Sea of Thieves is, arguably, Rare’s first major title since Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts dropped back in 2008. The game definitely turned heads when it debuted four years ago and now that it’s finally here, I’m left wondering what was actually accomplished during that time.
Sea of Thieves
Developer: Rare
Price: $60
Platform: PC & Xbox One
Sea of Thieves is an open-world online pirate game that promises high seas and grand adventures as you and your friends partake in pirate shenanigans. The game has you and your crew of hooligans sailing in either a small sloop, or the larger four crew galleon ship. Unlike the pirate themed Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, Sea of Thieves takes a more jovial approach to the setting with a more cartoonish aesthetic and the encouragement of doing dumb things like launching yourself from the cannon to an enemy ship. There’s also the element of actually properly sailing your ship with you and your crew having to be in constant communication else you’ll soon smash into a rock and go straight to Davy Jones’ locker. As one player steers the ship they’ll need the others to provide directions, control the height and positioning of the sails to be catching the wind for optimal sailing speed, fighting off enemy players, and patching up any holes that spring up. It’s a refreshing system that’s really satisfying when your crew is working in total sync and can lead to some hilarity when it all inevitably goes wrong. Being a multiplayer game, you can encounter other ships full of players while sailing the seas. You might avoid each other, or perhaps open fire in hopes of stealing whatever the other person has. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll just park your ships next to each other and get absolutely plastered with each other. You never know how another crew might react to you which makes each confrontation both exciting and tense.
In lieu of a structured story, there are instead three factions that you’ll perform quests, or voyages as they’re called in-game, in the hopes of becoming a legendary pirate. You’ve got the Gold Hoarders who will assign you classic “X marks the spot” treasure maps, the Order of Souls tasks you with hunting down skeletons for their haunted skulls, and the Merchant Alliance which will assign deliveries such as boxes of cannonballs or a specific breed of chicken. You’ll perform tasks for these three factions, raising your reputation with them in the hopes of gaining access to the legendary pirate faction that offers new voyages and special rewards. Nobody actually knows how all this works for sure though, since you have to get all three factions up to a certain level before you’re given access and so far no player has achieved that yet.
Besides that there are also skeleton forts that are active when an ominous skull cloud hangs over them. These timed events features hordes of skeletons you have to battle through to acquire a key that will give you access to their sought after treasure room. Of course, this being a multiplayer game, that means all players can see when a fort is active and will likely sail over to test their luck. A battle against some skeletons can suddenly turn into a three or even four-way fight as other players descend on the fort. Partnering up with other ships is always an option since you could easily divvy up the loot, but this game is called Sea of Thieves, not Sea of Friends, so the specter of betrayal constantly hangs overhead.
I had a particularly thrilling moment where we battled with another crew over a fort and after coming to a truce and having a good laugh we decided to team up to take down the fort and split the loot. I’m gonna keep it real, while they had honest intentions of being civil we had honest intentions of betraying them, we just never told them this. While me, another crewmate, and the entire other team stormed the fort to fight the skeletons we had our other two players taking turns fighting in the fort and sneaking explosive barrels into their ship. Once the skeleton captain was killed and the treasure room opened we had the two players set off the explosives. Bless their hearts, the other team thought another team had rolled up and was attacking our ships and I encouraged that idea until they peeked over the hill to see our ship opening fire on their already exploding ship and they felt the cold knife of betrayal as I shot them all in the back. My crew loaded the fort’s treasure onto our ship and the loot the other players had on their ship and made a beeline for the closest outpost to deliver the goods.
After sailing for a few minutes we noticed another ship behind us and realized the other players had somehow found us and were giving chase. With the wind against both of us it was a slow and tense crawl to the outpost, and thanks to our better understanding of the sail mechanics we were able to pick up a bit extra speed. Deciding that anchoring the ship would slow us down, when we got to the outpost we decided to crash the ship onto the island as we rushed to collect our gold. When the other players finally caught up with us they decided that similarly beaching their ship was the swiftest way to their revenge and while they were too late to stop us from collecting, they were happy to be paid in blood. Our blood specifically. It was easily one of the best multiplayer experiences I’ve had in my life and shows the potential this game had to be an instant classic if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s so supremely underwhelming in every other way.
Saying the game had a bad launch would be an understatement. I honestly haven’t seen a game launch this bad since probably SimCity, with the one-two punch of servers being on fire and players realizing this probably wasn’t the grand pirate game they were sold on. The game just flat out didn’t work on release. You would wait minutes to enter the game only to be kicked back to the main menu, occasionally the game crashed, or if you actually managed to get in you would sometimes get kicked out anyway. Even things like faction reputation and gold weren’t working. Completing quests would just give the usual fanfare, but you wouldn’t get any reward for your delivered loot. What you would have to do to fix this was quit the game and re-enter it to see your gold and faction points applied to your pirate, which hilariously enough added even more strain on the servers. Some people didn’t even have the gold or reputation ever added to their account which would understandably frustrate many players. It took days for this to be fixed and they even had to turn off achievements because those weren’t working either and caused even more issues with their servers.
Before you could even enter the game to experience the lovely server issues you had to go through what’s absolutely the worst character creator I’ve ever seen. The game randomly creates eight pirates for you to select from and you have to pick carefully because you can’t change their appearance once selected. If you don’t like the eight given to you then you’ll have to reroll another eight until you’re happy. I understand the concept behind this, in that each character feels like a Rare character and everyone’s character keeps to the game’s aesthetic, but when you’re sitting there for over half an hour rolling characters because you can’t find one you like, you start to not care about the reasoning behind the system. It’s frustrating that my opening hour with the game involved me mashing the reroll button while chatting with a friend who was doing the same. I eventually just picked a pirate because I just wanted to play the game and let me tell you, playing the game with a character you’re not happy with isn’t fun.
Once you’re finally in the game you’ll soon realize that the quest loop the three factions have you on is all there is to the game. Get a gold chest, kill some skeletons, catch a chicken, rinse and repeat for hours on end. As you increase your rank in each faction the quests do add new aspects, such as two special skeletons spawning at the end of a skeleton hunt or being given a riddle to find a chest instead of a map, but adding an extra step to a flight of stairs doesn’t drastically change your walk up them. This lack of variety then lays the responsibility of finding something fun to do on you and your friends.
The game also has a carrot on the stick method to its design philosophy, but it never lets you take a bite of the carrot. Your motivation for playing is to acquire gold to buy new cosmetics for your pirate and your ship which is fine. What’s not fine is how the game dangles all these items in front of you and gates them behind absurd amounts of gold. In the beta I was regularly able to purchase new items after partaking in a few voyages; you could get a sweet new cup for 200g or a new gun for around 2000g. In the full release the prices for items has more than quadrupled for everything. That same gun in the final game is now 13,000g. A new mast for your ship before was around 6000g, this time it’s a staggering 70,000g.
You would assume that the prices were lower in the beta to allow players to get a taste for the game and that the final product raised the prices because you’re able to get more gold. Let me tell you right now that you’d be wrong to think that. When you start out chests generally give around 100-200 gold with the rarer chests peaking at around 1000g. On release day I dropped maybe seven hours into the game; I was able to buy a single hook hand for my pirate. Seven hours of work for one of the cheapest cosmetic items. It also doesn’t help that there are only a handful of items, a half dozen or so per item type, so not only does the game expect you to grind hard for its items, but the pickings that are there are pretty slim.
Back to the carrot on a stick philosophy, when viewing faction pages you can see items you’ll be rewarded if you hit certain milestones in that faction which would incentivize you to want to keep playing to get the reward right? No, what happens is you are then given access to purchase that item from the faction; there’s no actual reward for increasing your rank in a faction. To rub this in even more is a mysterious pirate in the tavern who asks you to get all the factions to level 5 then come back to him. Do that and he’ll say come back when they’re all at ten. Return and he’ll tell you to bugger off until they’re at fifteen. This absurd goal posting just throws out any semblance of progress in exchange for loyalty to a worthless grind. On top of this, all weapons share the same amount of damage, so since everything is cosmetic you never actually feel like you’re progressing while the game itself actually gets harder. Order of Souls quests introduce stronger skeletons who can take more hits and hit you harder, but your character never gets any stronger to balance this out. I get that items have static values so all players are always on an equal level, but outside PvP this system just doesn’t work.
With confirmation that Rare plans to add microtransactions soon after release, all the elements at play here start to make sense because this all reeks of a dev ready to add a paid currency in the worst possible way. I looked back at the gameplay footage from two years ago and everything there is unchanged here. The voyages are there, the boat combat and gorgeous water is there; everything that makes the game what it is right now I can see in that old footage so I’m left to wonder what the hell were they working on in that time. With the ridiculous lack of content available and a grind that would make an MMO blush, Sea of Thieves honestly feels like it should have been closer to a $30-$40 release, instead of the full price it’s currently being sold for.
I’m sure you’ve read many reviews for multiplayer focused games like Destiny or what have you, that have said you really shouldn’t play the game solo; well Sea of Thieves is a game you *really* shouldn’t play solo. Having to manage a ship by yourself is a nerve-racking experience and not in a good way as you’re bouncing between piloting, positioning the sails, checking the map to see if you’re going the right way, plugging leaks, and running to the front to check for rocks. You’re also at the mercy of other players as you stand no chance against any sort of ship with two or more players purely because it’s impossible to sail and fight at the same time. Even returning to an outpost to deliver your loot becomes a pain because what once was three players hauling three chests is now you slowly running back and forth between your ship and the merchant. And god help you if you docked your ship even mildly far away or if another ship rolls up on you. The only times I ever had a fun time playing solo was when I avoided storms (because good luck doing that solo), stuck with voyages that weren’t particularly combat heavy, and was lucky enough to not see any hostile players. When these three elements perfectly aligned the game turned from a pirate shenanigans games, to a relaxing sailing game in the same vein as something like Abzû or Journey.
Sea of Thieves doesn’t even manage to avoid any bumps when it comes to basic multiplayer features. The first, and most mind-boggling thing is the complete lack of an invite system when you’re already in-game. In the main menu when selecting the boat you want to start in you can invite a friend from there, but once you’re already in the game there’s no way of doing this. Instead you have to minimize the game, go to your friends list on the Xbox app, and invite them from there. Sometimes when this isn’t working the people in the game will have to quit their session to re-invite everyone into a whole new session. As can be expected, being the guy who has to stop everyone’s fun by making them stop what they’re doing to quit the game so you can join in doesn’t feel very good.
Besides the missing invite system, there’s also no way to kick out random players who happen to join your crew. It would have been nice for there to be an option to restrict players other than your friends from joining your crew but a simple kick option is a basic, practically expected, option. If someone happens to join your crew and your buddy eventually messages that they’re ready to hop in, you have to literally ask that random player if they’d please leave the game so your friend can join. Sometimes, the person will understand and quit but from my experience most players tell you to fuck off and stay in. If this is the case the only alternative is to either quit yourselves and restart the session at the main menu, or vote that player into the brig and hope they quit out of frustration. Neither option feels especially good to do. These might seem like nitpicks, but to me they’re glaring omissions of basic features that just adds on top of a game that’s already laying seeds of doubt to its quality.
The Final Word
Sea of Thieves can be a complete blast to play with your friends but a lack of content, an almost disastrous launch laden with server issues and some highly questionable design decisions makes what should have been the ultimate pirate game into a complete and utter disappointment.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre
