Sea of Thieves’ concept is beautifully drawn up. It has exploration, intense PvP and one of the most beautiful sea adventures to ever grace gaming, but it is lacking in content and it needs more reason to keep players moving and exploring. It has plenty of space on its plate for that, but in its vanilla form there’s nothing really to fill that space. I suspect that won’t be the case for long, if Rare has anything to say, but that is the current case now.
Rare brings to the table a neat concept about living the life of a pirate, even down to screwing over another player’s pirate in the high seas by stealing their treasure and sinking their ship. Sea of Thieves for the Xbox One is built on foundation that is simple enough to pick up and go, but the scurvy sea dog of a game seems to have its boat rocked a bit on content.
Before we get into it, let’s talk briefly about this review process. You should know that we took a full week to get our feet wet with this title. For us, the game went live on Monday and it seemed wrong to rush a review for a game that had so many cogs running the machine. While we make no apologies for taking this long, because there were truly things we kept uncovering as our adventure moved forward, we do wonder how people can judge something so quickly from other places. Wondering…wondering…wondering…ah, well, waste of time.
Anyway, let’s dig right into the game.
The initial gameplay design of Sea of Thieves is simple; you get on a ship, you acquire a treasure map and you go exploring the high seas for treasures. Along the way, you enjoy the most beautiful water effects found in a game, while at the same time learning a bit about sailing (such as sail length, sail positioning) and what it means to be a pirate. Those are the core gameplay mechanics you have to know, outside of reading a riddle/treasure map and digging holes, to keep the game interesting and going. If you’re a person with patience, then you might enjoy the calmness to the process and the longevity of the journey you are constantly making. The payoff? Well, most of the time the payoff, especially at the beginning, isn’t as rewarding as it should be, but nonetheless it does exist from adventure to adventure, which is finding treasure and making coin from it.
The underlying mechanics to spice the above up come with PvP with other pirates and enemies. This can be thought of in two different ways.
First, if you choose to play single-player matches, meaning you are the only one on a ship and you are solo adventuring, then you’re going to have a frustrating time. The PvP matches are not in your favor and sometimes your exploration efforts are for not. For example, you must watch over your shoulder every time you’re on a island. There is more than a 60% chance another pirate or a crew of pirates (actual players) are going to find you and kill you. Imagine going across the seas on a 10-15 minute journey to locate treasure, find the island with the treasure, acquire the treasure and then you’re killed on the way back to the boat, thus negating your treasure. That sounds fun, right? It’s not. There are times where you have deciphered a coded message, found the location without an ‘X’ on the map, dug up a valuable treasure only to have it taken from you. It’s frustrating and it begs the question of why a single-player adventure was even made for the game? It’s incredibly unbalanced and not playing in the favor of the single-player that just wants to solve puzzles and get rewarded for it. If this wasn’t enough to make you steam a bit, imagine going to a port, where you turn treasures in, only to find enemies waiting for you — basically pirate camping. Long story short, Sea of Thieves is best played with friends or online single-serving crews.
The second way to play, if I haven’t spoiled it for you, is to get friends onboard with your adventuring or allow the game to randomly select a crew for you. This is the best way to play the game, as you can have back-up and epic pirate battles. There’s nothing quite like having a crew of misfits conquering the open seas with you, and honestly this method of playing the game is far more fun than the single-player method. You get to communicate with your crew, and foes if they’re close enough, to steer the ship, go to battle with other ships or to develop a plan to kill and ravage other pirates. You’re essentially putting together a pirate gang that harasses others on the open sea. How cool is that? It’s actually very fun and cool when it is kicking on all cylinders. There’s a lot of teamwork involved with this method and it usually works out, as Rare has probably planned it that way. Anyway, this is the best way to play the game and I highly recommend going this route in order to succeed quickly in the game and to enjoy the experience overall.
Speaking of success, the game does feature a few level-up opportunities to keep you motivated and engaged. One of the biggest is leveling up in multiple categories from items you find and turn in. The easiest category to explain is a ‘Gold Hoarder’ category that is leveled up by your pirate finding and selling treasure chests at Outposts (those are basically shop spaces, where you can find clothes/weapons/whatnot). You can also acquire treasure hunts from the same shop at the outpost, as well as go to other shops to find other types of quests, like a chicken hunt or material hunt, which also equal out to leveling up specific categories. The better reputation you gain through leveling, the better rewards that come with the process and eventually the more you can open up the game. As you move forward with leveling, you can unlock better maps and such when you reach particular levels. For example, if you hit level five at chest hunting, then you can unlock better maps with better rewards. The maps will cost you money, which is fine because you earn enough coin selling chests, so be aware of it. Leveling up is a huge motivating factor when it comes to continuing the journey machine in Sea of Thieves.
The other motivating factors in this game include the purchasing of better weapons, clothing and material as you gain money and fame. Each Outpost you run into has a unique set of goodies that you can purchase and each goodie is damn expensive, so make sure you’re earning the coin at a good pace. That said, it is still wanting the best of the best material to make your pirate life unique to others, not that you will sit and converse with strangers, but in case you run into chatty pirates you probably want to look your best…and arm yourself with the best weapons. Again, the fact these exists will motivate you to want to do better and keep going in the game.
Shifting gears just slightly, the PvP in this game is rather limited. You can shoot, stab or run. Those are the main choices when fighting another player. You can shoot guns (and they come in a variety from short to long range — somehow a shotgun has made it and it’s a cheating bastard of a gun in this game too), you can stab people with swords or you can simply avoid people, which causes them to do choice one or two on you. If that wasn’t enough, you can battle people on the high seas with cannons on the ship or on land. All of this is easy to use, but in terms of variety it’s still very limiting for an MMO. Also, upgrading the above weapons is still going to cost a lot of money, so working and striving to find better treasures is your goal here. All in all, the PvP is basic for anyone to keep up with and if you should die in the game, you’re just temporarily put on the Ship of the Damned, which eventually allows you to go back to your boat.
Staying with boats, the game offers you two types of boats: A tiny one or a REALLLLLYYY big mother. There’s not really an in-between. The tiny ship has speed, but it doesn’t have the girth. The girth is important because it means your ship can stand things like accidentally hitting a rock or running into a ship and sinking it. If you sneezed on your tiny ship and scratched a rock, it might start sinking quickly (not really, but they can get hole-y really quick).There’s a lot of negatives about the tiny ship versus the bigger one, and it’s certainly easier to control, but the fragility of it is the biggest problem.
The bigger ship is nice because it can be fast and it can cover ground quickly with three sails pointing in the appropriate direction, but it isn’t meant for a tiny crew. It takes some effort to work and maintain, but it’s a horse ultimately.
The ship of my choice for this game is the big one, but only if you have the crew to fill it.
Moving slightly back to gamer melee, the main enemies of the game that cause the most trouble, outside of other pirates, are skeletons that you find on islands. They usually are on treasure islands and they come in a variety. You might have some skeletons with swords, some with hooks, some with guns and some just armed with lefty/righty. None of them are particularly complicated, if you use the right strategy in taking them down. They are shallow enemies with no real grit or intelligence added to them. Put it this way, I’ve been killed twice by skeletons and I blame myself for both times, as getting killed by a skeleton is equivalent to being killed by a pug. It shouldn’t happen, but if it does, then you probably did something incredibly wrong to deserve it. Anyway, they are the main enemies, outside of actual players, and ones that aren’t particularly difficult. Outside of them, you have snakes, sharks and a Kracken I haven’t seen yet. The first two show up once in a while and both can be killed pretty easily. The last one I have no idea, but I’m anxious to find out.
Beyond enemies, the sense of exploration is big for this game. You’ll want to explore the islands to find things and sometimes you will find unexpected items. Those items could be material, like gunpowder, something you can turn in for coin, or sometimes you’ll find things like a perpetually crying treasure chest called the Chest of Sorrow. If you can somehow get that back to an Outpost without it pouring endless amounts of water on your ship and sinking it, then you will get rewarded big time. If you want to be a complete d*ck, though, you can plant that on an opponent’s ship and watch them panic because their ship keeps filling with water. Either way, it’s a neat bonus for exploring islands and it’s not easy to find. I wish the game had more of that in it.
Outside of all of the above, the game really doesn’t offer a whole lot more to it. I can see the spaces left open for potential updates and future DLC, but as it stands Sea of Thieves is skimpy on the content. It’s still fun and if you don’t mind repetitiveness you’re going to be comfortable playing it, but if you’re looking for an unstoppable Rare experience, then you’ll need to give this some time. It has crazy good potential to be something incredibly epic, but the content simply isn’t there yet. I do have faith it will be, but right now it simply hasn’t arrived.
Overall, Sea of Thieves’ concept is beautifully drawn up. It has exploration, intense PvP and one of the most beautiful sea adventures to ever grace gaming, but it is lacking in content and it needs more reason to keep players moving and exploring. It has plenty of space on its plate for that, but in its vanilla form there’s nothing really to fill that space. I suspect that won’t be the case for long, if Rare has anything to say, but that is the current case now.
