If Sea of Thieves Had Blood
Sea of Thieves is a completely bloodless game. Despite the amount of murder that goes on, there is not a single drop of blood to be seen. Ghosts explode into green clouds, skeletons disintegrate into bone dust and human pirates keel over and slowly fade away, rather than ragdolling on death, their souls slowly floating upwards. You can kill sharks, snakes, pigs and chickens for food and they disappear into puffs of smoke, while megalodons and krakens screech in agony before sinking beneath the waves. There’s no blood what so ever. Probably the closest thing to blood is either some light staining on a handful of swords, or the Ritual Skull, which has red marks on it, but those reds are bright enough that they can just be decoration.
Combined with Sea of Thieves’s bright, cheery art style, this fools people into thinking that the game is meant for kids, it’s just a kids’ game, nothing harmful here. Look at the colourful graphics! Look at the scenery! There’s no blood what so ever, it’s great for kids, right? And people DO let their kids play Sea of Thieves. In a previous article, I wrote about how people really want Safer Seas, and there were LOTS of people who admitted that they let their kids play this game, and can’t wait for Safer Seas so they can play without the multiplayer elements.
But despite its looks, Sea of Thieves isn’t a kids game. Its rating is T for Teen, meaning ages 13 and up. People ignore the fact that a lot of murder goes on in the Sea of Thieves. It’s a place where you have to kill to survive, where the world, or at least the bad guys, desperately want you dead. You can’t even dig up a chest without skeletons bursting up from the ground, trying to kill you with whatever they have in hand. More importantly though, multiplayer interactions DO NOT have a rating. You can run into anyone, and it is possible to run into genuinely toxic people who shout slurs over their mics. That’s not something you want to risk children running into.
Simply put, this game is not meant to be for children. Its appearances though trick you into thinking the game is harmless. It’s not. It’s a game filled with pirates, and pirates are violent. People think they can get away with more, they can get away with griefing, they can get away with complaining about being killed, they can get away with anything because the game’s violence is cartoonified. It’s just a kid’s game, after all.
However, if Sea of Thieves had blood, I don’t think this would be a problem. Blood gives weight to the death and destruction. You’re actively killing things, whether it be ghosts or real people. And I think it would better match the pirate aesthetic. It wouldn’t even be a problem to the franchise stuff. After all, Pirates of the Caribbean has blood and death in it. Monkey Island not so much, but then again, the last Monkey Island chapter had an undead pirate warlord, a forced wedding and a mind-controlling sword, all pretty scary things.
There’s already a game that does this well. And we’ve featured it a lot. Team Fortress 2 also has a cartoony feel, but it also has blood, and people understand that it’s a violent game. Yes, some idiots do let their young kids play the game, but overall people get that it’s violent. The blood and guts in Team Fortress 2 are just as cartoony as the rest of the game, but they show that the game is, well, full of death and destruction. And people take the game more seriously.
The same would apply to Sea of Thieves. If there was blood, even if it was cartoon blood, people would take the game more seriously. People would better understand that Sea of Thieves is a pirate game, and pirates are inherently violent. They always were. You can argue that pirates didn’t kill each other, but they definitely attacked other ships, killed other people and stole their loot. Pirates are violent. And beneath its bloodless disguise, Sea of Thieves is violent too.
Would adding blood now change how people play? No, I don’t think so. Adding blood would drive away people playing with their children, but that’s about it. However, had Sea of Thieves originally started with blood, I think it would have been a slightly different game. And I’d love to see how that would have turned out.