sea of the thief
Sea of Thieves offers the essential pirate experience, from sailing and fighting to exploring and looting – everything you need to live the pirate life and become a legend in your own right. With no set roles, you have complete freedom to approach the world, and other players, however you choose.
The ultimate pirate fantasy can be different for everyone. sea of the thief Maybe it means you and your crew plundering the vessels of would-be explorers on the open sea as you wreak havoc across the ocean, searching for lost ships and buried treasure on a quest to become a legendary pirate to rival Jack Sparrow, or just singing shanties with a pet monkey. Whatever your particular flavor of piracy, Sea of Thieves’ impressive open-world sandbox gives you the total freedom to do all of that and more while making even its mundane moments fun.
It’s important to understand that even though Sea of Thieves is a shared-world online adventure game, it’s not actually an MMO with a persistent world. This means that each and every time you log into Sea of Thieves you’re given a brand-new ship in one of three classes based on the size of your crew– Sloop (up to two players), Brigantine (up to three players), or Galleon (up to four players) – and everything except your long-term progression goals are reset. All of the supplies you accumulated last time, the row boat you found, the storage chests you saved – all of it’s gone.
While the smallest ship can be controlled by a single person, it loses much of what makes the sailing so fun in the process because instead of working together to wrestle the waves you’re running around the deck like a headless pirate scrambling to not crash. Both of the larger vessels really demand bigger group sizes due to their sheer complexity. You and your crew will be running up and down stairs to adjust sails, steer, scope out what lies ahead, fire cannons, and repair damage at the same time – doing all of this by yourself is hard enough on the smallest ship, and nearly impossible on the bigger ones.
But in the downtime between the Adventure Mode’s moments of tense, often unscripted and organic sea combat, Sea of Thieves perhaps manages to soar its highest. What in most games are all-too-common bouts of tedium from traveling from one objective to the next, giving out orders to teammates, or methodically searching for obscure items on a scavenger hunt are transformed into the main appeal of gameplay and a source of camaraderie in Sea of Thieves. You’ve actually got to adjust the sails to account for the shifting winds, bust out your compass to make sure you’re going the right way, and use your telescope to inspect land masses in the distance – and when there is down time, you and your crew can pull out your musical instruments and listen as they all cleverly sync together and play the same song, perfectly in rhythm. There’s even an achievement for playing your instruments together as your ship sinks.
Then there are the countless examples of Rare’s attention to detail. For example, the actual map that shows your ship’s location relative to the various islands is below deck, meaning a single person can’t steer and see it at the same time, or how you need to manually raise, lower, and adjust the sails to the wind’s direction. These little touches can sound tedious on the surface, but they add up to make Sea of Thieves more immersive overall.
A Pirate’s Life For Me
Sea of Thieves is about as free-form of an experience as you can get, which is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you could probably spend close to a dozen hours having fun sailing around without ever realizing there is a proper campaign to follow (like I did). And that’s when I discovered that even though its free-roaming gameplay is enjoyable enough, once I realized what these missions, called Tall Tales, were and how to access them they led to some of my favorite moments.
Rather than playing out like the brief, objective-focused Voyages, which are standard-issue RPG quests usually about killing a certain named enemy or collecting a specific item, Tall Tales are structured more like one-off mystery adventures that connect into an overarching story. Many of them begin with vague instructions and crude drawings that require you to solve riddles and go on actual scavenger hunts across a variety of islands. They’re brain teasers that really challenge your detective skills, so it’s a bit surprising you’re not pushed toward them more directly as “main missions” in some way.sea of the thief Instead you just kind of stumble across them from NPCs and lore books in the world. Discovering them is intentionally obfuscated to stay thematically consistent with their mysterious topics and vague directions, but a little more guidance on getting started with each would have been great.
