Sea of Thieves is a Wave of Fun and Confusion

This is not a review. Sea of Thieves is a live service game, one that I wasn't initially into because of my Thalassaphobia. And a core part of my review process is that I have to be able to complete the game, I will never review a game that I have not finished. I initially played this because my TTRPG team was working on a pirate game but that was moved to the back burner for us to concentrate on our Space Opera TTRPG with Cyberpunk and Mass Effect like elements (oh hey this is the first time this has ever even been talked about before, congrats you got behind the scenes stuff before our game is even officially announced).

Now, with all that I've experienced in the game, I have many thoughts, some positive, some very negative. It is important to say that I only had one other person to play this with, the main dev of the team I'm a part of, so there are some issues I had that I likely wouldn't have had if I had more people to play with. With that said, I've played a lot of the game now, played multiple "stories" and stuff so I think I can talk about it rather effectively. I will be structuring this differently than my reviews and this will not end with a score, this is purely my impressions and thoughts. So let's get going with my first, and possibly only, Not-Review.

The Drowning

I talked about this in my Why I Quit Playing Destiny 2 article a while ago, but I'll restate it here. I'm not a big fan of live service games and my only real experience with them has been Destiny 2 (although I've been enjoying Helldivers 2 a lot recently so that's also in there). Part of the reason I have issues with Live Service games is that the on-boarding is fucking rough for almost all of them if you haven't been there since the beginning. In Destiny 2, it is overwhelming and it has lead to you having to buy expansion after expansion and dungeons and seasons in order to even be close to people who have been there for years. Well, here in Sea of Thieves I experienced a similar feeling that here I will be referencing as Drowning...because Pirates.

The Drowning experience includes a short Tutorial that is pretty decent, and then being let loose in the giant world of Sea of Thieves. It loads you into a main Island that has everything you need to get going. It's got all the factions, bounty boards, merchants, and quest givers. When you first load in though you don't really get a whole lot of Direction. In Destiny 2, it'll tell you places to start, but in Sea of Thieves, you just kinda have to wander around to figure out some stuff to do. Which is fine, to a point, but it also doesn't really introduce you to the factions that exist. So what ended up happening to me is that I had to look up the symbols for the factions over and over again because I kept forgetting which is which. If there had been a proper tutorial in this experience, I would have had an easier time. I ended up just wandering around the entire fucking Island with my first bit of treasure trying to figure out where the faction is that I'm supposed to sell my treasure to.

Which brings me to a large annoyance I have with the game, there's no Fucking map. Sure, there's one for the world and usually for the Islands you are going to in order to find treasure, but once you've docked at a Port, good fucking luck trying to find where you need to go. I was wandering around trying to find the (soul faction) in my first port, trying to follow the sign post directions, but I just couldn't find them. The other person I was playing with ended up finding them for me because I was so damn lost. This is not a good experience. Just give me a map. It wouldn't be that hard. Every time you unlock a new port, just give a map to the player so you can look up where you need to go immediately as opposed to wandering for minutes. Destiny 2 does this wonderfully because you can just open the map, see where the vendors are, and even where you are so you know how to get to them.

This then brings me to my other issue with Drowning, Menus (which you can see above). Now, Destiny 2 has a massive amount of menus you have to deal with, and Sea of Thieves has just as many, except here, many of those menus are missing obvious pages, like quests. See, I have to hold my left bumper button for the radial wheel menu to pop up where I can press another button to pull out the quest book or other quest items, and sometimes as you're still getting used to things you will accidentally store your quest and lose the very important item you needed to know what to do (you can of course get it back but if you didn’t realize you stored it, well, it feels like you lost it). Then in the normal menu where, in Destiny, you'd be able to see all your quests and items and bounties and such, here it is basically useless unless you want to quit the game or go through the battle pass or select one of your normal inventory items. It feels like Rare wants you to have to "realistically" pull out your quest items and all that because it's, of course, "realistic". Yet, this just leads to confusion when it would make much more sense to have your quests in the normal menu and whenever you select an item, you then leave the menu and pull out the item.

I have already talked about how I have frustrations with "Realism" in games nowadays back in December 2024 Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review (which is here) but let me restate some things here if you don't want to go read that first. Realism gets in the way of having fun. Let's take the menu system I described above, how does it being realistic make it more fun for a newcomer to get used to the nonsensical controls? How is it not easier to just pull up the menu when you press select and have your quest inventory there? Why is there not a quest inventory section when there is a regular inventory section in the normal menu? How is it not just keeping you from being able to easily interact with your quests? Aren't quests the whole point of this game? Why can I even store my quest items when you could just have a bigger quest section in the actual menu? Am I just completely missing where the quests are? Basically, I think realism should only be considered up to the point of whether or not it inhibits you from being able to play the game faster or more fluidly. It simply adds barriers in a game like this to have newcomers get used to the controls. While I did get a bit more used to the controls eventually, it took so long when things could have been much faster with a menu system that makes sense and doesn't only serve the battle pass. I do understand that you can pull out the quest items while running in the current set up of the controls, but I don't think that matters since it would take such a small amount of time with opening the menu and selecting the object. I'll eventually write something rather in depth about my hatred of realism but that's obviously for another Wednesday.

Tall Tales

One of the things about Sea of Thieves that makes it enjoyable isn't even the core gameplay of the game. Over the last several years, Rare has been releasing story DLC for free. I started with the Monkey Island story not because I know anything about that set of games, I don't, but because it interests me. Plus it was the first one they made so I was interested in seeing how it was structured. Immediately, upon getting to Melee Island, the game showed me that this, these Pirate stories, are what I needed to experience. What I was there for to begin with.

It's not inherently the storyline that is interesting here, although that is a part of it. It's the atmosphere. You load into Melee Island where Ghost pirates have taken over the town and you have to figure out how to make it to the Mayor's House. The characters in this single area had more depth than anything in the normal game I had yet to experience. You have the Pirate Lords chilling in the pub, the skulls on the mantle in said pub, some dudes hanging out in the street and making fun of you, the ghost Pirates blocking some areas, and the lookout who is way too old to be the lookout. The game comes alive not because of the gameplay on a ship, but because of the gameplay of being a Pirate in an actual story, an adventure. Think about it like this, would Pirates of the Caribbean be fun if all they did was sail around and dig up random treasure from random people? No, adventures are what make being a Pirate so thrilling. Sea of Thieves, in their story content, accomplish this wonderfully.

That said, there are moments where I wish there was more communication. For instance, in the first mission of the Pirate's of the Caribbean story, A Pirate's Life, you "stow away" on the Ferryman's ship. My partner and I expected it to take us somewhere so we sat waiting expecting the ship to get somewhere. As far as we knew the game didn't tell us what to do. I looked it up and you're supposed to take out your lantern, light a big brazier that is already on fire, and go below deck to find Captain Jack Sparrow. This is interesting but I do wish that the game had given me some kind of direction here. I don't like just sitting and waiting, thinking it will lead us somewhere. I don't remember whether it told me there was a prisoner we had to "save" but if it did, I missed it. This might have been my fault, but if the game had added a page to the Quest book then I could have known what I was looking for, instead we waited 10 minutes. It sucked. The atmosphere in the mission was top notch, so the failures of communication was that much more frustrating.

My Kingdom For A Ship

A core fantasy of Pirating is sailing on the High Seas. Sea of Thieves, mostly, does this very well. You're able to play with 3 types of ships and can either, load in with a generic one of those ships every game session, or buy your own for sooo much gold. I only had one other player so we used a Sloop which was the perfect size. It was also more maneuverable. You turned faster, had one sail which made stopping faster, and it was easier for the helm to see the map since you can look down off the back of the helm and see the map right below. It's a great little ship that I enjoyed riding around in.

There are moments, however, where you are forced to drive a larger ship, these are in Tall Tales. I can tell you're wondering, why have this as a separate section from the Tall Tales if it has to do with them directly? Because I wanted to, and because this is where the "mostly" comes into play for the sailing fantasy of being a Pirate. See, the bigger the ship, the harder to do...well...anything. It takes 2 or 3 sails to slow down, it takes forever to turn, and you can't easily see the map from the Helm. I already knew this because of accidentally selecting a larger ship once but I figured that that would be the only time I'd have to captain one of those ships. Unfortunately, it was not. In the last mission of the Monkey Island Tall Tales, you are forced to pirate a Ghost ship down an annoying but not difficult cave of magma. Then you come to an open area that has rocks you have to avoid while fighting the final Boss', LeChuck, ship. Here is where the awful controls became the bane of my existence for the entirety of the fight. Sailing the ship was already a bitch, but having to avoid rocks and get up next to the ship in order to be able to shoot it with canons was the worst experience I had in the entire game. Add on to this that the cannons I was trying to aim had a very small horizontal swivel so I could only shoot 2 cannon balls before getting out of range in some way. Then, when I tried to use the ones on front, I was told I was unable to use it. For some reason. Now, when I was sailing the ship, my partner was able to use those cannons, which was annoying and odd. The outcome of this fight was nothing but frustration and nothing but hatred for large ships and a hope that I would never ever, ever have to deal with one ever again.

Besides that massive issue I had, the sailing is still rather good in the game. I think my main criticism is just that I wish I could go third person to make steering easier. Assassin's Creed games have amazing sailing, allowing me to captain my ship easily and without frustration since I can see the entire thing. In Sea of Thieves, you are never able to do that which lead to me being the navigator and my partner being the one at the helm. This is probably the point, as it has this odor of realism attached to it that just makes for annoyance. As long as you have multiple people and a small and agile ship, however, the sailing isn't a big problem.

Treasure Remains

I have obviously kinda shat on the game so far during this not-review. That's largely because of my disliking of realism. Yet, I found myself sitting through that disdain for realism and playing more with my partner (until they accidentally wiped their windows partition and since it doesn't seem to work on Linux I haven't played in a while). I found enjoyment of sailing around and finding treasure on different random islands. I loved, despite my fear of the ocean, diving down to get treasure in those Siren Shrines that allowed me to get a ton of treasure and do some small puzzles. I enjoyed unlocking new customization gear for my pirate, getting a new peg-leg was always a joy. I enjoyed loading the ship up with treasure so that when you went below you saw chest after chest just sitting there waiting for my partner or me to pick up and take to the appropriate vendor. The combat felt rather fun as well.

That's kinda the thing that bothers me most about Sea of Thieves. I actually had fun. Mainly in the Tall Tales of course, but even in the normal standard gameplay I had a decent time. I just think it could have been even better is all. I don't mean to disparage the game too much, it is really enjoyable once you've adapted to the menus and systems. It just takes time, like almost all Live Service games.

The Conclusion

Sea of Thieves is a game that feels most worthwhile when you're playing the story content with friends but once that's done it still retains some fun but is significantly less interesting. Sailing feels unsatisfying in anything bigger than the smallest ship (but is decent in that smallest ship), having to buy a boat to be able to customize is awful when it's both super expensive and takes forever to grind your way there (hmmm, I wonder if Micro-Transactions are here to "fix" that forever grind???). The annoying dedication to realism holds the game back when it feels like it just doesn't want to admit to itself that it is, in fact, a game. The UI is confusing to get used to and even when you are finally used to it there is still frustration with the general design of it. Plus it's still a Live Service game with Seasons and battle passes and shit.

Overall, I just think that the non-story parts of the game are, while fun, just more boring but then when you're in the Tall Tales, playing through the story and gameplay moments that are designed with actually fun context in mind, almost everything falls into place and it feels great. If Rare would lower their realism when it comes to the menus, which is realistically an impossibility with how long the game has been out, the game would be so much better. Give me a third person camera for sailing and better menus and this game would be the quintessential pirate game. But hey, if you can deal with those things and have friends to play with, grab it on a sale and play those Tall Tales first to have a ton of fun and get into it quick.

Meow,

Cat