Sea of Thieves is Rare’s latest release, and probably the first game of theirs anyone’s cared about since Donkey Kong Country in 2003. But I digress. In this multiplayer shared-world pirate game, you and up to three friends (or matchmade randos) sail the, uh.. one sea, from island to island doing pretty much whatever you want.

Unfortunately there are about 6 things to do, and the most fun was puking into a bucket and throwing it in my friend’s face. Sinking another player’s ship was a pretty close second though.

It’s immediately apparent how much care went into the art, sound and music in this game. It has a bright cartoony style, similar to World of Warcraft and Fortnite.

The water looks insanely good (especially looking up from below the surface) and plays a huge part in the immersive soundscape, alongside creeky ships, beefy cannons and the little ditties you can play and harmonize on your accordion or hurdy-gurdy, whatever the fuck that is.

The crossplay between console and PC is a nice addition, and a trend I really like (as long as it makes sense for the game type). Even though the entire map is a player-vs-player zone, it would be a stretch-and-a-half to consider Sea of Thieves a truly competitive game.

You have a pretty huge area to roam, and with servers capped at 16 players it’s not uncommon to go a few hours without seeing another player-controlled soul.

So what do you do when you’re not horking into buckets or ruining another player’s hours of work? Fetch quests. Yep, the main way of getting gold and reputation in Sea of Thieves is running side missions. Don’t worry though, there are three different factions offering three whole different types of fetch quests.

1: Figure out which island to go to based on the size and shape given on your quest map, and dig where X marks the spot based on various landmarks or simple riddles. 2: Go to a named Island, kill a few pirate skeletons, then kill the skeleton captain and bring back their skull. And everyone’s least favorite, 3: Take cages to capture specific colors of pigs or chickens. Feed pigs so they don’t die, and make sure your chickens don’t get struck by lightning or drown.

Number 3 could actually be kinda cool if you could find animals while doing other missions. But you can only have one active on the captain’s table at a time, and you don’t get the cages until the mission is laid down and voted for by the crew. So you pick up the mission, get the majority of the crew back on the boat to vote for your mission, go back to shore to get the cages, then aimlessly wander until you find that exact animal.

Fuck. That. And to make matters worse, unlike the skull or chest missions in which you can hoard as many as you want on the boat before turning them in for gold and rep, the goddamn animal ones don’t complete until you bring them back to A SPECIFIC OUTPOST. WHAT. THE. FUCK?!

And while on that note, for all your mostly tedious work, nothing you get progresses your character in any meaningful way. The only thing gold gets you are cosmetics for your character, items and ship. Reputation gets you more lucrative missions, often by giving you multiple (of the same) objectives.

While I understand wanting to keep Sea of Thieves balanced for PvP across the board, there are a bunch of upgrades that would improve the quality of pirate life but affect combat minimally, if at all. How about a bigger shovel to dig chests faster? A spyglass with a longer zoom? At least give me a bigger tankard to get drunk faster; or even better, change the amount, range and color of my projectile vomit! Please!

Skeleton forts are supposed to be the higher end activities, with waves of different types of skeletons thrown at you. By the way, other than players, skeletons are the only enemies in the game.

The idea is to get a bunch of crews to set their differences aside and work together to get some really expensive stuff to sell (or get stolen by your temporary comrades). While my two-man crew didn’t complete the event, it was probably the third most fun thing we did.

Overall, I would love to see Sea of Thieves succeed. It’s a solid skeleton, but with very little meat. Sailing is fun, and just chaotic enough to require someone to play captain and give specific orders to get anywhere. But purely cosmetic upgrades don’t make a juicy enough carrot to get my stick going for very long. I’d like to go back in with a full crew of four to take out a skeleton fort, and then spend all night raiding other player ships.

As it stands now, the game is a lot of busy work with very little reward. The looming threat of [warning: obligatory shitty joke incoming] getting your booty plundered keeps things just interesting enough; as long as you’re really, really drunk.

+ Fun, beautiful and immersive experience

+ Requires teamwork and communication

– Lack of variety and meaningful progression hurts the game’s longevity

Final Score:

3.5 / 5

About Author

M. Hamilton

I write about things when I feel like it. Science, tech, video games and festivals are where it’s at.

See author's posts