The entire time I was listening to that intro cutscene narration, I just kept hearing that same voice in my head saying "Let strength be granted so the world might be mended... so the world might be mended."
Also, did they just pull a shot directly from Moana with that Maori navigator on his sailboat?
I'm not surprised that Sea of Thieves was the GB crew's Most Disappointing Game this year. For me, though, it was one of my favorite games this year, if not my favorite (I haven't decided quite yet).
It ended up just being a perfect hang-out game for me and three of my good friends, two of whom played solely on PC, while the other two had Xbox Ones. My friends and I all play different types of games than each other and are of very different skill levels when it comes to video games, so although there isn't much in terms of progression in Sea of Thieves aside from getting ridiculous sets of cosmetics in which to look silly, it made the game accessible to all four of us while giving us the freedom of not having to work to keep up with each other if anybody misses a play session.
The overall gameplay loop is pretty repetitive (it's almost entirely a series of fetch quests), but the core gameplay was simultaneously simple enough and compelling enough to be a great way for the four of us to just hang out on a chat call and sail about. Interacting with other random players, a lot of whom ended up being very friendly over the course of the year, and the random encounters with giant sea monsters also made the game a lot more interesting to us. It actually made me appreciate Austin Walker's way of telling stories of things that happened in games that he plays a lot more, because I ended up having a bunch of weird stories like that from our sessions in Sea of Thieves (it sounds like the WayPoint crew did as well, judging from their End-of-Year podcasts). And the addition of new events and content throughout the course of the year gave us good reasons to dive back in and get into more ridiculous nautical shenanigans.
My friends and I still play Sea of Thieves relatively regularly, and we still have a lot of fun doing so. It definitely is a game that speaks to a certain niche audience, and it is very much a "your mileage may vary" type of situation, but it ended up being one of my favorite games this year.
I had the good fortune of meeting Felix briefly on the show floor at this year's PAX West while she was repping that untitled Asshole Goose game. After I mentioned that I was a fan of her appearances on the Giant Bomb, she expressed her gratitude for not referring to her has "The Gooch." It was one of the highlights of my PAX this year.
Always good to see more Rich Gallup content on the site.
That said, while reading through this list, I was preoccupied by the thought that if you punched someone exclusively with your right hand while wearing those ridiculous knuckle dusters, you would leave a big mark on your assailee that just reads "PROD." And for whatever reason, that is hilarious.
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