![](/uploads/1/2/6/3/126345511/139630826.jpeg)
The ultimate pirate fantasy can be different for everyone. 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.
Sea of Thieves offers the essential pirate experience, from sailing and fighting to exploring and looting – everything you. No user reviews.
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.Sea of Thieves soars highest during moments of downtime.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 MeSea 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. Instead you just kind of stumble across them from NPCs and lore books in the world.
![Thieves Thieves](/uploads/1/2/6/3/126345511/992005451.jpg)
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. But the bright side of not being forced to complete them is that you really don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Progression in Sea of Thieves, like its overall structure, is pretty loose. Rather than gaining experience points to level up a character, you increase your reputation with five different Companies by completing voyages, finishing Commendations (which are challenges like delivering a certain number of resources to quest givers over time), or turning in specific items like a chest of treasure to the Gold Hoarder.
Each company is associated with a certain activity you could pursue: Sea Dogs for the PvP-focused Arena, Order of Souls for collecting skeleton skulls through PvE combat, or Hunter’s Call for gathering fish and animal meat.The variety of missions is good, but in a game about colorful pirates it seems like a huge missed opportunity that the flavor and personalities of each faction are about as deep as a puddle. I don’t remember any of the merchants’ names and they only exist to sell cosmetics and issue voyage missions.
They may as well be bulletin boards rather than characters. The only exception are the Tall Tales, which usually get kicked off by an NPC with some enticing flavor text – but as soon as you set off, everything else is communicated via obscure treasure maps, lore objects, and bread crumb trails. It makes for exciting adventures full of player-driven intrigue, but not great storytelling.Almost everything you unlock is purely cosmetic.Sea of Thieves’ unusual approach to progression also means that there are no skills or equipment you can earn that will change the way you play. From the moment you first log on all the way through your one-thousandth hour and beyond, you’ll have access to the exact same abilities and weapons as everyone around you. It literally never changes. If it sounds like that could get old, you’re right, and it’s the biggest factor that takes the wind out of Sea of Thieves’ sails after a while.Instead, almost everything you unlock is purely cosmetic. As you rank up with each company, you’ll gain new titles to display above your character, more lucrative and exciting Voyages to undertake, and new outfits to purchase.
Even though the cosmetic rewards enticed me with attractive clothing skins, tons of varied ship designs, and good thematic weapon styles that fit with the factions and setting across your avatar, ship, weapons, clothes, and more, I still was left hoping for something more to shake things up. If all you care about is hunting other players to engage in PvP combat, there’s actually an entire separate section in the main menu, the Arena, designed just for that. It’s split into two competitive versions: two-player Sloop ships or four-player Galleons. Both modes have the objective of racing to dig up buried treasure using only rough maps as a guide and turning them in at a remote merchant vessel. However, the catch here is that everyone is after the same treasure using the same maps at the exact same time, turning it into a frantic, nautical rat race. The winner is decided based on a point system, where points are awarded for both turning in chests and sinking rival ships.
The Arena is exhilarating, stripping away any concerns about deciding where to go next and freeing up my mind to focus solely on PvP.The team coordination required to be successful in the Arena is nearly an Olympic-level feat and really puts the best and most impressive parts of Sea of Thieves on full display: it encourages cooperation with an all-hands-on-deck-style approach. The sense of realism when raising and lowering sails, firing cannons manually from the side of a ship, and literally digging up buried treasure often leads to memorable moments such as trading canon shots while strafing an island as your crewmate grabs a treasure chest before you narrowly avoid getting rammed by enemy ships by dropping your anchor to spin around with a tight turn, almost like an aquatic drift. Timing and coordination is everything.The VerdictSea of Thieves is a pirate fantasy sandbox with an enormous amount of things to do, made unpredictable and exciting by the addition of other players. Coordinating together across the deck of a massive pirate ship is pure chaos at times, but it’s also endlessly entertaining. The cosmetic-only progression system doesn’t give you as much incentive to keep playing as I’d have liked and its free-form nature left me feeling lost at sea at times – but if you’ve got a good group of two or three friends to play with, it’s hard to find a game as entertaining to jump aboard.
![](/uploads/1/2/6/3/126345511/139630826.jpeg)