Sea of Thieves is a Microsoft play anywhere title by Rare that is available for Xbox One and PC. It currently costs $59.99 US.
Anyone who knows me knows I love pirates. Anything pirate themed immediately grabs my attention and gets me excited; my favorite movie of all time since I was young is Pirates of the Caribbean, I’ve 100% completed the Lego equivalent of my favorite movie, and the most enjoyable experiences from the Assassin’s Creed series for me came from the pirating aspect of Black Flag. So, naturally, when I saw the E3 announcement for Sea of Thieves I was on board almost instantaneously. I had never before played a pirate game with other people, let alone a game that was solely focused on the actual plundering and pillaging of a pirate’s life and nothing else. It seemed like such a perfect idea to me that I don’t understand why this game didn’t exist sooner, and so I cracked and dropped the money for it on launch day to try it out and see if it was everything I hoped it would be.
The first thing you do, as with most games when playing for the first time, is choose your pirate character of choice. There’s no detailed character customization in this game; rather, a random assortment of characters of varying gender, ethnicity, body type, and “wonkiness” are loaded up and you choose your favorite. This “wonkiness,” for lack of a better term, is basically how weird your character looks; there are some missing teeth, there are some with cloudy eyes or extreme lazy eyes, there are some with mashed up faces, and so on. Likewise, there is a wide range of diversity in the characters themselves, with all sorts of ethnicities for both genders available to choose from, and several different body sizes and types as well. From the dozens of characters I saw, there was a small Asian woman playing the hurdy gurdy, a white man roughly the size of a boulder and only sporting about half his teeth, a black woman with a strong upper body build holding a large weapon, and a suave, long haired Italian man posing on a stack of cannonballs just to name a few. In the end the character I chose was an old sea hag with a squared jaw and no teeth drunkenly holding up a tankard. Yup, you read that right, I have zero teeth. She was so hilarious in her triumphantly drunken pose that I couldn’t help but end up choosing her.
Once you are in the game there is a large variety of cosmetic options available that you can purchase with the gold you amass from thieving to further customize your character. You can buy new tools and weapons, which are purely cosmetic and don’t have a leveling system, or you can upgrade your sailor clothes. There’s hats, jackets, hook hands, peg legs, etc…the best part is that the game doesn’t care what gender you choose and keeps all of the cosmetics open to everyone, meaning my old sea hag was sporting a rather unruly beard for a while, much to the displeasure of my companion.
Sea of Thieves gives you all the basic tools any good pirate needs at the start of the game; you have a compass for navigation, a shovel for digging up treasure, a pail for if your ship springs a leak, and musical instruments you can play to pass the time while sailing from island to island. And of course, no good pirate game would be without the rum, and Sea of Thieves gives every player their own tankard that they can refill and drink at their leisure. Downing a tankard full of rum and experimenting with some of your other equipment leads to some rather entertaining results.
I played the game with my boyfriend (who sported the male counterpart to my old hag), and we set sail in our two-man sloop. He had already played the game for a few hours so he was able to show me the ropes (and also give me some good beginner’s tips). He also had a few voyages on him, which are essentially this game’s version of quests, and we set sail to our current destination. There’s no minimap or HUD elements telling you where to go in the game, so you must constantly rely on a world map placed below deck on your ship and the paper trails from your voyages to find the islands and treasure you are looking for. It adds a genuine sense of adventure that this game would be sorely lacking without.
Each voyage will spawn maps or decrees depending on which of the three factions you bought them from. There are voyages from the Merchant’s Alliance, where you gather various materials and bring them to a specific outpost before the given deadline, the Order of Souls, which are the combat missions that involving fighting skeletons and returning the captain’s heads, and my personal favorite, the Gold Hoarders, where you are given a paper treasure map with either an image of an island with an X marks the spot on it or a riddle that you have to decipher to find the hidden treasure. Alongside these quests you can randomly find chests, skulls, other trinkets that can be sold, and messages in a bottle scattered around the various islands. They can also be found in sunken ships, which are most easily spotted by the congregation of seagulls flying above them. Sometimes if the ship is fully submerged this is the only indicator that it is even there. As luck would have it we found a half sunken shipwreck just a few minutes after setting our course to a nearby island, and we managed to pick up a couple treasure chests and a skull inside.
After some more sailing and completing a couple Order of Souls voyages I found a message in a bottle that led to a four-captain strong combat mission on Lone Cove island. On our way there we came across a second sunken ship called “The Feared Dragon,” which lay suspended underwater in a rather frightening fashion guarded by three sharks that ended up eating me. There is a penalty for dying, in which you are transported to the Ferry of the Damned, a ghostly ship that you must wait around on for 20-30 seconds before respawning; mildly irritating during quests, but extremely detrimental in the midst of a pirate battle.
Speaking of, one of the biggest thrills and threats in this game comes from the PvP aspect, as this game not only encourages cooperation between players, but also competition; after all, you are a bunch of pirates. Other ships manned by players can be seen sailing around searching for their own loot, and players can actively engage them in a sea battle. If you have a multi-man crew, one or more players can focus on firing cannons at the other ships and shooting those on board while the other players can try and sneak into their cabin and steal the loot they have acquired from their own missions. Or, if you want, you can sink their ship and all it’s contents. Or if you don’t want to potentially lose your precious gold, you can flee fights. It ends up being a balancing act between potentially earning more loot from other pirates or losing the cargo you currently have. Unfortunately, in the hour I played we did not come across any other players (as crew mates or competing pirates); we did see some in the distance but decided not to engage because we had not yet sold our current haul and didn’t want to risk losing it. It seemed they were not looking for a fight either because they didn’t pursue us as we sailed away.
It didn’t take long playing Sea of Thieves to learn that the core mechanic given the most love and attention is the sailing; that’s where a majority of your time is spent, and that’s where this game really shines. The stylized look of the game itself is gorgeous, but the simulated water is absolutely stunning, and the weight of the waves against your ship can really be felt in the controls; furthermore, the actual sailing mechanics are stellar. Every other pirate game I have played involved pressing a button to drop sails and go faster, and then turn the control stick to turn the ship, with it automatically straightening out when you released the stick; this is not the case in Sea of Thieves. In this game you actually have to control the ship; this means dropping and raising the sails at the appropriate times, rotating the sails at the optimal angle to catch the strongest draft of wind, dropping and raising anchor when you want to stop at an island or set sail again, and most importantly, controlling the ship wheel. The wheel on the sloop can make two full revolutions, where the ship will stay its course at the first revolution, and spinning it in either direction will turn the ship; however, like reality, if you keep the wheel turned, your ship will 
never straighten out, and so you have to make sure you don’t spin the wheel too much or you will overshoot and then have to correct in the opposite direction. There is weight to these controls, with each action having a somewhat realistic delay to it; after all, a large ship won’t turn on a dime as soon as you spin the wheel. As a whole it feels amazing and it is by far the most enjoyable aspect of the game. The only negative is that there are currently only two types of ships in the game, the sloop (for 1-2 players) and the galleon (for 3-4 players), and while I don’t feel that is holding the game back, it would be interesting to see some intermediately sized ships in the future.
Unfortunately, while the sailing controls are near perfect, certain other mechanics are considerably lacking. The combat in particular feels rather flat, with the only enemies you fight being skeletons of various difficulty levels. And unlike your ship, there’s no sense of weight to the combat, so it’s hard to tell if you are even doing damage sometimes or if you are just wildly swinging your sword around in the air. Also, since everything in the game is cosmetic, there is no leveling system to your weapons or character, and so your damage output and health bar remains constant while the enemy difficulty scales up, which in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can become very quickly unbalanced if you happen to be playing solo and suddenly get swarmed by a group of eight high level skeletons, leaving almost no chance of victory.
Furthermore, the launch was a rather rocky one, with many players being unable to join the game due to server overloads, and those who did get in suffered a number of gameplay glitches, from being unable to equip weapons to not receiving gold for selling quest items. During my playtime I frequently fell victim to my character spontaneously getting stuck on the terrain or suddenly walking extremely slow for no reason, and I was also prey to the popular no gold glitch (though exiting the game and signing back in did update my gold to the proper amount). Nothing game breaking, though it is a shame to see so many small bugs at launch after so many open betas and countless forum posts on what needed fixing or updating.
In the end, is it worth the $60 to play? Honestly, I’m not sure. The sailing is phenomenal, and the voyages do scale in difficulty after completing a certain number of them, with many becoming multi-tiered or offering more rewards of higher rarity upon completion. However, I can still see many players quickly becoming burnt out by the repetitive nature of the available voyage types unless Rare adds in a larger variety in the near future. I have several friends who are playing the game at launch as well, and all of them say that the game is significantly more fun playing with friends than playing alone, which I am currently in agreement with. Sea of Thieves feels like a multiplayer game by necessity; the single player option is available, but the greatest moments seem to come from the social aspect of playing with others. I would give it a stronger recommendation to those who love the pirate theme (guilty) and have friends to play it with, otherwise it may be more beneficial to wait a while, either for the price to drop or to see if Rare will add more content to it in the coming months.
Post Note: For those who are interested in taking a closer look at the character generation process, Rare’s lead character artist Sam Chester uploaded several screenshots that break down many of the potential combinations used to create every player pirate in the game on Artstation.
Editor’s Note: Some community members have reported toxic behavior when matched with random players in SoT that includes being locked in the brig without reason and racist or sexist slurs in in-game chat. At this time there doesn’t appear to be anything built into the platform that prevents or combats this kind of behavior.
