Sea Of Thieves is an online adventure game where you play a crew of pirates roaming around a great sea, looking for treasures to plunder, skeletons to defeat and other ships to sink. It entirely lives on the fact that you can play it online with your friend, and ultimately dies because of the lack of content, lack of progression, frustrating player encounters and the fact that your millage may vary with your friends depending on what kind of gamers they are. I still had a good time with it, but it’s entirely because it’s something I could play with my buddies during these quarantine times.
After a small tutorial where you’re taught the basics of the game - using a compass, fighting, digging for treasure, fixing boat damage using planks, sailing, you are thrown in the crew of your choice. I wouldn’t imagine playing SoT alone, nor with random people, so I’ve always played with the same group of friends since the very beginning. The more players you are (up to four) the bigger the boats are and the more you need teamwork to make everything work together, which I like.
One person simply cannot steer the boat by themselves because they don’t have access to the world map and cannot see in front of the boat with the sails down. Raising the anchor takes some time if you do it alone, but goes faster with other players. Same with moving the sails around, it’s all about teamwork. This is a neat design decision - they could’ve have a map near the the wheel and the sails could’ve been placed in such a way yo allow the captain to see everything - but instead you really need everyone to be doing something most of the time while the boat is moving between islands. This can turn sour a little if people take the game too seriously and someone messes up, since the consequences will be lost time for everyone. Again, I cannot imagine playing this game with random players.
My two biggest gripes with Sea Of Thieves are the playable content and the progression systems. There is a very limited number of things to do in the game. Most quests are either “Go to island X and kill skeletons.” “Go to island X and dig up a treasure” and “Go to island X and deliver something”. The game will try to break the monotony by sometimes throwing in an enigma or by not precisely saying where ‘Island X’ is, but you are more or less always doing the same thing. The holiday season, for instance, has special quests, but they’re just supercharged versions of regular ones, I’ve had to deliver 50 pieces of cargo from point A to point B recently, which was okay in order of rewards, but extremely boring. Sometimes you’ll find something neat, still, like a shipwreck, a special boss fight, a puzzle more involved than the usual, but it’s a very fleeting thing, you’ll be back in the loop soon enough.
Progression is gated by reputation with various factions and gold you get for turning in quests. You can become an emissary for a faction which gives you bonuses and special quests with them (see previous paragraph, these quests are just longer versions of regular quests) and accomplish challenges to give you titles and cosmetic items. Gold is also used to buy cosmetics for your character, ship, clothing and gear. There is really nothing to progress towards in Sea Of Thieves, you buy cosmetics to look cool, and then you’re done. Your items are reset every time you start the game, so if you’ve took the time to cook some good food and stockpile cannonballs, they’re all gone.
There is no experience, no level system. Your gun will be terrible from minute 1 to hour 50, you’ll always take six hits before dying, your sword will always take three hits to dispatch a regular skeleton. No faster reloading on the canons, no upgrades, no skills, no nothing. I’ve heard the argument that this is a multiplayer player-versus-player experience and having powers and gear would make the game unbalanced in favor of people who’ve been playing since the beginning. To that I say that it already is, a grasp of the game’s mechanics already made everyone we encountered extremely dangerous. In addition, PvP could’ve been something you enable before leaving port. I get that the point is having fun with your friends while roaming the beautiful waves, but that fun is paper-thin.
It’s not that there is no fun to be had, you can shoot yourself out of a cannon, you can buy a cat - why is it a paid microtransaction in a full priced game again? - you can fight other ships with everyone on the canons and yelling about what you should do. You can fight giant sharks. You can play music with your pals while your ship is going down in flames (because you burned it down at the end of a game session), it’s just that I’m sure there are other multiplayer games with more meat around the skeleton bone than Sea Of Thieves. I wouldn’t play it all alone and even with a full crew it’s not that great. Still, they tried to make a pirate game and it works, it’s just not for me.
