Pirates have made an abundance of appearances in the past in the gaming industry. Whether they were enemies players had to deal with, or characters players have controlled, pirates are a fun topic on which to base a game. However, there haven’t been too many pirate games where the player can be themselves and roam around sailing with friends to do what pirates do best: solve maps, find treasure and duel in naval warfare. “Sea of Thieves” tries its best to give the players just that: a true pirating experience where players can go and be their own kind of pirate. Created by the famous game developing company, Rare, and published by Microsoft Studios, this game brings players together for swashbuckling adventures on the high seas.
While there is no plot to the game, the player’s main objective is to level up his reputation with three factions: the gold hoarders, the merchant alliance and the order of souls. The gold hoarders will give players voyages that require navigation skill to find the island with the “X” mark where a chest can be dug up. This guild also gives voyages where players must solve riddles to where a chest can also be shoveled up. The merchant alliance deals with trading animals and materials to certain outposts by specific times. In these voyages, players must take cages to certain islands that house the animals asked for, and then they must safely bring them to the required outpost. The order of souls gives players bounties of past pirate captains who are now skeleton bosses. They can sail to the island where the skeleton captain was last seen and face a few waves of skeleton enemies until the captain appears and obtain their skull to trade in for gold.
These voyages will give players the opportunity to earn gold and heighten the reputation in each faction. Players can continue to earn gold as there will be either more bounties, chests or animals to trade. There are also different types of skulls and chests that will give players more gold than a regular chest or skull. Players can then use this gold to buy cosmetic items such as outfits, peg legs, eyepatches, nicer looking equipment and cosmetic ship looks. While none of these make a player stronger than any other, they do make them look stylish whilst sailing the ocean.
“Sea of Thieves” gives players the choice of four weapons from which to choose: a cutlass that works as a melee weapon, a blunderbuss (shotgun), a flintlock pistol and a sniper rifle. Players also have the cannons on their ship to use when going against others in naval warfare. This game relies heavily on players working together and is a lot more difficult and less rewarding when playing alone. Players have two ships they can crew up on. One of these is a sloop, which is small for only one or two players where everything on board such as the anchor, sail controls and helm are close by for quick reach. However, being small, there is only one cannon on each side of the ship so naval warfare can be brutal and the ship can be easily lost if not strategically used. The other option is a galleon, which is for three to four players to captain. These have more cannons and fire powers and are harder to sink; however, the sails, anchor and helm are far away from each other and require full crew communication and cooperation to sail correctly. The map on a galleon is below deck, unlike the sloop where it can be seen at the helm, so a galleon captain must rely on someone to be a navigator.
The soundtrack for this game is beautiful as well, having many songs played on a hurdy-gurdy, or a concertina, giving the official pirate feel. This, along with the beautiful visuals of the water and the artistic look of the characters, gives players a colorful and bright sailing experience.
While there are a lot of good things about this game, there are also a lot of issues. One of the biggest issues is the large lack of content this game currently needs. Being in years of development and beta testing, many players believed this game would hold their attention for hours. However, with repetitive voyages that get tiring fast and not many variations of enemies, the game can quickly become boring, which isn’t right, seeing as people spent $60 for the game. Another issue is the large amount of bugs and connection issues that the game still has. Once more having years to be made, there was still significant connection issues with management shutting down servers for long amounts of time in the week of release. This has caused many potential players to drop the game entirely and not buy it.
While “Sea of Thieves” can be a lot of fun with friends and make for a lot of shenanigans, there just isn’t much there for players to keep returning. While the game developers have DLC cosmetics coming soon and plan to add more to the game, people are fearing that too many new games will come out by then, leaving this game to sit and be forgotten. If you’re a fan of pirating and have some friends interested in playing, then this game is for you, but if you don’t care too much for sailing with friends, then this game is a skip.
