After two days of being “too early,” I finally jumped into the Sea of Thieves closed beta. Microsoft’s pirate MMO is a strange beast, but I knew a bit of what to expect, having played the game at events. Even so the thing is palpably disorienting: most of what you have to do is meant to be intuitive rather than explained, but being thrown into a fight and having to familiarize yourself with an exploding ship during the night isn’t exactly an easy task. My first crew featured a player with deafening white noise in their microphone, so I bailed. On my second shot, I found myself with a friendly group of players midway through a mission, and they were kind enough to take a moment to show me where to find healing bananas, where we kept the ammo, how to fire myself out of a cannon, and so forth. It was a strange experience, still.
Sea of Thieves is not really like any game I’ve played before. You play a pirate, and you have to cooperate with other pirates to successfully steer a ship towards islands where you can find treasure. Along the way there may be other pirates, and fighting them forms the bulk of the game’s actual flavor. It’s an MMO without stats, where skill is as much defined as being able to talk clearly and confidently as it is being able to fiddle a controller with precision. It’s difficult for solo players to the point of being impossible: it’s even near-impossible to play without a microphone, even if you have teammates. A ship requires you to steer, navigate, fire cannons, drop the anchor, adjust sail length and angle, repair damage, load cannons, raise and lower the anchor, etc. — all of these tasks require an individual player to do, and operating a ship is an exercise in teamwork above all else. It leads to some frustrating situations, particularly in matchmade games, but when it works there’s something amazing about it when ti works: four players all running around the ship in improbable coordination, shifting sail angles and devastating unsuspecting enemies. When it’s clear sailing and fewer jobs are required, you can play the accordion on the prow, looking out to sea — it’s the sort of thing that seems stupid until you actually do it.
The necessity for social interaction makes for some strange situations. When my team sunk an enemy ship, one of their players asked to come aboard, promising not to shoot, telling us how he wasn’t able to find a good team. We finally relented after already having killed him the first time we asked, and he brought us all of his cannonballs and bounty. We still escorted him with pistols down to the storeroom — don’t trust pirates. Players have been throwing each other in the brig left and right, which is annoying, was bound to happen and feels just about right for this strange game.
It’s always a good sign when player roles are organically defined rather than placed down and assigned by the game. You don’t press a button to be the guy that ferries cannonballs to your artillerists — you just do it. The guy in the crows nest is the guy in the crows nest just because he went up there, not because he’s a scout class. Playing Destiny 2 lately, I’ve been disappointed by the lack of teamwork required, even in ostensibly coordinated activities like the six-player Raid. Too often, games like that just ask players to play the game next to each other rather than with each other, but Sea of Thieves is the exact opposite. It both requires and rewards coordination, even leadership — someone always emerges as the captain.
This uniqueness is what Microsoft should be chasing right now. After all, Sony has a character when it comes to its exclusive games. Not all of them fit this mold, but many of them orbit the idea of a somewhat dark single-player experience with lavish visuals and a healthy dose of atmospherics. Sony makes and sponsors the sort of games that have a way of struggling in the modern industry, and gamers love them for that. It works well, but it presents a problem for Microsoft: Sony already does that, and does it exceedingly well. And so when Redmond feels like its throwing its considerable resources chasing games of that type, it’s inevitably going to come up short. Sony is just too well-established, and Alan Wake was a while ago.
Sea of Thieves is something different. It feels like it’s utilizing Microsoft’s greatest advantage — a broad network that encompasses both Xbox and Windows — and carves out an identity neither Sony nor Nintendo while it’s at it. I don’t really know how well this game will do: its requirements will make it largely inaccessible to a large number of players, and it’s miles from having the instant appeal of a Sony exclusive. We’ll also still have to see how well it handles extended play when we see how much content there is beyond what’s accessible in the beta. But I feel confident that it will develop a large, passionate fan base that will likely evangelize and grow with time. It feels like the right game for a company that needs exclusive games that can shine even from under Sony’s considerable shadow.
