You Can’t Always Win in Video Games

The other day, the Sea of Thieves was particularly treacherous. Every ship we came across was jittery and aggressive, and loot and resources were pretty sparse. It seemed that pretty much everyone was out for blood, when we just wanted to battle a skelly fort. We hadn’t done much actual killing intentionally. Most of our attacks were self defense, and people getting too close to our skelly fort and the Ashen Lord on it.

Well, there was one other ship that wanted to attack us, then turned around and started running. We just chased after them, slowly catching up until we harpooned them and them swiftly sank them.

For a while, that’s kinda how the day went. We’d go do something, have to fend off an attacker and then get back to what we were doing. But little did we know that an alliance was forming.

Sometimes you sink.

Unfortunately, our luck ran out when three ships attacked us all at the same time. A total of four Reaper ships, all now locked in battle. Except that the alliance didn’t include us, and the three ships really, really wanted us rank 5 Reapers dead.

Well, they managed it. In a battle that felt like that scene from the movie Master and Commander, the ship sunk and we lost all our loot. We didn’t have THAT much loot, but it was a shame to lose it.

We went down fighting.

Honestly? It didn’t matter that we died and sank. This is the important part. We could have run away like cowards, but we all knew we wouldn’t outpace them. So we did what any honorable pirate should do, and went on the attack. Against three ships. There wasn’t really much we could do anyway. If we tried to retreat, the sloop would catch up to us. If we stayed and tried to kill the enemy galleon, then the other two ships would get in our way. All we could do was maybe try and take some of them with us, as we were outnumbered three to one.

And we did manage to do some damage. The sloop had to back out to patch its holes and we could have sunk them had they not been allied with a brig and a galleon that were hammering us. Unfortunately, all the bucketing in the world couldn’t have stopped us from sinking, despite having me as a full time repair person on the bottom deck.

Just get more loot.

The nice thing about the Sea of Thieves is that the Sea of Thieves has an infinite amount of loot. Sure, we lost a bunch of good loot, but there’s no reason to get too attached. No matter what, once your ship has respawned and you’re alive once more, you can still head off and find more treasure to steal and loot.

Sure, sinking does make you have to start again from scratch. But that’s the entirety of the risk versus reward that you get in Sea of Thieves. Sometimes you win and make massive money. Sometimes you sink. It’s all part of the circle of gaming. In the mean time, I’ll be off, getting some more loot to sell.