Before the developers implemented guns and swords, they gave every pirate instruments to play (and automatically harmonize) and grog to drink, causing them to stumble around drunk and throw up. While that element of piracy does give Sea of Thieves a particularly brutal, dog-eat-dog edge, it’s meant to be a fun and friendly place. The rewards you have to carry around are what provide the stakes. Dying or sinking your ship is not especially punishing: The dead simply wait for a minute before warping back to their ship, and you can always respawn a fresh ship at no cost. The voyages are deliberately simple, designed as a framework for meaningful encounters with other players in the world. Other people are the most important ingredient in Sea of Thieves. I’m not here to win I’m here to make friends! The role that other players had in our time sailing the Sea of Thieves was the defining factor in our sessions, but also the most unpredictable. Both situations can be lovely, but either risk becoming tedious when it dominates your play experience.
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Other times, we’d find ourselves hounded by the same ship over and over again for hours. Sometimes we’d sail for long stretches of serene solitude punctuated with the occasional ship on the horizon. The developers are cagey about exactly how players are paired in the world, but, in our travels, we ran into other players with varying frequency. That’s what makes Sea of Thieves a game about pirates - the title says it all.Īside from a handful of non-player characters at the outposts, all the ships and pirates you see on your travels are live players. The companies don’t care who turns what in, so anyone can snatch the rewards of your hard labor. Until you’ve cashed in your prizes, your plunder is a physical object that you have to carry with both hands and stow somewhere on your ship, meaning you’re vulnerable. Crucially, all of these rewards are purely cosmetic - seasoned sailors will be able to deck themselves out in impressive finery, but functionally the only difference between a brand new swabbie and the most advanced marauders will be player skill/knowledge and the ability to purchase harder voyages, for which they can take anyone along.Įverything is bright, colorful, and stylized, embodying that signature Rare charm. You also earn reputation with each company, which serves as a loose progression framework, since leveling up with each company gives you access to more elaborate voyages and fancier titles that you can display under your name (like “Gold Bucko” or, the one we found funniest, “Mystic Associate”). Lastly, the Merchant Alliance asks you to locate and capture animals from the islands and bring them to particular outposts by a certain time and date: Chickens are the easiest, which you simply catch, followed by pigs that need to be fed periodically, and snakes that bite unless you calm them by playing music.Ĭompleting voyages and cashing in their plunder at any outpost will net you gold to spend on visual upgrades for your pirate, items, and ship. The Order of Souls posts bounties for undead pirate captains whom you fight with their skeleton crews to collect glowing bounty skulls. The Gold Hoarders send you out with X-marks-the-spot maps and site-specific riddles to dig up treasure chests. Your adventures are structured into voyages (quests, in the parlance of most games), purchased from one of three companies. The developers at Rare have described it as a “Shared World Adventure Game” (SWAG), inspired by online survival games like DayZ and Rust, but intended to foster a friendlier and more accessible experience than its notoriously punishing inspirations. You play as a seventeenth-century pirate in the eponymous Sea of Thieves - a broad, open archipelago of mostly small, tropical islands - sailing around in cooperative crews of one to four for plunder and adventure. Sea of Thieves is an open world online pirate sandbox.
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The results don’t always hang together completely, but when it works, Sea of Thieves casts a uniquely enchanting spell, and after a week of serious play, we still find our mind drifting back to the promise of adventure on the high seas. Legendary developer Rare ( Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye 007, Donkey Kong Country) has come back in a big way, making a bold claim on the future of online gaming. It is defined by fascinating contradictions that are at once an embodiment of our online gaming zeitgeist, while also defying and undermining mainstream expectations with a radical focus on moment-to-moment play over progression and the dopamine drip-feed of rewards.
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It’s also a crazy online party where you can drink so much grog that you puke in your tankard and throw it in someone’s face in the middle of a dance party. Sea of Thieves is a harrowing and brutal crucible where ships clash and players ruthlessly steal each other’s hard-earned rewards.