Sea of Thieves was one of the most anticipated games of 2018, with gamers around the globe excited to commandeer their own boat, plunder, fight, and get to pirating as soon as the release date came. The game is meant for ridiculous antics, with features like shooting yourself out of a cannon, playing a shanty with your crew, and getting drunk. Really, really drunk. In the game, you sail around an open world, digging, looting, and causing chaos for everyone. Including your crewmates.
One of the most interesting parts of the game is the amount of communication and teamwork required in order to do just about anything. The boats are surprisingly complex, made even more so by the fact that there is no tutorial beside a few quick pop-ups when you first join a game. On a massive boat like the four-man galleon, thorough knowledge of the boat is needed in order to get to piratin’. For the first few hours, you will probably be overwhelmed and, overall, really freakin’ confused. Learning simultaneously how to sail, do quests, catch a chicken and fight other pirates is a challenging and, at times, frustrating experience.
After breaking through the first barrier of knowing what the heck you’re doing, playing with a few good friends can be an exhilarating experience. Everyone has an assigned job, whether it be standing at the wheel, navigating, or searching for boats to ruthlessly loot and, after a long battle, sink. The teamwork aspect of the game, although obviously not the first of its kind, is one of the best executed in just about any game.
On your quest across the seven seas, you’re likely to notice how perfectly, astonishingly well the ocean is simulated in this game. The sound of waves moving up and down the shore is calming, but the omnipresent, terrifying storm is ever-waiting just when you need it the least. The creaking boat and the sound of the sails overhead engages the player. The frantic atmosphere during a battle is both wonderful and thrilling as crewmates desperately scramble to patch the hull before they’re sent to Davey’s Locker. The environment can seamlessly change from calm to chaotic and back again without anything seeming unnatural at all.
Then, soon enough, the boredom sets in.
For the first few voyages you set out on, the experience Sea of Thieves offers is exciting, intriguing and beautifully insane. Going on a quest with your pirate crew and sailing across the seven seas is everyone’s childhood dream, and it seems as though Rare’s new game encapsulates it perfectly. But after a while, it starts to seem as though sailing the ocean has become quite dreary. Hearing the satisfying ‘thunk’ as your shovel digs into the sand and hits a chest for the first time is fun, sure, but what about the seventy-eighth time? After a certain length of time, every voyage seems the same, and the grind to a new shirt or sail becomes bland and unforgiving. Killing skeleton after skeleton with terribly designed close combat becomes routine and automatic, and after long enough, the experience becomes so terribly boring that you want to log off and fall asleep.
In most situations, developers would solve this problem by adding in a new ability or something similar. In Sea of Thieves, the only things you’re spending your (extremely) hard-earned gold on is aesthetic improvements. While this has some bonuses, like making the game equally accessible to both casual and hardcore gamers, it is simply not rewarding enough to merit the many, many hours required to get a fully decked out boat. Although Rare is planning on releasing free DLCs for people to download, all that is added is some new features which provide temporary relief from the monotony of the normal game and which ultimately end in getting more cosmetics. After all the new items have been bought, life returns to normal. Buy a quest, sail to an island, dig, kill, capture. So on and so forth.
If the game had more variety and complexity, having simply cosmetic items would be OK, but considering that it has neither, some serious action would need to be taken for anything to change. But considering the choices the devs have already made, it seems as though the ideal alterations will not be coming anytime soon.
With all these issues, it seems Xbox's problem of having close to no exclusive games is not going away in the near future. Sea of Thieves was a game which showed promise but ended up being one of the most overhyped games so far in 2018. Although redeemed in some respects through the fantastically designed multiplayer and aesthetic elements of the game, the play experience is tedious and dull. Chasing pig after pig, slaying skeleton after skeleton, and uncovering chest after chest seems to be the only three things to do in Rare's new RPG, intermitted every now and then by a sea battle. A battle which may not even be wanted by a crew who just want to relax and sail with their friends.
Rare obviously had good intentions when making Sea of Thieves but, in the end, created a game in which repetition is the only option, and close to nothing is at stake except hours and hours of wasted time. It only takes a few voyages to feel less like a pirate and more like the subject of a series of tests.