Why Sea of Thieves Needs More MMO Elements to Keep Players Engaged | A Look at the Game's Skill Ceiling
Discovering the challenges faced by Sea of Thieves in keeping players engaged and the potential solutions to increase the game's longevity.
Yesterday’s issue got me very excited. I read about the upcoming update for Sea of Thieves and got very excited to play it. I sat down, bought it on steam, and downloaded it. To be clear the updates listed in the video from yesterday don’t come out till later this month. Yet I thought to myself,
“Well it’s been a while since I’ve played the game, I should give it a shot a little early.”
Which is why I’m bringing it up to talk about today. That, and there really wasn’t that much else interesting happening in the news right now that I felt like I wanted to write about.
Sea of Thieves has a problem. Sea of Thieves is unable to keep its player around for long periods of time. One of the games core pillars is this: “All players must be on a mechanically even playing field.” This is not an unheard of core idea. Chess, checkers, Rocket League, CSGO. Many many games exist with this core idea. So why is this a problem for Sea of Thieves? Skill ceiling. If you’ve never heard of the term before “Skill ceiling” refers to the difference in skill between the most skilled player, and the least skilled. Games like Chess, Rocket League, and CS:GO all have staying power because, despite their repetitive gameplay modes, you can always be improving. The skill ceiling is very high. Consequently someone who invests twelve thousand hours is going to be much better at the game than someone with twelve.
The other key element is that these games are all player vs player. Going up against another human is always engaging because, as humans ourselves, we are unable to predict exactly what someone might do. That invested individual with twelve thousand hours, definitely will be able to predict what the person with twelve hours will do.
So what about games that do Player vs AI? Well. Unlike playing against other humans AI (in the past) have been hand written by humans. This meant that if you could learn the strategies that the AI’s used and exploit them. In this case how do you make a player feel like they are getting better at a game when the AI is basically at a fixed difficulty? Well you change the stats of the player, relative to the AI. This is how basically all MMO’s work. The player does get more and more skilled, but not to the extent that a chess player gets more skilled at the game. The fun and progression of the game has more to do with the player going through trials in order to earn gear that lets them have higher numbers.
So what does all this have to do with Sea of Thieves? SoT is a game with MMO elements that asks its players to enjoy it like chess. The problem is that SoT is not chess. Players can spend hours amassing Jeff Bezos amounts of wealth, but they gain nothing from doing so other than the ability to make their ship look cooler. You do have the ability to fight other players out on the high seas, but this also has some issues. When you sign up for a chess match, you are signing up to play against an opponent. When you choose to play SoT you don’t get to choose if you want to encounter players or not. So players aren’t getting any stronger vs the AI as they play the game, but they also might not be signing up to get better at the PvP. Which puts the game in a weird middle ground. The developers can’t make anything more challenging in the PvE because all players are at the same base stats, while they also can’t make players ships stronger since that would cause the already unbalanced PvP to be even more out of whack.
So what does a game like this do? In my opinion I wish that SoT would accept and adopt more MMO elements. I think having things like weapon stats and ship stats would greatly increase the potential playtime of the game. I think having PvP servers and PvE servers is also a nice option so that you can sign up for competitive experiences. Another option to consider is to have the stats of the weapons only effect the AI in the game, where all the weapons do the same damage to other human players in order to keep veterans from having a significant stat advantage.
The new update showing some of the quality of life improvements as well gave me some more ideas. The game is already fun enough as it is. Have us buy these quality of life improvements as ship upgrades with in game money. That would be a huge motivator.
Ok, I’ll step off my podium now. I love SoT and I say all of this because I would love to have a reason to keep playing and exploring the world of the game. The current content the team is pushing out feels shallow in my opinion for the reasons I’ve listed. If you’ve never played it before it’s an amazing time and will last you a while! Just don’t expect to stay for too long.
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