Sea of Thieves

Sea of Thieves, if you want the one line take away without reading the full review, is a deeply, unfixably broken game that uses a happy and goofy exterior to hide a deep, cynical, nihilistic interior.

Sea of Thieves is a beautiful game. The ocean alone is easily the most amazing water I've ever seen in a game, and even beyond: it conjures the mental image of the ocean better than going to the ocean ever could. Its bright and cheery and spooky and fun in a way that only Rare could achieve. Storms can be seen as a towering black mass from leagues away, and going through one is a harrowing experience that rides the fine line between being both achievable and preferably avoided. Skeletons, the game's primary NPC antagonist, cackle, creak, and laugh in their whispery way, the more difficult skeletons being made of gold coins (and pans and other jewelry) or black mist that can only be dismissed with a lantern. The Megalodon, a massive shark that introduces itself by breaching jaws open as high as your mast, is a terrifying sight, circling you and occasionally diving in for a massive bite that can open 5 or 6 holes in your ship. The Kraken spawns a mass of inky black water that traps you, forcing you to fight your way free of the towering tentacles. The islands of Sea of Thieves are anything but generic, each being lovingly designed and unique, with the smallest (and even unnamed) hiding secrets beneath.

But for all its beauty, the part where you play it and it becomes a video game instead of an amazing screen saver begins to show cracks. The sailing itself feels great. The ships feel weighty, with the Sloop (the smallest two-man ship) still feeling agile, the Brigandine (the 3 person ship, added after launch) feeling more powerful but more slow, and the Galleon (the 4 person ship) feeling like a floating fortress. Cannons are a blast to fire, with a heavy arc on the cannonball that takes time and skill to get good at. The sails and anchors get slower as the ships get bigger, with the bigger ships each having an additional sail (but also moving just a little faster when you get them all at full wind). Small auditory cue's trigger to tell when all the sails are at full wind (a little music sting) or rattle when they aren't, the ship creaks under the strain when it starts filling with water, music cue's precede any monster attack (although not soon enough to avoid any of them). But the sword and gunplay don't really feel good at all, especially when compared to other first person melee games (even Skyrim feels deeper and more responsive). You have three sword swings, then about a second wait until you can swing again (not just after 3 swings, but every time you stop swinging) or you have a charged-up thrust that does more damage, but comes with a two second heavy breathing penalty afterward. The pistols feel weak, and the Eye of Reach (or Pirate Sniper Rifle, if you will) zooms too far to be useful close and doesn't do enough damage when you are far enough away. The Blunderbuss (or Pirate Shotgun) feels more powerful, but since every gun has a maximum of 5 shots, still doesn't really feel that useful when compared to the faster and infinite ammo sword. The weakest skeletons take 3 sword hits to kill, or 2 pistol or eye hits and one up-close blunderbuss blast, and only take more from there (The gold skeletons in particular are extremely tanky, requiring you to throw water on them to 'rust' them before they start taking any real damage, and even then not much). The Megalodon is very intimidating at first, until you fight it and you realize it just sort of swims around your ship, and if you just put your ship into a loop you can just keep firing canons at it and fix the holes with very little effort. But the Kraken is as difficult as the Megalodon is easy: it traps you instantly and does massive damage and is extremely hard to kill (I've never successfully done it, even after killing at least a dozen tentacles). When faced with a Kraken, unless I have a hold full of loot, I'll just scuttle my ship: they aren't fun to fight, since most of the time your cannons won't have a good angle on any of the tentacles, and solo it just sucks you out and kills you.

But the combat isn't the main focus of the game (although it is one of the core pillars, and the biggest problem, but more on that later). The main focus is sailing around and doing quests, whether found on beaches, bought from Traders (the primary form of progression in the game, who give rep for returning loot found in adventures) or one of the Tall Tales, a post launch addition that's the closest thing Sea of Thieves has to a story mode. Islands are riddled with named skeletons to collect the heads from, buried treasure to dig up, or chests full of rare bounties to find and sell. The loot is fun, from glowing skulls to chests that make you drunk when you carry them, and the loop of going back to the settlements to sell feels good. The Tall Tales are the part where it breaks up the monotony in favor of more intricate quest designs, the chests requiring 3 or 4 steps to find, hopping islands and using unique tools to locate them (and each has a couple of different places they occur, making every run similar but not exactly the same). The first in particular (The Shroudbreaker) feels particularly Indiana Jones, with sunken chests full of captains logs that you use to find an Idol to open a hidden, trapped temple to steal the Shroudbreaker and escape an island full of angry skeletons. The combat being what it is, the game still manages to achieve a feeling of high adventure, sailing through a world of magic and excitement.

This is where the deep problem comes from, because Sea of Thieves is a shared world game where at any moment someone can come along, sink your ship and murder you, stealing everything you have and sending you to spawn at another island on the other side of the world. This seems like a light consequence, because loot can be attained just as easily again, until you start moving into the mid to late game. Things like Tall Tales usually take an hour or more, where at any moment someone can swing along, sink your ship and steal your idol and there's nothing you can do about it. Restart the quest. But what's an hour? It sucks, but easy come, easy go. Skeleton Fortresses are massive forts dotted around the sea that occasionally spawn a 'curse', waves of skeletons that cumulate in a boss who drops a key that unlocks a ton of loot (about 20k gold total). Unless someone comes along and sinks your ship while you're fighting, or they wait until the giant Skull-Cloud that signifies the curse is active goes away, showing that you completed it and that the loot is available and then sink your ship and come and kill you. Again, they spawn all the time and aren't that hard to complete so it's not a huge loss. But its a constant threat, and because you can't actually see what other people have before you kill them, usually they just kill and see what you have after, even when it makes little sense (like ambushing people trying to get to an island: if they had loot they've sold it, and if they're following a map you can't steal it) so all you've really done is troll them by forcing them to restart the Tall Tale or quest or whatever it is.

And here we find the core problem. You have no protection from other players, at any time. Of any kind. So if people want to steal what you have, they can at will. Or if they just think its funny to sink ships parked at islands and fuck the owners over, they can do that too. But the easy access to loot of your own makes stealing it nonsensical: it would take a lot longer to find someone with loot and hope that they have a lot of it than it would be to just get your own. But that's not the point, the point is that you're stealing it from a real person. That in some small way, you're hurting them. This is the deep, dark core of Sea of Thieves: its a glitzy, beautiful bait to draw you in so people with a need to hurt you, can. Other 'survival' shared world type games almost all have a 'private server' option (I can't speak to all of them, but Conan and Ark definitely do and is the preferred way to play those games for me). The game has a PvP mode called the Arena, but you don't hurt anyone in there, they sign up for it. There's fun to be had in there. Ambushing and murdering people, and the specific joy of it, is only possible when the victim has some sort of investment in what you're stealing from them. Even something as simple as loot, easy as it is to attain, can be frustrating when you spend the time to get it only to have your ship sunk when you were on the island and because they have the practice at it, they're much more adept at killing players than you probably are. And any loot on your ship floats to the surface for easy access for your killer, and all loot glitters with a bright spot of light to make it easy to find if you tried to hide it in a small moment of defiance. And if you were too far away to hear the Xbox proximity chat, there is a default item on the wheel that they can use to project their voice from far away so you can clearly hear the racial and sexual epithets they yell at you while they complain you didn't have any loot.

The response generally is, none of it really matters so who cares? Its all just gold and gold is easy to get. And you just use gold to buy cosmetics, of which have no real gameplay impact at all. Even the loot contributing to the different Trader Factions is easily attainable by buying the quests they sell, which are very cheap. But if none of it matters, then why play the game? Why steal it? Why bother to make the game a shared world at all? The answer, simply, is because the point isn't the adventure. Its the theft. The adventures, the sailing, the stories, they're all the bait to give you something someone can take from you. The longer something takes, usually the better the reward, and the worse it feels to have it stolen and the better it feels to steal it. And now that Xbox Game Pass is freely available, there are more and more people freshly stepping into Sea of Thieves, looking either to have fun pirate goofs or to have a great time ruining someone else's. Ships that sail the Reaper's Mark show up on everyone else's map, giving you the even greater power boner of watching people avoid you and try to sail away from wherever you go.

If this was an occasional occurrence, then it wouldn't be that frustrating. But it happens constantly. I have a Brazilian friend, and their servers are much less crowded so is our preferred sea to sail, but still far from immune from people who do nothing but sail the seas looking for times to ruin. You get an additional cosmetic for completing a set of achievements on each Tall Tale, including doing the quest 5 times, and I've started The Shroudbreaker at least 20 times. These people are the actual core player base of Sea of Thieves, because that's an experience you can't find anywhere else. Even Fallout 76 has private servers on the roadmap. No where else is a core part of the game the ability to find anyone, kill them and waste their time. If you aren't in a server with enough people, that server will get merged with another so soon enough there will be fresh ships to sink and people to kill.

Sea of Thieves is not a pirate simulator, Sea of Thieves is not a sailing simulator, Sea of Thieves is not an open world action-adventure game, Sea of Thieves is not a role playing game, Sea of Thieves is not a coop adventure game. Sea of Thieves is a multi-million dollar bully's playground, with lots of fun toys to push the other kids down and take. Sea of Thieves has more and more fun, pretty things to draw people in to give fresh prey to the long-time players. Sea of Thieves is even expense, never having dropped below $30 on PC. So they don't expect most people to buy it, they expect people to download it excitedly with their friends and happily sail into the teeth of someone who gets off on ruining that excitement. It's just good enough to make you want to keep playing, but lacks any real endgame or progression because that was never the point. Just dangling enough fun cosmetics to keep people playing long enough to get completely frustrated and give up, only to be replaced by the next group of people excited to try it. And just like when you were a kid and asked whatever authority figure what they were going to do about the bully, the game just shrugs and says 'That's life'.