Sea of Thieves is a creative, stand-out title in an ocean of games re-doing the same formulas over and over.
And I’m just not sure it’s for me.
I have tried to like Sea of Thieves, both playing the beta and watching streamers more entertaining than I play it, but there’s something about this game that just rubs me the wrong way. I kind of get what it’s doing, breaking us out of hand-held tutorials and flashing mission objective markers by forcing us to think and plan and work together. But in practice I just…haven’t found it very fun?
I played by myself:
This resulted in a really strange introduction to the game. I spawned in a bar with a barkeep that wouldn’t speak to me. A prompt said I needed a tankard , but I couldn’t pick up any of the 30 lying around the bar, which was my first instinct. A small thing, but a metaphor for how unintuitive this game can be.
I didn’t have all that much trouble sailing my ship like some have said (which I got out of port after staring down a dockmaster NPC who, also, would not talk to me), though it’s certainly more involved than riding the high seas in Black Flag. But I didn’t understand what I was supposed to be doing or where I was supposed to be going.
So I just went anywhere. I parked at little islands and fought tiny clusters of skeletons and found barrels full of cannonballs, bananas and wooden planks. And nothing else. Always the same skeletons, always the same barrels, wherever I went. Then I went back home to stare blankly at NPCs that would offer no advice or help. I knew there were quests and riddles somewhere in the game, but after 25 years of playing video games and now literally doing it for a living, Sea of Thieves was very good at making me feel like a moron that I didn’t understand how or where to get to the meat of this game.
Then I played with a team:
I matchmade into a team game where four people control a much larger ship. Even here, seemingly no one had any clue what they were doing. We all ran around an island doing…pretty much nothing, then got in our ship, where my crewmates kept randomly dropping the anchor in the middle of the ocean.
After a little while of this and only communication via emotes, my crew members started to wink out of existence, quitting the game and leaving me to man this giant ship by myself. I landed on an island. More bananas. More wooden planks. What is this game?
Then I watched Twitch streamers:
Sea of Thieves has been one of the most popular games in the directory the past few days, and here you can get more of a sense of the game by people who have put in a lot of time and are playing how it was “meant” to be played, with a crew of colorful personalities laughing and joking about what’s happening.
Even here, though, even finally understanding the core feedback loop of solving quest riddles for chests on islands, which you take back and sell for money, which you use to buy things like guns and tankards and “better accordions,” it all still doesn’t seem that interesting? The most “wacky” thing I saw a streamer do was sail to an island, steal someone else’s boat by shooting themselves out of a cannon onto it, then ramming it into rocks to sink it. Funny, but….why? They can just respawn it? It was just a gag for the stream that served no real purpose in the game itself, and I’m not sure I understand the appeal of a Pirate Troll Simulator.
No, I still haven’t played with my own friends:
I know that people will say this is the “missing piece” as this is how Sea of Thieves is meant to be played, but I haven’t played with my IRL friends, including the Forbes Games crew, because this game locked me out of the beta, telling me it was “too early” to join, and 48 hours later I stumbled into access, somehow, by joining the Xbox Insider program. So I couldn’t play right when everyone was starting, and now I have to wrangle some folks to give it a shot.
But looking ahead long-term, if IRL friend co-op is how this is “meant” to be played and solo play is a lackluster experience, this game is just not going to be for me. I just don’t play games like that extensively. Best case scenario I could schedule maybe what, two hours a week with friends to play a game like this? And even that seems like a stretch. So if that’s what Sea of Thieves demanding of me, sorry, it’s not going to happen. To me this feels like a game that was literally designed for Twitch streamers. Good for visibility, perhaps not great for the average player.
Outside of all this I just…don’t really like much of what I’ve seen here. The character designs are incredibly off-putting. The land maps look like something from a low-budget indie game, while the water effects are some of the best I’ve ever seen in the industry, which is a weird juxtaposition. Controls are clunky, from sailing (you can’t see where you’re going with a non-transparent sail in your face at all times), to fighting (such an incredibly simplistic system, I’m not sure why it exists at all in a game based mostly around puzzles). I just really have not enjoyed much of my early time with this game so far.
To be clear, I’m not saying this is definitely a bad game or won’t find an audience. The impression I’m getting so far is that it’s probably just not for me, though it does make me wonder about its mass appeal when it’s almost mandatory you’re playing with your friends or not at all. Its guidelines-less sandbox reminds me in a lot of ways of Minecraft, a game that also isn’t really my cup of tea, but blew up regardless, so maybe there’s hope it will attract a similar audience. But Minecraft is also a game you can easily play solo, which I have not found to be the case with Sea of Thieves.
If you’re enjoying Sea of Thieves, rock on. But I’ve found it strangely cryptic and relatively inaccessible, and not a world I’d care to spend much time in. I will give it more time, trying to explore it in more depth after filling in more of my knowledge gaps, but for now, my first impression is that this is not something I’ll be playing long-term.
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