A First Glance at Sea Of Thieves
Sea of Thieves is a neat pirate game by game developers Rare, where you can sail the seas, loot and plunder fortresses, kill skeletons and occasionally fight with other pirates for epic loot. It’s a massive game with an unclaimed sea and all sorts of mystery. Sea of Thieves is also a game that I’ve wanted to try for a while, and a recent 50% off discount allowed me to try it.
Now, most of the time, I’d be diving into this game straight away, on my own. But I’m a very lucky person, and I have some damn good friends.
Adopted by the Stormcloud
Yep, for my first time in Sea of Thieves (after completing the tutorial), I got to sail with the infamous Bacxaber and his crew, veterans of the game and a team of some of the deadliest pirates around. I was working with the professionals here. Despite not knowing what I was really doing. But they happily gave me tips and knowledge as we played along. The session’s goal was to make lots of money, so that’s what we did. We all voted on a mission, sailed to various islands and made a ton of gold.
We’d sail between islands, using treasure maps to find buried gold, while also fighting off both ghosts and skeletons, while also keeping an eye out for other ships. One ship actually made an alliance with us, from which we all benefited from. And we only saw one single enemy pirate, who climbed aboard, killed me then got completely destroyed by the rest of the crew.
The tutorial mission wasn’t bad either.
Sailing is wonderful
The thing that stuck out the most for me was how it does all genuinely feel like an adventure, and that you’re actively sailing a ship. I watched as we sailed across the waves, watching the sun rise and fall, while islands faded into and out of existence. Voyages do take a bit of time, but there can be interesting things along the way, such as skeleton ships, massive megalodon sharks and, potentially, other players.
On top of all that, Sea of Thieves’ art style is absolutely gorgeous, and actually runs pretty nicely on my lower end laptop. I found myself taking a lot of screenshots, trying to capture that beauty.
Not really a solo game
While I do fancy going off on my own to explore, it’s pretty clear that Sea of Thieves wants cooperation and the like. The option to play solo exists, after all, everyone gets their own boat. But it is a bit of a struggle steering a boat, sorting out the sails and knowing when to drop the anchor doing everything on your own.
The only other downside I’ve had is long loading screens. If you can have Sea of Thieves on an SSD, it’s fine. But I don’t have enough space for this 70 GB game to make use of it. So loading times are very slow. I always load eventually, but, for example, if I die, I have to wait extra long to respawn.
Still, Sea of Thieves is a great game and I can’t wait to sail alongside the Stormcloud again.
Sea of Thieves really is a special game. Not perfect, but it fills a very particular niche for me.
It manages to make a fully PvP-enabled open world with no safe zones enjoyable thanks to a lot of simple but clever design decisions.
It’s too bad none of my friends or family play it, and I’m rarely in the mood to hook up with strangers to play with – there are Discord servers for that btw, much better than the in-game matchmaking that essentially throws anyone and everyone together.
Although, the game can be surprisingly enjoyable alone; it’s an almost completely different experience where you can feel almost completely alone on the sea, or be the tiny underdog zig-zagging in the midst of a bunch of angry galleons.