Sea of Thieves’ Season 10 Was Lame

I’m going to be straight here, Season 10 sucked. There was hardly anything in it. We got some numbers, a single world event and a copy of an existing game mode. That was it. Nothing else.

Let’s start with guilds. While guilds are indeed cool, they are mostly just some numbers that go up, and the ability to use your friends’ ships, if they allow you to. Sure, there’s some progression and unlocked tied to it, but 99% of guilds is invisible once you’re in game. The only gameplay-affecting part is when you get to rank 15 and unlock the Guild Emissary Flag. This works like a normal Emissary Flag except instead of giving 150% on Emissary-specific items at rank 5, you instead get +75% extra gold on everything, and can easily just sell all your loot to Sovereigns. This is less than the 150% bonus Reapers get, but Reapers are marked on the map from the start and have to go to an easily attacked location in the middle of the map to sell. At rank 5, guild emissaries are also marked on the map, and, curiously, you can see what type of ship they are.

Most of the time though, you don’t see anything about a guild apart from words. A captained ship pledged to a guild will be shown when you view it via a spyglass, but the guild’s rank is invisible to everyone outside the guild, and once you’re sailing, unless you have the emissary flag, it’s no different from, well, any other time you sail.

And then we have Safer Seas. Safer Seas is nothing more than a copy-paste of High Seas, with the player count set to a maximum of 4. Now, I know that there were more technical difficulties in the background, mainly just making sure that enough servers were being made for more players, but Safer Seas isn’t some massive engineering feat. It’s single player mode, basically. There’s nothing special to it.

Finally, there’s the Skull of Siren Song. But this is a single world event that most people don’t even seem to do. And it’s not even complicated. You dig up a key and a chest, you open the chest then take the skull to Briggsy on a nearby island. The only thing interesting about this voyage is that other people can interfere, but, well, people can interfere in any voyage if they’re on High Seas. Briggsy herself is fun, but the voyage itself is a drag, especially when your ship is slowed down greatly once the Skull of Siren Song is revealed.

And that was it. There was nothing else in season 10. No mini adventures, no real events outside of the standard Christmas one, nothing. And even the Christmas event was nothing special, it was just a repeat of last year’s, complete with a repeat of last year’s Twitch drops as well. We didn’t even get any lore.

There was something that didn’t suck though and that was the cosmetics. Pretty much every new, non-Emporium cosmetic looked awesome. The Gold Leaf set in particular is amazing, and you can just go ahead and buy it all in the normal shop. We also got some nice gear in the season pass, even if the clothes did kinda overlap with the Navigator guild clothing, but it all looked good. Season 11 at least looks like it will continue this trend, and is adding even more cosmetics in the form of rings.

Outside of that though, basically nothing happened. Sure, we did get Safer Seas, which people have been begging for for years, but Safer Seas isn’t new. It’s just High Seas but solo and with some restrictions. For what we were told was going to be a bumper season, we got basically fuck all. Season 9 was just as exciting, and most of that was empty, aside from the Monkey Island tall tales.

At least season 11 proves to be cool. While season 10 played it completely safe, season 11 is reworking voyages and emissary progress, making the world more dynamic, as well as allowing you to dive to the world events you want to do, once you’ve unlocked the ability to do so. So no more being stuck with an unwanted ghost fleet for half an hour. Huzzah.