A Lack of Pirate Clothing

One of the main goals in the Sea of Thieves is to make your pirate look good. If you visit the shops on any outpost, most of them are selling cosmetics for you to buy. Some are premium, some aren’t. But there are a lot of cool things to buy, to make your pirate look cooler. There’s something odd about all of this though. There’s a bit of a lack of, well, clothing for pirates.

Admittedly, there are plenty of pirate captain clothes. If you want to look like a pirate captain, then you can buy all sorts of jackets and formal wear. Many of the coats and trousers are rather fancy or posh. Some of the names are fancy too, there are a lot of items named ‘admiral’ for example. While you can buy some scruffy stuff, a lot of clothing is actually rather bright and colourful, but not in a pirate-y way. Some gear just looks absolutely hideous, like the Kraken and Crab sets, that come in a myriad of bright colours that don’t always seem to match. Frankly, I absolutely hate the Kraken jackets.

What’s missing though are the classics. Bandanas, striped t-shirts, rugged shorts. We don’t even have a black pirate hat with a traditional skull on it. We have some hats that come close, but most hats in the Sea of Thieves just aren’t decent tricorns. In fact, a lot of hats look weird. Which is part of the reason why I did 50 Legend of the Veil missions in order to get the hat Sarwan wears. Okay, the hat of the son of Flameheart isn’t a traditional pirate hat, but it is closer to being traditional compared to the many hats you get in the clothing store. Many that don’t even make sense, like the frozen viking-like hats. We’re in the Caribbean, there’s no snow around here and, hopefully, there never will be.

The problem is, we know that more traditional, pirate-like gear is available. There are tons of NPCs that look more like the traditional pirates of our childhoods. But they are for NPCs only, and we simply aren’t allowed to buy anything similar. When we do get clothes in an update, it’s done so in such a small way. We’ll get like one jacket and maybe a couple of hats in any one update. With the release of the third Monkey Island Tall Tale, we got some pirate-y gear in the form of bandanas. Something that we kinda should have had from the start of Sea of Thieves. We get little trickles of cosmetics, which Rare uses to extend the game’s lifespan. But we know there are more cosmetics out there, thanks to things like a clothing leak a few years back. That leak consisted of not just hats and clothes, but hair cosmetics as well, especially facial hair. The cosmetics exist, but we can’t ever have them. They’re trapped in a cosmetic limbo until Rare decides to release them. Which might not ever happen.

In the mean time, there are some good cosmetics available. And I will hoard those cosmetics until I get more. Then again, my loadout is pretty much already set in stone. After all, I did do 50 Legend of the Veil missions for a single hat…