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 really even trying to think about it).

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 it could have stupendously easily been turned into it’s own entire separate sailing game built on the GTA engine…

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 ever mastered (and is certainly one sentient aliens on planets with oceans must have mastered as well) and unlike space video games, the moment to moment skill of sailing a ship is fundamentally rich in sensory inputs and necessary reactions.