When Rare showed off the awesome trailers for Sea of Thieves at several E3 events, it was pretty much obvious that everyone would be excited. It was all about the pirate lifestyle, and since the release of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, every gamer—excluding myself—has been starved for a really engaging pirate game.
Regardless of the fact that the game seems to be quite fun, of which I have no doubt, I can’t stop feeling that this game will have the same issues Evolve and others had. For instance, when Fable Legends were announced, it seemed quite awesome. The game had exceptional visuals, quirky gameplay and the developers seemed to know exactly where the game was headed. Fast forward to the beta, gamers were given a broken and downright boring gameplay experience that was wholly dependent on you having a good number of friends to play with. The same could be said about Evolve, which had everyone in a tailspin with hype, until the game released.
The problem with games that require you to play with friends, is just that, the fact that you have to play with friends. The second issue with Sea of Thieves is that the developers have already stated that the game will not be a free-to-play experience. This is a cause for concern. When it comes to experiences like this, you have to assume that each one of your friends will buy this game day one; and if they don’t, you’ll be strapped with a bunch of randomly chosen players.
Sea of Thieves require you to communicate in an effective manner, and every player needs to ‘man’ a specific task on your ship. Games like Evolve and Overwatch have the issue where every person goes in it for themselves, and rarely focus on the team effort. Overwatch suffers little from this, as the game can be played and won without much teamwork. Evolve on the other hand fell flat as gamers rarely communicated, and the game died pretty much soon after launch.
So, my question remains, what would Sea of Thieves do to mitigate this fact that not every gamer who buys this game would be going in knowing that you will have to scream into the mic, and most often than not, take orders from the captain. We all know gamers have become used to being the ‘captain’ in every game, rarely being the one that has to follow orders handed down to them by others.
The other issue I see with this game is the fact that everything we’ve seen thus far was mainly combat based. Several players get together and start shooting at each other. Pretty soon afterwards, everyone’s ship is sinking and you have to start over again. This seems to be a griefers paradise. I understand there might be ‘treasure’ to be had on some islands, but mostly you’ll be taking on other players on the open seas. Other than that, when you do not have someone to shoot at, what will you do when you’re on the open seas? Will you just stand there hoping nobody leaves out of sheer boredom? That has a foul stench of becoming very boring, very quickly.
The Division and Destiny have had this issue for ages. Get a team together, go out in the wild, kill some thugs, and collect loot. Rince and repeat. They might be popular, but without a near constant stream of DLC, these would have died out soon after launch. Sea of Thieves seems to be following the same blueprint, offering players a multiplayer only world, followed by a constant stream of DLC to fulfil a $60 experience.
I have no doubt that Rare would be able to pull it off, but I feel that another game that requires you to put in countless hours of ‘grinding’, and not to mention requiring you to have all your friends online when you do want to play, will be worse off than The Division. Beyond that, Sea of Thieves have been set up in a way that will not make any sense in a single player setting, because that might be even more stale and lifeless having to play with a bunch of random players all doing their own thing.
For me, Sea of Thieves seems like a nice idea, but it requires a perfect world to be played in. Online communities on Xbox Live might be awesome to be on, but we all know it’s not the same as playing with random people all laughing together at E3. Rare needs to address how this will work in Sea of Thieves. Will it require grinding to, for example, get enough resources to acquire a new vessel? How does that work? Is there a way to compensate if you can’t find people you want to play with at all times? These questions need to be addressed. Until then, I’m curbing my enthusiasm for Sea of Thieves, and you should too.
Dreyer was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 139 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @dreyer_smit.