Sea of Thieves

Having put in far more hours on this over the past few weeks than I’m willing to confess, I have to say that for the majority I have really enjoyed the experience. Whether it’s been sneakily raiding unsuspecting fellow pirates or sinking their ships, throwing buckets of puke over crew-mates, searching treasure maps or trying not to get raided whilst smashing skull island; ultimately, it has been a bundle of fun.

Once you look past the initial teething problems with connectivity and that sinking feeling —no pun intended— when heading to an outpost stacked full of loot for the server to randomly boot us for no apparent reason, rendering the last ninety minutes of game time completely pointless. The biggest issue Sea of Thieves faces is the distinct lack of varied content.

The first things that strikes you once you begin sailing are the water and lighting, it’s beyond beautiful the first time you sail a choppy sea into a sunset. For this, Rare truly delivered. As for the sailing itself, it’s not too difficult playing solo on the game’s small ship, the single-sailed sloop, once you get used to angling the sail dependant of the wind and the slowing distances some of the journeys can seem a little boring without company between destinations.

As for the quests: what you basically have are three factions to level up by completing quests. For one you get maps and riddles, then dig up buried treasure and sell it at an outpost. The second you get sent to an island, kill a bunch of skeletons, collect the captains skull and return that for a reward. And the third you basically have to deliver a commodity to a certain outpost before the rather lenient timer runs out, this usually —at least at lower levels— involves you catching chickens, pigs or snakes from relevantly stocked islands. In completing quests you are also rewarded gold that you can spend on your appearance, ship or equipment; however, everything you buy is purely cosmetic, there is no true levelling up in this game.

Along with the three sets of basic fetch quests you have sunken ships to explore and loot, signalled by birds circling above the sea; and messages in the bottle, which are simply just a random hit from the quests above, these are most commonly found washed up on beaches.

Skull forts offer the only real challenge to the game and typically take twenty to thirty minutes to complete depending on your crew; if other crews interfere as they often do, you can add considerably to that. These fortified islands are signally by a huge skull with flashing eyes above in the sky, these are public events and I think the creators maybe hoped crews would work together to complete them, the reality —at least in my experience— is far from confederate.

Much like when questing for skulls, the island throws waves of skeletons at you, these are numerous and differ in type, some standard ones, metal ones, shadow ones, ones that regenerate in water, etc. Each wave needs to be destroyed until eventually a captain appears, once killed the captain drops a skull shaped key and the island falls peaceful. The key opens the door to a stronghold situated beneath the main fort on the island, inside is a wealth of treasure which from experience seems to range from 9K to15K; not a bad haul.

What makes Sea of Thieves special is the interaction with other players. Solo can be fun for a while but playing as a team of four on a Galleon can be so much more entertaining. I made more new xbox-friends in the first week of playing this than in the whole of last year. The game encourages you to mic up and after the nervousness of four complete strangers passes —often with some random buffoonery— you find yourself having a great time. Playing this with a crew of un-mic’d randoms can be troublesome and makes everything harder than it needs be.

As much as this, the interaction with other crews shapes the game in varied ways. Many, maybe most, simply want to blow you out of the water, but on occasion you meet a friendly. On one voyage me and friend approached a skull fort in a sloop, knowing that another sloop had been there for sometime. Our angle was to hope they had near completed the raid so we could jump in and steel all the loot. The other sloop was a solo player who had foolhardily decided to attempt the raid himself, this guy slowly approached us with his accordion out serenading out entrance and after much deliberation we agreed to help him with the raid and split the treasure. (I’ve seen this where two galleons have agreed and it never goes down smoothly) It was edgy and tense at the end of the raid with very little trust on both sides but we did manage to do exactly as we’d all agreed.

Although it’s certainly not all plain sailing…

The combat is clunky, often you can occupy the same space as the thing you’re trying to attack or morph through it to slash at thin air. The guns seem a little cumbersome but the skeletons seem to have near perfect aim, this is fine until you have four of them all trying to de-humanise you.

Maybe it’s not a great analogy, but isn’t a game about sailing ships that contains only two different ships, akin to a game such as GTA only having two different cars? 

Another gripe would be down to the title being cross-play, with a few PC users now exploiting various hacks including unlimited health and single hit swords. I know Rare are taking a no tolerance approach to cheating and hope they can stamp this type of exploit out for good.

A very minor annoyance, the game constantly spawns me in with a pistol and sniper, whereas my preferred default is cutlas and blunderbuss. (My fault that I forget to switch before I’m on an island surrounded by sword wielding skeletons, cue avoidable death.)