Ok for sure, no judgement if you don’t like sailing but I grew up learning how to sail sunfishes and other derpy small sailboats.
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.