $30 more because microsoft feels like it? i dunno!!! i'm not subscribing to game pass for this though!!!

• the gold hoarder representatives rub their hands together like the "happy merchant" meme and i don't like that at all, especially considering they're the "gold hoarders". looking at them theyre elaborate enough not to look like jewish caricatures and its not like theyre wearing yarmulkes but i feel like its too similar to the format to be unintentional

anyway like whenever i try to describe something i just end up listing negatives because i'm like a cynical sitcom shithead so ill say this: sea of thieves is alright but in the face of all the other unfinished bideo games i have its difficult to justify spending my time on it. that said i've spent lots of time on it!! (maybe because i only have a two week trial) but the time i do spend on it, where i can finish by selling everything i've collected and making a few more ranks, feels rewarding and fun, and i think that there is potential in sea of thieves that isnt realised or i just havent seen. i hope rare can do what they need to do to address the criticism that the game has received. ok thats my wall of text good bye