The Surprisingly Balanced and Fair Fighting in Sea of Thieves

I won’t lie, I’m a complete newbie in Sea of Thieves. But I have noticed something which actually seems quite odd and quite interesting to me. While Sea of Thieves does have a large PvP component, it’s all weirdly balanced in a variety of ways. To the point that it comes to mostly skill when it comes to fighting.

Everyone has the exact same tools.

Mechanically, everyone in Sea of Thieves is on the same level. While you can gain levels in all the different factions, your character is always the same. A freshly spawned new pirate has the exact same weapons and tools that a veteran pirate has. The only differences are all mostly cosmetic. And everyone has a nice, green, glowing skeleton inside them.

Seriously, outside of looks, we’re all basically identical, with all the same skills. Everyone can carry 5 food, 5 planks and 10 cannonballs, as well as other assorted stuff. All the weapons are also the same. Every pirate has two weapons, choosing from a sword, a pistol, a blunderbuss or a sniper rifle of some sort. But even these weapons are all very similar, having 5 shots each. Well, aside from the sword.

Because of this, the PvP aspect of Sea of Thieves is consistent across the board, and it takes genuine skill and game knowledge to become a better fighter, rather than just having better weapons or being a higher level.

Resource management

When the skill is even enough, the battle still carries on, except it becomes a game of attrition. After all, all players can only carry so many resources, and needs to make the most of what limited commodities they have. Eventually though, someone will run out of cannon balls to fire, or perhaps they have used all their wooden planks, fixing up their ship. Once one ship becomes low on resources, all they can do is try and avoid the inevitable sinking of their ship, which can’t be repaired any more. You reach a point where you can’t fight back any more.

Fights all seem fairer because of this. A well-stocked ship will do wonders while sailing the seas. But it’s easy to become complacent and use up all your resources, especially in the middle of battle. Really, the only things that are different are food and cannon balls. There are special types of cannon ball that all do different things, but these are mostly found while exploring. Even then though, higher-healing fruit and more exotic cannon balls are all somewhat balanced out in the end, once you run out of resources.

The Downside: Ping and Lag

Really though, the biggest problem for PvP (and Sea of Thieves in general) is one’s connection to the game overall. Despite my low hours in Sea of Thieves, I’ve seen a few server problems, one of which made the crew lose a lot of gold from loot. It seems that the Sea of Thieves servers are a little… temperamental and very jittery. Hit registration is all over the place, even when shooting standard generic PvE enemies. Doesn’t help that Sea of Thieves runs like shit if it’s not on an SSD. Loading times can be really slow, and that holds back players as well.

So, really, at the end of the day, while the more skilled player should normally win, there’s plenty of luck to be had as well. The winner ends up being the person with both skill and a better connection. But otherwise, it its mostly an even playing field…