I’ve put hundreds of hours into this game, but I haven’t had the drive to play it for a few months now. This makes me very sad, because this game is very special to me- it’s a bit embarrassing, but it’s the game that made me spend time with my now-girlfriend, who I love more than anything.
Sea of Thieves is a complex game to analyze. On one hand, it wouldn’t be wrong to describe this game as suffering from the same exact problems nearly every “games as a service” product suffers. A constantly changing release cycle, a focus on getting something out to stop playerbase drops, and a consistent “drip-feed” of content. Sea of Thieves is in many ways bloated, with a lot of systems that are poorly explained, confusing, and seem contradictory to each other. But at the core of this mess is a geniunely fantastic multiplayer sandbox- perhaps wider than it is deep, but still a game designed with core philosophies that, to me, seem to be fairly rare(and given the developers, that makes sense. Sorry.). It has changed a bit in this regard recently, but this game has a bizarre progression. In almost no ways do players “powers” or statistics grow in any meaningful way through progression- rather, most rewards are purely cosmetic, despite the game taking place in a PVP environment. It’s an odd choice, but one I appreciate. Seeing the “hardest to unlock” sails on the horizon does not inspire fear because you know that ship is mathematically faster than yours, it inspires fear because you know those players have likely never been outside.
Sea of thieves setting is perfect for the kind of game it is- there’s a slightly jarring dissonance between the cartoony style and adventurous gameplay that is sometimes interrupted by players arriving, saying the kind of awful things that only people who own an xbox think is normal to say parallels nicely with the fact that pirates, despite an overwhelming amount of “adventurous and fun” romps in media, are kinda fucked up.
I’m getting off course (I blame the storm), but my point is that sea of theives isn’t a particularly well designed video game. It wants to be more things than it’s capable of, and the more you care about a specific thing the more you’re likely to realize the game is flawed- but when you combine all of the silly tools, and play the game as a sandbox to have fun in, it geniunely delivers on the “pirate adventure” fantasy in ways that are impressive, in ways that are conscious of the meta understanding of players.
I really like sea of thieves, and I wish there were more games like it.