

I'm not trying to preach here, or criticise anyone's expectations, but I've been here since the start and I know The Goonies is one of the stories that are behind the inspiration for the design of this game - a group of mates (or one or two) who go off and have adventures.

Remember when you were a child and you went out into your backyard and created your own adventures with the few tools you had available? Sea of Thieves is something different, as has been mentioned - it's an opportunity to enter a gorgeous world and PLAY. If you cannot find your fun in a game without it literally pointing its finger at scripted and "one and done" activities, then Rare's new game isn't for you, that's You're right of course, the majority of gamers do enjoy the achievement, levelling, grinding, progression of many other games.

SoT won't appeal to the people with short attention spans and those that feel a need to be constantly rewarded with gameplay-affecting stuff, that's it. On top of that there will be none of that: "I can't play with my friends because they are level 100 pirate and I'm level 2" or "I can't play because the people that spend 100+ hours on this game have weapons and equipment that totally overpower me" nonsense. Sea of Thieves would still be an appealing if you removed all these beautiful graphics and stuff because SoT really is a sandbox game and a role playing one - you are given actual tools that allow you to interact with the world and the players in a natural way and then dropped into this world that really lets you pretend that you're a pirate with all these features like trading companies, treasure hunts, naval battles, constant ship management and so on. If you stripped off all of the flashy stuff like an excellent gun handling, constant rewards and loot systems these games wouldn't survive on their core gameplay mechanics at all. These games flood the players with dozens of copy-pasted missions that you check off after completing them to give yourself an artificial feeling of making progress and being ahead of everyone else, these games give you these loot mechanics that further the gap between beginners and veterans every day and encourage you to put your every minute you can spend into gaming so that you don't fall behind your friends and rivals. Sea of Thieves isn't the next Destiny or The Division. After seeing so many different threads both here and on Reddit with people expressing their disappointment or even anger because of what SoT is shaping up to be I feel like this really needs to be said loud and clear because it seems that with current gaming mentality many gamers have a hard time grasping the concept of a true sandbox game with organic gameplay ingredients, not a fake sandbox where there are dozens of random activities and missions scattered around a huge world that can only imitate this design philosophy of: "do whatever you want".
