In 2015, Microsoft and Rare unveiled their next ambitious project, called Sea of Thieves. This pirate themed game focusses heavily on co-op gameplay and the thrill of exploring the seas and finding booty. Many people were excited and played the betas whenever they had the chance. Most of them left the betas with a positive, yet cautious vibe since many players thought the game was lacking content and experienced numerous technical issues. Now the game has finally been released and I’m afraid that the betas were an accurate representation of the full game.
The story of Sea of Thieves is almost non-existent, which is not a bad thing in this case. You pick a randomly generated design of a pirate, choose whether you want to play solo or with friends and which ship you’d like to use. Your character then wakes up in a bar on a small island where several merchants and factions are present. The game then basically tells you ‘go out and explore’. It’s the simplicity of this ‘story’ that benefits the game since it immediately makes it obvious that you can do whatever you want without any story-related limitations. It also motivates you to make your own story by participating in naval warfare or treasure hunting on cursed islands. In short, in Sea of Thieves, you are the supposed master of your own story.
If this complete freedom doesn’t interest you and want a little sense of purpose or something to guide you, you can complete tasks for three factions. These consist out of the Gold Hoarders, Merchant Alliance and the Order of Souls. Gold Hoarders collect treasure chests and pay you various amounts of gold if you manage to bring these to them. The Merchant Alliance orders you to deliver cargo to random locations and the Order of Souls wants you to defeat skeletons and bring back magic skulls of former pirates. These three companies basically as the game’s progression system. The more tasks you complete from a faction, the higher your reputation becomes and the more difficult tasks you can accept. You can also buy company-related skins for your weapons and tools, to show off your hard work to other players. However, this progression system is very basic and lacks any depth. The tasks you have to complete are always the same, with only a slight difference in the number of skeletons you have to kill or treasure chests you have to find. It’s disappointing to see the missed opportunities Rare could have implemented into the game, like chasing a notorious pirate on land and water or rescuing prisoners from a heavily guarded prison island. There also isn’t a major goal you’re working towards, with the exception of unlocking skins for your tools and ships. This, combined with the shallow tasks makes Sea of Thieves a painfully repetitive experience.
Great naval combat
When Rare showed gameplay footage of the game before the release day, they mostly showed the naval combat mechanics. When you’re controlling your ship, either a sloop or galleon, you have to manually raise or lower the sails, raise the anchor and fire the cannons. It’s possible to sail a sloop on your own, but the galleon requires more than one player to operate. Once you start battling another ship, you have to keep an eye on the hull, as it can get damaged by enemy attacks and create leaks that fill your ship with water. If you wait too long to fix the leaks and remove the water, your ship will sink and you’ll lose all your belongings and cargo. While shooting holes in enemy ships with cannons are the most common strategy, there are different ways to achieve the same result. Your crew can distract the enemy with cannon fire, while you sneak aboard with an explosive barrel that can do major damage. You can also board the other ship and kill the crew with your sword or gun, making it easier to steal their treasure. The naval combat is easily the best part of Sea of Thieves. It is fun to sail the seas with your crew, battle other players and steal their loot. And if you are brave enough, you can hunt the mythical Kraken.
The Kraken is a dangerous sea creature that can attack your ship at any time. Once he has you in his sights, the water around your ship will turn black and several tentacles will pop out. These nasty things can damage your ship and grab you in an attempt to eat you. Defeating this beast is downright impossible when playing alone, but can be defeated when you have a crew. The first time I encountered the Kraken with my crew is a gameplay experience I’ll probably never forget. Our panicked reactions when we realized what we were about to see made the encounter feel real and had us completely immersed. We fought the thing with everything we got. Guns, cannons, explosives and everything else we could throw at it. We eventually beat it and were rewarded with a huge amount of loot that was floating in the sea around our ship. After returning home and selling the treasure, we felt like we accomplished something and couldn’t wait to fight the Kraken again.
We kept playing the game, completing the repetitive tasks and killing hundreds of skeletons until finally, the Kraken attacked us again. Since we had experience fighting it, this time we managed to quickly dispose of it by shooting our cannons at the tentacles’ maws when they were open. The fact that we defeated it so quickly made us worried. Will the next encounters with the Kraken also be like this? Sure enough, the next couple of times we fought it, we won the fight effortlessly because we know its weak points. After a while, we even dreaded fighting the Kraken because we now saw it as an annoyance instead of a challenge. This made me realize something. The Kraken in Sea of Thieves is not a well-designed gameplay event. The only reasons as to why it is so threatening the first time you encounter it are due to the design and you, the player, not knowing how to fight it yet. After that, it basically becomes a joke since it can be defeated so easily. It’s still the best way to earn large amounts of loot, but not the most fun one after playing the game for several hours.
Great visuals
The visuals in Sea of Thieves are simply put amazing. The game is built in the Unreal 4 Engine and it’s clear that Rare knows how to use it. The lighting effects are especially great to look at. The way the sun’s light refracts on the surface water of the ocean is beautiful. Even simple things like a lantern’s flame emit the right amount of light to make it look realistic while still fitting the cartoony art-style of the game. Speaking of the art-style, it looks great on everything, except the characters. The faces of human characters look off and suffer from the dev team’s decision to randomly generate characters instead of designing them. It’s not a big deal since you play the game in a first-person perspective, but still, it would have been nice to see a face that doesn’t look horrible every once and a while.
We’ve been here before
After playing Sea of Thieves for several hours, I thought of something. I was playing a game that advertises itself as a ‘make your own story’ kind of experience. One where the developer promises that you have absolute freedom and can do whatever you want. A game with content that quickly becomes repetitive and unsatisfying. A game that costs €60, but is so shallow that it feels more like an early access project. A game whose player base is already complaining about their experience with it, so shortly after release. We’ve been here before. In 2016, a similar game was released and had the same complaints. This game also promised everything but gave almost nothing. That game was No Man’s Sky. Sea of Thieves is this year’s No Man’s Sky.
Conclusion
Sea of Thieves is not the game Rare (and Microsoft) promised us at their E3 or other presentations. There is not much to do and the things you can do quickly become repetitive. The naval combat and the multiplayer cooperation are the best parts of the game, but fighting the same ships over and over again is not something that will remain a fun experience for most players. I call this game this year’s No Man’s Sky and sincerely hope Rare will vastly improve it in the future to justify its €60 price tag.
