Ever want to be a pirate? Why wouldn't you? You drink rum all day and chase that booty across the seven seas! ARGG!!

My Thoughts on Sea of Thieves

If you have played the game and want just read my thoughts, click HERE or scroll down to the section called My Thoughts

Whats the Game about?

Introduction

Sea of Thieves is first-person action-adventure multiplayer cooperative pirate game (did I use enough buzz words?) developed by Rare and published by Microsoft. You can play it on either the PC (where I played it) or on the Xbox with cross play enabled (being able to play with players on both platforms).

Click the Image above to view the trailer

In this beautiful game you'll be able to play as a pirate and sail your very own ship by yourself or in a crew of up to 4 of your friends. The aim of the game is fairly simple, get that booty, get rich and become a Pirate Legend. You can accomplish this by either digging for lost treasure, killing pirate skeletons captains or being and pirate animal wrangler (Wait! What? Why? How boring...)

What People Thought The Game Was Going To Be About

From my impressions of the people I've talked to prior to the game's release, people thought that this game was going to be about being a pirate and going on epic quests or raiding other players for loot. The game's trailer, above, shows us just as much with everything from finding masses of treasure chests to sea battles between huge galleons. It did an excellent job of teasing us about all the customization of your pirate and your ship as well as teasing all the different activities you'd be able to do.

THE HYPE!

As the game's release date approached I was getting more and more excited. I even went to the point of breaking my cardinal rule of NEVER PRE-ORDERING VIDEO GAMES. Having enjoyed the sailing and naval combat of Assassin's Creed Black Flag and mostly enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean (the films went down hill after the first one). As a kid, before I was given my first Harry Potter book, my favourite story was easily Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. In short, I was ready to be a pirate!

What's Actually on Offer?

Remember when I mentioned above that the game's trailer did an excellent job at teasing us about whats on offer in the game? That's mostly true except that it actually shows us EVERYTHING in the game. I think it actually shows us almost every single customization, both ship and pirate, as well as every single quest. Really. I'm not even exaggerating that much.

The Ships

So what can you do in the game? Well you're a pirate (which you kinda get to choose, but not really) and you a choice of two different ship sizes depending on you crew size (Sloop and Galleon. These two ships have all the same elements. There's the helm for steering, cannons for shooting, a navigation area for navigating, storage area for storing, an anchor winch for anchoring and the crows nest. Oh and there's also a brig for annoying your friends. Sailing quickly is done with mounting points for your sails to be raised and lowered and for their angle to be changed to catch the wind.

The Weapons

Every pirate has a choice of four weapons of which you can only carry two of. There's the trusty Cutlass, Pistol, Blunderbuss (Shotgun) and Eye of Reach (Sniper for your 1080 no-scopes). You're able to carry at most 5 shots for each gun at any one time but you can refill on your ship or occasionally on the islands you're raiding.

Tools

You also have a number of tools to help you on your pirate journey because as any pirate knows, preparation is key:

1. a compass
2. a shovel
3. a spyglass
4. a bucket
5. BANANAS

1. Two different instruments
2. a pocket-watch
3. a lantern
4. a pile of wooden planks
5. and of course a tankard.
   These all have specific uses in the game that aren't overly complex and pretty obvious.

The "EPIC" Quests

There isn't a story to the game but there are factions that you can work with.

There are three factions on the game that you as a pirate work with to make gold. There are the Gold Hoarders, the Order of Skulls and the Merchant Alliance. Each have quests that can be purchased from them:

• The Gold Horders sell treasure maps which shows you a picture of a island and where on the island the treasure is. As you progress up the ranks there may also be "riddles" to solve to find the treasure. They aren't hard.
• The Order of Skulls sells bounties for Pirate Captains. These are pretty straight forward. Go to the island and kill the Pirate Captain. There are also a few of his minions roaming around and there are different types that require you to use different tools to kill them.
• The Merchant Alliance sells a list of different resources they need which you can collect on the different islands from such as piggies to a certain number of cannon balls. These are timed quests that require you to collect the different items and deliver them to a certain island.

You'll occasionally come across Messages in Bottles and random other quests to do. These tend to be one or a combination of the ones above. If you're lucky you'll also happen on a sunken ship which has a chance to have loot and relics that you'll be able to sell to the different factions.

There's All This Room For Activities!

Aside from what's on offer above, there are also Skeleton Forts. These are harder encounters with re spawning skeletons. Eventually the Boss Skeleton will spawn and by killing him you'll be rewarded with a key to a vault of treasures. Since these forts are clearly marked for all pirates, you may have to fight off other crews as well as skeletons.

Wait, is that it?

Annnnnnnd that's it. Well not really. There is also the Pirate Legend system. I haven't become a pirate legend yet so I don't really know what it entails, but from what I've seen, its more of the above quests in combination. As you progress up the ranks of pirate legend you'll get more rewards and cosmetics.

Oh, That's Pretty

The main progression systems are your ranks with the different factions and cosmetics. These cosmetics include gun and tool skins and clothing to more piratie things like peg legs, hook hands and captains hats. There are different classes of cosmetics so that all the items in a particular class have a specific theme.

Apart from being able to customise you're pirate, you'll be able to customise your ship. Customisations include your sails, hull and figurehead. These are a lot more expensive than your pirate customisation's.

There are also certain customization's for achieving specific ranks with any of the factions and no customisation's effect the power of weapons or health of your ship or pirate.

My Thoughts

This game is really pretty, or more specifically the water effects are really pretty. Impressively, the cartoony style of the game doesn't clash with the realistic water at all and that's just swell. But much like having a MLG-Skill-enhancing-RGB mouse on your mouse pad, you'll just get used to it after a while and stop noticing. The graphics are also very well optimised, and I guess they have to be to be able to run at 4K on the Xbox One X. I was consistently above the frame-rate of my monitor and it never, ever, dropped in my observations. The design of most of the elements of the game make them distinct and easily . For example its fairly easy to see the difference between the different skeleton types or the size of a ship on the horizon.

THERE'S NOTHING TO DO!!

That's not exactly true but it kind of is. There's plenty to do, but its all busy work. For the ship to get anywhere it needs to be steered and the sails need to be adjusted. This most of the time requires your whole crew to work on to be efficient.

As for the quests, they're a bit lacking in my opinion. Without a story to base anything off, you're essentially just doing the exact same three quests over and over again with very slight variation. And then all of a sudden YOU'RE A PIRATE LEGEND. At which point you're still doing the same things over and over again. All of this with the occasional Skeleton Fort should you choose to do that.

Without the context of a story, its just a long long grind. I like grindy games of of the time, but even this is pushing it for me. Now, you can raid other pirate crews, but after a while it becomes less and less fun in my opinion because of its lack of structure and minimal rewards considering how much time of a time sink these tend to be sometimes. You can get into a 10 min fight with another crew only to find out that their treasure hold is empty.

I've heard the developers call this a "make your own fun" type of game and they've given you enough things to do to go out and follow your own pirate adventure. This is just laziness on their part. Part of the fantasy of being a pirate comes from raiding merchants and being feared by everyone and that doesn't happen in the world. There are no NPC ships at all for you to raid.

As for the solely cosmetic progression of your character, faction progression just makes the quests offer more gold (most of the time), I'm of two minds about it. Its really simple and compared to a more RPG type of progression, it does make PVP more skill based as opposed to character based. I like this aspect of it. The part I don't like however is that all you're getting is gold for completing any of the quests. You're not finding any actual loot to speak of. It would be awesome if you were able to find a cool cosmetic out in the wild as well. That's sadly not the case here.

What Needs to be ADDED for this game to succeed

Some sort of narrative is needed in the game for this game to go anywhere. It doesn't have to be definitive and it doesn't have to actually end, but at the moment I have no idea WHY I'm doing anything. You could say, "To become a feared Pirate Legend!!" and to that I would ask if you know you're progressing toward that from playing the game or from the developers outside the game telling you that that's what you're meant to be doing. That's not even why you're doing it. I know there's that one guy in the Tavern, but s/he just gives you a short poem encouraging you to come back when every five ranks with all the factions. Adding even a basic narrative should also add some context as to why you're doing the different quests and what the different factions represent. At the moment its just, here's a hundred gold for finding a chest that looks like can hold thousands.

Honorable Mentions

• I love how the different instruments automatically sync with each other when playing with another member of your crew.
• I hate that you can endlessly patch your ship up when its being bombarded by cannon fire. I once fired 20 shots below the water line of a sloop and it didn't sink because I was solo and they were a crew of two. I ran out of cannonballs. It was a sad time.

Tips for NEWBS

If you're either thinking about getting this game or are fairly new, here are a few tips to help you along:

1. Turn off your ship lights to make it more difficult to be spotted at night.
2. Stock up your ship with everything you can find from the outposts you encounter. You'll eventually run out if you don't
3. Music puts snakes to sleep and pigs need to be fed when they start making noise. Also don't let the drown (I know that one's pretty obvious)
4. While using a cutlass you can dash forward. This is useful as it one-shots basic skeletons and allows you to travel faster through water when done right.
5. To defeat the different skeletons requires you to do different things to them. For the Black spectre looking ones, shine a lantern on them at night, moss covered ones a weak to your cutlass and gold need to be splashed with water before they can be taken down.
6. Careful shooting yourself out of a cannon when in PVP. Its a bit embarrassing when you miss and both ships just sail away into the sunset without you.
7. If you park your ship terribly and it gets stuck, you can try and wiggle your way out of it but it's easier to just skuttle your ship and get a new one. Go hide you treasure on the island, fetch your new ship and come back for your booty.
8. When working with the Merchant Alliance, try and get quests with Golden animals in them as they're worth the most gold. If you don't have any on your list, just collect all the cages and cancel the quest and get a new one. You can always just hand in the extra filled cages for a small amount of gold.
9. On the Sloop, you can navigate easier by looking over the railing at the back to see your map. You'll never have to run all the way downstairs again. Unless you sail off it.
10. When fighting the Kraken. Don't die. You'll be laughed at by everyone and its embarrassing. (I know I didn't mention the kraken anywhere above, but that's because it really is insignificant. I've come across 5 or so and have never been worried at all. Just shoot it a few times with you cannons and it lets you go. You'll know if you're captured by one because you ship slows down without releasing your anchor for no apparent reason.
    and finally,
11. If you want to get your lady friends wet (from the sea of course), drop your anchor while making a turn to do a hand-brake turn. You can turn almost 180 degrees.

Conclusion

This game has a lot of potential and I did have fun when I first started playing. It just needs more content in the form of different quests before they start releasing more cosmetic content which is coming soon. I know having a parrot is quintessentially a must have for a pirate but you wouldn't want your parrot to get bored as well. It's a beautiful game and if you have a good crew, you'll get less frustrated with the game and have more fun. If you have that one friend that's constantly getting drunk and playing music. Get new friends. Just kidding! Lock them in the brig and leave them there to rot.

Thanks for Reading

Thanks for reading My Thoughts on Sea of Thieves. I hope you enjoyed my opinion of the game. There were a lot of pirate puns in there but I edited them out because this was already a long read where I rambled on and on and on and on. They were also not that funny.

If you want to read anything else from me in the future be sure to Follow me. I'm trying to write something new every day. If you want to read what I wrote yesterday, Why I Love Thor Ragnarok, click HERE Let me know if you agree with me. Thanks again and have a lovely day!!

Image Credits

All Images come from TheVideoGameGallery.com except Banana GIF from GIPHY