Sea of Thieves has been on my Wishlist for a while. It was the next great multiplayer we were going to get once it’s on a reasonable sale. Last week it just happened to be on sale when we were looking at new games to try out so here we are.
To start off, I didn’t know much about Sea of Thieves before playing it. I knew it existed, there was some hype around it when it was coming out, and I knew it had the world’s worst character creator. And that’s about it.
A note on Character Creation: I spent a good 20 minutes here rolling randomly generated pirates until I found one to my liking. I’m surprised that a game this heavily focused on cosmetics doesn’t have a proper character creator. At this moment in time, I don’t even remember what my character looks like….
The following is a recount of my first time playing over the weekend.
The Tutorial
The tutorial is a little better than “Use WASD to move…” It’s short it’s sweet and covers about half the game. You get a treasure map, you find treasure, you dig up treasure, and return treasure for money. Seem’s fairly straight forward so far. You can swing a sword and shoot a gun like a proper pirate. Great! Oh and by the way here is your boat, here’s the sail, here’s the anchor, try to drive it in a straight line and you’re good to go!
As it turns out, I am not good at a sailing in a straight line. I’m pretty sure I managed to get turned around and was going backwards at one point….I was not in charge of driving when we got into the game.
Trying to Form a Party/Crew
I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to figure out how to add friends on Xbox Live for PC. I spent a good chunk of time figuring it out for PSO2 but couldn’t for the life of me remember how to do it here. Our first attempt at grouping up led to Greg’s game getting stuck on a black screen. We ended up force quitting and joining from the lobby. Once we were in the same place and could see each other we grabbed a few voyages (quests) and set off to find our boat.
The First time on the boat
After a bit of search we spot our ship in one of the docks. We’re below deck trying to figure out how to accept a quest and finding our destination on the map when suddenly the lower deck of the ship is on fire. I thought I accidently shot something explosive with a miss click. But then we heard the yelling….
It turns out Sea of Thieves has open voice chat. And that went about exactly as you think it did. Before we even knew what was going on our whole ship is on fire, Greg’s dead, and some guy is chasing me around yelling that he loves me over and over….Welcome to Sea of Thieves I guess.
The Second time on the boat
It took us a good 15 minutes to figure out how to meet up again. Greg was dead and had been transported to another outpost. Meanwhile I’m still alive on our original outpost. The tutorial failed to mention that the mermaids in the water would transport you to where your ship currently is. This goes for if your ship is sunk or you fell off and your buddy sails on without you.
This time we managed to sail out of the outpost without sinking. We found a very small island, killed some snakes, fought a few skeletons and found the treasure chest. We returned to the outpost without incident and turned in our first voyage.
On our way back to our ship we hear a cannon shot. Just off the dock, our ship is once again on fire. We swim out to the ship to see if we can atleast fire back. This takes us into the range of voice chat and the man attacking us is going on and on about how these are his waters and to get out of his outpost. We informed him we couldn’t leave because he set our ship on fire…he wasn’t having it. So again we’ve lost our ship in port.
We almost quit right there. But we decided to give it another go.
Respawn # 3
We decided we wanted to get a taste of PVP after being blown up 2 times. So we went sailing to a new island for quests but were keeping an eye out for any small ships we could engage in combat with. About halfway to our destination we find another sloop on the horizon.
Queue a half hour battle of 2 small ships circling and missing each other. About 15 minutes in we hear: “These are our WATERS!” Apparently we’ve run into our friends from before.
Now the fight isn’t over until one of the ships sinks so if you die you respawn back on your ship. No matter what state it’s in. Twoards the end our entire ship was again on fire so we’d lose half our health just spawing in it. Seeing it’s a losing battle, I jumped off our ship and swam over to theirs. I managed to kill one guy with the blunderbuss from the water and then get the other guy coming up the ladder which left me alone on their ship while they respawned. I quickly grabbed their fire bombs and set fire to their ship before finally succoming to my fate.
The whole thing was hilarious and everyone had a great time. I’m definitely starting to like this game.
The Final Voyage
The last hour of the night was not as eventful. We did a longer voyage that involved solving a riddle to find the treasure. I’d like to point out our ship was docked for a good 20 minutes without incident.
We turned in a few more voyages, took a look at all the cosmetics, and logged off for the night.
The Conclusion
I’m sure we’ll at least get another play session or two out of it, hopefully more though. I can see the find treasure take treasure back loop could get boring but the threat of PVP everywhere makes things a bit more interesting.
As terrible as most of this sounds I actually had a lot of fun playing this. I had no idea what to expect going in but I was not disappointed in the gameplay. It feels like Elite: Dangerous, Guns of Icarus, and The Hunt all mixed together.
Many Welps 