Sailing is fun as shit. Yeah intense racing type sailors are absolutely insufferable but if you have ever had the pleasure of having a sailboat to fuck around in, it is like kayaking except you don’t have to do work. Wonderful. Amazing. Sailing is so god damn underrated in video games.

The basics of sailing are pretty simple and easy to grasp. Yet… 99% of games with sailboats as optional craft never actually make the sailboats behave like sailboats. They are just lame motorboats you drive until you can manage to hijack a speedboat. It sucks.

Or there are pirate/tall ship games where the ships just magically go in any direction you want and it just utterly kills the vibe.

There should be entire genres of sailing games by now that are basically just open world space trading games but with actually interesting vehicle controls and living dynamic universes (the fucking ocean) with regional wind patterns.

WHERE ARE ALL THE SAILING GAMES????

sigh but again no judgement if you hate sailboats but as long as a game implements them like Valheim, than rowing gets you there plenty fast enough i.e. you can just ignore them. Valheim sadly undersells sailing though since if the wind is blowing against you sailing upwind is slower than rowing which robs you of one of the fundamental magical feelings of sailing (how am I rapidly traveling my in the opposite way fronthe force powering me??).

There are so many reasons to love sailing, it connects us with human history, it is fun, and it provides a vehicle piloting experience with lots of mechanical depth.

/endrant

[–] Kiosade@lemmy.ca 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Dang are you the hypeman for sailing, because i’m feeling the energy haha. I’m sure real life sailing is actually fun. My grandfather had a sailboat back in the day, and while I never got to go sailing on it, I did get to step aboard, and I could imagine the adventures one could go on with it :) But yeah in video games it’s usually just kind of boring. You’re mostly just waiting to get from A to B, with little to do inbetween. I did like how it was handled in Windwaker to some degree, but that may also be because you don’t lose all your stuff 30 mins from home because a random mosquito attacked you out of nowhere 😅

[–] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

I did like how it was handled in Windwaker to some degree, but that may also be because you don’t lose all your stuff 30 mins from home because a random mosquito attacked you out of nowhere 😅

Oof I got attacked by a “mosquito” and lost all my stuff way far from home in valheim and it made me temporarily quit. The mosquito was weird though, it was like 100 feet long with a big menacing mouth full of teeth, no wings thankfully.

Also some of the most fun sailing is in the tiniest sailboats you can get like sunfishes, lasers, j20s etc… they are simple, quick to tack (i.e. they keep speed through turns) relatively inexpensive and easy to get in the water and a blast to sail like a fool and capsize. Sometimes there are sailing clubs/classes you can sail these at that are pretty affordable if you live near water.

But yeah in video games it’s usually just kind of boring. You’re mostly just waiting to get from A to B, with little to do inbetween.

This is true but it is so silly, if you ever get the chance to go out sailing on a windy day on like a 20 foot hobie cat style catamaran with someone who knows how to sail it and you would NOT say the experience was boring or full of long periods of nothing stimulating. Even if the water wasn’t its own unique dynamic environment just the mechanics of keeping the sailboat hiked over with your body weight to get maximum speed without flipping over are complex and stimulating and those things FLY. In a video game there is no reason game developers couldn’t dial up the arcadeyness and speed to make this experience even more fun, but I just don’t think most game developers give a shit about sailing so they don’t even think to try. They just program a motorboat and animate a cosmetic sail on top of it that swings around to whatever direction you are going and call it a day.