Sea of Thieves is a great social game but not one for the lonely pirates

MICROSOFT’S much anticipated adventure pirate game is great — provided you’ve got some swashbuckling friends to play with.

PIRATES are one of those rare examples of the historical record being written by the losers, and yet they’ve become an indelible part of pop culture — from Treasure Island to Peter Pan to Sid Meier’s Pirates!

Now even Microsoft are releasing a game on the high seas sailing ship adventure theme.

Developed by Rare software and published by Microsoft on PC and Xbox One with crossplay support (if you’re playing on one platform you can game with people on the other), Sea of Thieves puts you in a cartoonish pirate ship in a large ocean and says: “Have fun!”

If you had visions of Pirates of the Caribbean or Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag-style swashbuckling though, you’d best put your cutlass away now because that’s not really the experience on offer in this game.

Sure, you’ve got a ship, you’ve got treasure maps or cargo to deliver, and you’re likely to run into skeleton warriors at some point, but Sea of Thieves doesn’t take itself especially seriously — and in many respects is all the better for it.

It’s pretty clear the idea is that the developers want you to have fun with your friends on the high seas, with the adventure being more about the journey than the destination. However, that assumes you have friends to play with, and that they’ve either spent $99.95 on the game or signed up for the Xbox Game Pass subscription.

Getting your friends together to play the game allows you create a vast array of your own stories.

Sea of Thieves is absolutely playable on your own — you’ve got a single-masted sloop you can get around in — but it also ends up feeling a bit empty and pointless; visit Merchant A, get Treasure Map for Island B, sail there, dig up treasure or fight skeletons, return to Merchant, get paid. Repeat until you have lots of gold, which can be exchanged for purely cosmetic upgrades such as different clothes and sail emblems.

The giant white whale in the sea is the fact the world feels so empty. It’s very rare to encounter other players and even if you do, and assuming a battle then ensues, the stakes are so low as to be largely shin hazards.

If your ship gets sunk, you’ll get another one for free (albeit somewhere else on the map) and any treasure chests on your ship will float in the ocean where your ship sank for a brief period of time to allow the other players to try and collect them.

If you die, either in combat or in a much more amusing but still fatal mishap, you’ll end up on “The Ferry Of The Damned” for a short time before being returned to the game world.

As you might expect, one thing that game does very well is the ships.

Given a game like Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds has 100 players sharing the same map at once, while other large online games such as Battlefield 1 have 64-player matches, and massively multiplayer online RPGs like World of Warcraft or The Elder Scrolls Online have hundreds or even thousands of simultaneous players, the decision to restrict Sea of Thieves to a frankly paltry number of players is baffling, to say the least.

However, there are also a lot of things Sea of Thieves does extremely well — and one of them is the ships.

Crewing a pirate ship with your friends is fun, and the mechanics requiring the sails to be unfurled and set, the anchor raised, ship steered and map read are well done and add to the enjoyment of the game — especially when your crew are running about like hyperactive chickens trying to simultaneously reload a cannon, bail out water and repair holes in the hull.

The water looks incredible and despite the cartoony graphics, it’s a gorgeous game — especially at night, when the moon is reflecting off the waves, the glow of your ship’s lanterns are illuminating the decks and off in the distance you can see a fire burning on an island somewhere. The sound of the ocean is excellent too, and does an admirable job of helping you feel that you’re really on a sailing ship out in the ocean — you can almost taste the salt in the air, in fact.

The game is at its best when you’ve got a motley crew of bandits to take on the high seas with.

Just sailing around is quite relaxing and enjoyable in its own way, but it’s not really enough to sustain long-term gaming, especially given Sea of Thieves’ purchase cost.

It’s also disappointing that there’s so many interesting environmental aspects to discover on the islands (such as giant dinosaur skeletons, or lizard statues, or abandoned encampments) which look cool but don’t relate to anything content-wise. There are no stories or side quests involved, so the literal point of these points of interest appears to be making the player say “that’s interesting”.

When you sail with a crew, however, Sea of Thieves is a totally different experience. Getting your friends together allows you create your own stories — such as the time my friends and I chased a sloop with a rival crew across the map, engaging in artillery duels through a storm, or the epic adventure where three friends and a random fourth crew member took on a skull fort and won, making off with epic loot in a ship held together by hastily-made repairs and riddled with cannon holes.

The disconnect between the multiplayer and solo adventures really is quite jarring, and I can only hope the developers address this in future content updates.

Rare have said they have a road map of additional content for the foreseeable future, but I am reviewing the game as it stands at present and right now Sea of Thieves feels more like Pirates of the Sea of Tranquillity in some respects.

If you’ve got lots of friends with the game, it’s a magnificent social experience and a chance to live out many of those corny pirate clichés which come to mind. If you’re more of a lone adventurer type however, keep your doubloons in your treasure chest until there’s some more significant content updates.

Originally published as Sea of Thieves is a great social game but not one for the lonely pirates