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Dredge looks pretty awesome. I have to say though, I get just as hot and bothered about the idea of a game like Ships At Sea/Fishing Barents Sea .
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1266540/Ships_At_Sea/?curator_clanid=40205009
I want both lol.
I will say Windbound looks like it kind of launched with some frustrating game bugs and confused players a bit, but it is at a crazy steep discount right now and looks like it is worth buying. It has real sailing mechanics as far as I can tell and involves the exploration and navigation aspect of sailing that I love.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1162130/Windbound/
Sail Forth also looks like another dime a dozen pirate ship games with ships that don’t act at all like a sailing ship but rather just look cool with animated sails and drive like a tank… but the sailing mechanics are actually apparently really deep and fun. They are arcadey, but the spirit is real sailing.
Oh damn I never knew that, see in games like that I never even bother to jump in a sailboat when I see one because I know chances are it is going to be lame and make me sad and the sailboat wasn’t put there as a drivable vehicle to make me happy but rather the programmers just made it so you could drive all the boats even if some of them were painfully boring and oversimplified to the point of being an utter waste of time and honestly kind of a middle finger to sailing. Like Saints Row style comedic games should just have the character go down into the cabin, come back up with a chainsaw, cut the mast down and then turn on the outboard to make it into a motor boat, that would be way less horrendous than programmers spending a bunch of time animating totally fake sails that just magically spin the wind direction every which way they go (it hurts my brain a little just trying to explain it from the standpoint of actually understanding the very barebones basics of sailing).
I have always had a bit of a grudge against Rockstar for not having their sailboats behave like sailboats in their games. They absolutely have the money and they have shown the aptitude to make mechanically superb focused games like the midnight club series or more specifically the table tennis game they made that is… just a damn fucking good table tennis game.
Rockstar could have made their sailboats behave like sailboats at least in GTA 5 and when people realized that was awesome they could have stupendously easily turned it into it’s own entire separate sailing game built on the GTA engine… from there small rowable sloops for inland waterways useful for running rum covertly to unexpected and unwatched places where cargo could be discretely offloaded would naturally slot PERFECTLY into a Red Dead Redemption 2 dlc focused on swamps and waterways….
…sigh
No excuses game developers, learn to sail, go play Pancake Sailor, I will not accept this level of extreme sailing ignorance going forward. Sailing is one of the dopest skills humans have ever mastered (and is certainly one sentient aliens on ocean planets all over the universe must have mastered as well, certainly before becoming a spacefaring race if that is even possible right?) and unlike space video games, the moment to moment skill of sailing a ship is fundamentally rich in sensory feedbacks and necessary minute control corrections.