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'Ocean of Thieves'

MSRP $59.99

"'Ocean of Thieves' feels a little thin, but its unique foundation has captured our imagination."

Pros

• Gorgeous and inviting world
• Uniquely fun and easygoing multiplayer space
• Embodies universal pirate fantasy
• Encourages teamwork, play, and adventure

Cons

• One-half-broiled social controls
• Buggy launch

Sea of Thieves is a harrowing and fell crucible where ships clash and players ruthlessly steal each other's hard-earned rewards. It's besides a crazy online party where y'all tin can potable so much grog that you puke in your tankard and throw it in someone's face in the middle of a dance party. It is divers past fascinating contradictions that are at in one case an embodiment of our online gaming zeitgeist, while too defying and undermining mainstream expectations with a radical focus on moment-to-moment play over progression and the dopamine drip-feed of rewards.

Legendary developer Rare (Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye 007, Donkey Kong Country) has come back in a big way, making a bold claim on the future of online gaming. The results don't e'er hang together completely, but when it works, Sea of Thieves casts a uniquely enchanting spell, and after a calendar week of serious play, nosotros still find our listen globe-trotting back to the promise of run a risk on the high seas.

Piracy, for fun and turn a profit!

Ocean of Thieves is an open world online pirate sandbox. You play as a seventeenth-century pirate in the eponymous Sea of Thieves — a wide, open archipelago of mostly small, tropical islands — sailing around in cooperative crews of i to four for plunder and adventure. The developers at Rare take described it as a "Shared Earth Adventure Game" (SWAG), inspired by online survival games similar DayZ and Rust, only intended to foster a friendlier and more attainable feel than its notoriously punishing inspirations.

That friendliness starts with the game looking utterly gorgeous. Everything is bright, colorful, and stylized, embodying that signature Rare charm. From goofy characters to dramatic vistas and the most beautiful in-game water nosotros've ever seen, Ocean of Thieves is a visual banquet. Considering of its quirky visual way that prizes bright colors and singled-out silhouettes over realistic textures, it manages to expect great on a top-of-the line-PC or Xbox One X, or a much more modestly-specced auto. Every player we've spoken to about it in-game agreed it was one of the best-looking titles they'd always seen on the Windows or Xbox platform.

Sea of Thieves is a visual feast.

Your adventures are structured into voyages (quests, in the parlance of most games), purchased from one of three companies. The Gilded Hoarders send you out with X-marks-the-spot maps and site-specific riddles to dig up treasure chests. The Guild of Souls posts bounties for undead pirate captains whom you fight with their skeleton crews to collect glowing compensation skulls. Lastly, the Merchant Brotherhood asks you to locate and capture animals from the islands and bring them to particular outposts by a certain time and engagement: Chickens are the easiest, which you merely grab, followed by pigs that need to be fed periodically, and snakes that seize with teeth unless you at-home them past playing music.

Completing voyages and cashing in their plunder at any outpost will net you aureate to spend on visual upgrades for your pirate, items, and transport. Y'all also earn reputation with each visitor, which serves equally a loose progression framework, since leveling up with each company gives you access to more elaborate voyages and fancier titles that yous can brandish under your name (like "Gold Bucko" or, the one we found funniest, "Mystic Associate"). Crucially, all of these rewards are purely corrective — seasoned sailors will be able to deck themselves out in impressive finery, but functionally the only divergence between a brand new swabbie and the most advanced marauders will be player skill/cognition and the ability to purchase harder voyages, for which they can accept anyone along.

College level voyages are also not substantially more than complicated than the basic ones. While they practice introduce gradual variety such equally rare, cursed chests and tougher skeletons that demand detail tactics (like shadow skeletons that are simply vulnerable when exposed to direct calorie-free, or establish-covered skeletons that heal in water), avant-garde voyages are mostly distinguished by stringing together more than of the same, basic objectives, either past giving you several maps to pursue in any guild, or doling them out in sequential chapters. The net effect is that you stop upwards out at body of water longer, accruing loot, which makes you increasingly vulnerable to other players.

Everything is brilliant, colorful, and stylized, embodying that signature Rare charm.

Until you've cashed in your prizes, your plunder is a concrete object that yous have to carry with both easily and stow somewhere on your transport, meaning yous're vulnerable. The companies don't care who turns what in, and then anyone tin can snatch the rewards of your hard labor. That's what makes Sea of Thieves a game about pirates — the title says information technology all.

Aside from a handful of not-player characters at the outposts, all the ships and pirates yous see on your travels are live players. The developers are cagey about exactly how players are paired in the world, but, in our travels, nosotros ran into other players with varying frequency. Sometimes we'd canvass for long stretches of serene confinement punctuated with the occasional send on the horizon. Other times, we'd find ourselves hounded by the aforementioned transport over and again for hours. Both situations can be lovely, but either risk condign ho-hum when it dominates your play experience. The role that other players had in our time sailing the Body of water of Thieves was the defining factor in our sessions, but besides the most unpredictable.

I'm not here to win; I'm here to brand friends!

Other people are the almost important ingredient in Sea of Thieves. The voyages are deliberately uncomplicated, designed as a framework for meaningful encounters with other players in the world. Dying or sinking your ship is not especially punishing: The dead simply expect for a infinitesimal before warping back to their transport, and you tin can e'er respawn a fresh ship at no price. The rewards y'all have to conduct around are what provide the stakes.

While that element of piracy does give Sea of Thieves a particularly brutal, dog-consume-domestic dog edge, it's meant to be a fun and friendly place. Before the developers implemented guns and swords, they gave every pirate instruments to play (and automatically harmonize) and grog to drink, causing them to stumble around boozer and throw upwards. You can dance and wave and the like through a carte of emotes. Voice chat, both at unlimited range with your own squad and in proximity to anyone else, is cardinal to the experience.

Ocean of Thieves tries to counterbalance the inherently aggressive nature of its subject with a light and silly tone and the tools for social engagement. When this balance works out, it's uniquely compelling. Early in our travels with a mainstay crew of three, ane solo pirate must have attacked united states of america seven or eight times, laughing maniacally and taunting us the whole time. Afterwards a while of this when we again saw a small ship skid out from behind a nearby rock and asked "Is that the aforementioned guy?" we heard a deadened "No … Information technology's another guy …" from the other player right before they attacked. (To be articulate: Information technology was not another guy). After on, afterwards nosotros sank a different solo pirate's ship several times in a row they approached us playing music and offered us a sellable crate of rare tea equally a peace offering. We had a friendly chat about how the game was going and went our separate ways in peace.

Not every meet is so thrilling, though. Merely every bit often, yous will find yourself existence defenseless out unawares past silent assailants that steal your progress without the courtesy of a good story to tell. Or perchance you have a serial of tentative, half encounters with other players where yous never quite engage, but just make each other anxious and tiresome your progress. Player beliefs is the variable that Rare has the least control over, simply since it is the well-nigh of import component in the game, that makes the overall experience extremely contingent on something difficult to predict or manage.

Other people are the most important ingredient in Sea of Thieves.

That applies as much to your ain crew equally it does to players y'all encounter. The optimal experience would exist to sail with a full crew of three good friends, but that'southward not going to exist realistic for a lot of players. Going solo is viable, and tin be quite enjoyable in its own right. The extra maneuverability of the smaller send elegantly balances out the numbers reward of a larger coiffure. It's too the most harrowing way to play, all the same, equally a small transport and no backup emphasizes the risks involved in accruing and cashing in treasure.

The sailing mechanics are a microcosm of what's slap-up nearly Sea of Thieves' arroyo to teamwork. Crews of one or two sail on a smaller, single-sailed sloop that'due south like shooting fish in a barrel to maneuver, but larger crews canvas on galleons with three masts and eight cannons. Galleons are much more unwieldy to steer, so you really need to work together in social club to sail efficiently. No private task in sailing a ship is complicated–adjusting the top or angle of sails, steering, checking the charts–but coordinating all of them requires communication. Sea of Thieves doesn't punish a lack of individual skill–nothing you practice like sailing or fighting is particularly hard or punishing–but it does reward teamwork very well.

Unfortunately, for a game that's so dependent on positive social interactions and collaboration, its social features are woefully underbaked. Incompetent, inattentive or uncommunicative crewmates can make your feel profoundly frustrating. Matchmaking is purely random, with no way to filter or seek out other players that you do not already know. Once you're in a game it'south hard for friends to join up while you're in progress considering the game automatically populates empty slots with random players, and if you restart you lose current voyages and loot that you haven't cashed in.

The but in-game social control is that a majority of the crew tin vote to lock players in the brig, which is a literal cage in the bottom deck of your ship. It'southward intended equally a way to allow players to cocky-enforce good behavior, but with no caps on the fourth dimension people tin can be locked up or whatsoever regulation, it's ripe for abuse. Because you tin't concord slots or otherwise boot players, groups of friends have been using it to passive-aggressively lock up random joiners immediately until they leave. Social controls are especially bad on PC since they go completely through the divide Xbox app, rather than beingness bespoke and in-customer, which tin can be disruptive.

Rare'due south approach to player beliefs is earnest, merely maybe a bit naive. The game is clearly intended to encourage positive interactions, just information technology doesn't requite players enough control, and then at times can feel frustratingly random. Their intent is good, but Rare needs to accept more deliberate steps to construction the game's social feel and empower players.

#content

The problem with reviewing a game like Body of water of Thieves is that, considering the experience is then contingent on other players, playing in the beginning week may not pigment a fair picture show of how the metagame will evolve. For the time being so, nosotros will prepare aside the variable of other players and examine the game itself under ideal atmospheric condition to see how information technology holds up.

The most obvious criticism is that there but isn't plenty basic content in the game at launch. While the world of Sea of Thieves is consistently cute, it'south as well a flake homogeneous. From one corner of the Bounding main to another you volition see basically the same way of tropical island with palm copse, boulders, and sandy beaches. In that location are ostensibly a few named regions on the map, with subtle changes similar the water being a especially vibrant blue in i area, simply for the well-nigh role, everything feels a bit samey. The names of individual locations, such as Shipwreck Bay, Plunder Valley, and Mutineer Rock are all a scrap generic, too. The earth is lovely, only information technology often lacks a sense of real specificity.

The near obvious criticism is that there just isn't enough basic content in the game at launch.

The voyages, likewise, start to feel rote fairly speedily, especially without the spice of other players. Chasing expensive cosmetic rewards offers a similar, but much smaller thrill than, say, earning new weapons and armor in Destiny two or Diablo three. Without whatever mechanical consequences to these rewards will it exist enough to retain players' interest in the long run? Like most major online games now, Sea of Thieves is substantially a big Skinner box — but one that's devoid of the mechanical crunch that gives contemporary games their season.

Some of the criticism virtually content, however, is more of a framing problem with how players have been trained to process AAA games. The loot box controversy is just one small facet of our unhealthy relationship to content consumption. Playing off of our psychology, modern games have manipulated us into focusing on rewards, sometimes at the expense of fifty-fifty enjoying the actual gameplay, which just becomes a means to an end. These games take a linear relationship between content and fourth dimension spent, with players consuming bespoke gameplay experiences one time and never once more, hungry for novelty.

Once high-level players have consumed all of the standard gameplay ("the campaign"), they are occupied by player-versus-player competition and repeatable, skill-based content (raids). These are only a temporary patch, however, to sustain players until a new content infusion. Earth of Warcraft is the archetype and most long-running instance, simply its influence can exist felt throughout contemporary gaming.

Sea of Thieves adopts that structure wholesale (PvP, Skeleton Fort raids, and all), merely radically reframes it around people and accessibility. All of the rewards are purely cosmetic or shareable with anyone in order to avert partitioning the player community into a skill- and investment-based hierarchy. Viewed through the purely mechanical lens of content consumption, Sea of Thieves is laughably thin and artificially stretched out. That sort of callous viewpoint misses the point, notwithstanding.

Coil for initiative

Although Sea of Thieves apparently owes a lot, structurally, to modern, digital RPGs, especially of the massively multiplayer online diverseness, many of its credible flaws make more sense when you view information technology as a pen and newspaper roleplaying game. Well-nigh video gamers have come up to associate "RPG" with quests, boodle, and developing the skills and stats of a persistent character — the mechanical inheritance of Dungeons & Dragons. What RPGs and games with "RPG elements" oftentimes lack in any meaningful way is actual roleplay. They offer elaborate means for mechanical expressions, such as in what skills you cull and how yous fight battles, but they are very crude and on-track in how they allow yous to fill some other graphic symbol's shoes and brand choices equally them that affect the globe and other characters around them.

The perceived gap left by the Sea of Thieves' ostensibly thin content is infinite for the histrion to make full out with playing the role of a pirate. Information technology's a broad archetype with a lot of wiggle room for personality, whether you desire to be the savage alone wolf raider, the fastidious quartermaster, or the drunk and charming cad. Players have thrown around the word "sandbox" for years to describe open, false worlds filled with a diversity of activities for the player to pursue at their leisure. Ocean of Thieves embodies the principle more wholly and earnestly than whatsoever of its peers. It provides you with a suite of toys for playing out a pirate fantasy and so lets you go wild with that in whatever fashion you lot want.

The fun you find in Bounding main of Thieves depends on the energy that you lot and the people effectually you are willing to put into it.

Like a tabletop RPG, and so, the fun you observe in Sea of Thieves depends on the fun and energy that you and the people around yous are willing to put into it. It rewards investment and a sense of self-motivated fun, which volition really resonate with some players, but its loose structure will inevitably push some players abroad. Sea of Thieves goes out of its way to avert teaching you its bones mechanics, dropping you into the earth with petty to no explanation and asking y'all to figure information technology out. Helpful players and/or a willingness to fool effectually and figure it around volition become y'all through, just neither of those is congenital into the game itself.

Rare'southward attempt to take a notoriously punishing form of gameplay and go far and then anyone can play is truly admirable, simply information technology feels like the studio's sanded off a few too many edges in the procedure. Information technology isn't hard to imagine how they got there, either. Sea of Thieves gives astonishing "tissue testing" for brand new players, because it's easy to choice upwardly and goof around in, and pretty much anybody has a shared vocabulary for the basic pirate fantasy. It also must exist amazing to play when everyone has really invested in the game already, such as among developers or in a airtight beta community. Almost players will fall somewhere between those ii poles in practise, however, and information technology's not articulate that Sea of Thieves does enough yet to bridge that gap.

Our Take

For all its flaws, nosotros still discover ourselves uniquely compelled by Body of water of Thieves. The vast majority of current multiplayer games accept drilled downwards into a monomaniacal focus on the mechanics of combat, competition, and authorization. Bounding main of Thieves stands alone because it has pulled back the frame into a softer, more holistic focus on adventure and play. There are no other games quite like it that create a space where you can have loosely goal-oriented play with your friends that also leaves so much breathing room for just hanging out and goofing effectually. That's the existent reason that a lot of people go on to play Destiny, for instance, but Sea of Thieves makes that its explicit purpose, instead of also trying to be an ballsy and challenging narrative and competitive game.

It doesn't always work, only when it does Body of water of Thieves is truly special. Rare has been responsive to its customs all throughout development, and has promised major, free content updates starting several months after release, once all of the inevitable technical hiccups have been worked out (nosotros experienced our share of bugs in the first few days, but the game stabilized nicely over the class of the calendar week). The overall experience is a niggling bare-bones currently, simply to an extent, that'southward by design: Rare has built Sea of Thieves as a foundation that volition grow and evolve based on what the community wants. Design managing director Mike Chapman told us several months ago that "the gold historic period of piracy is yet to come up to the Sea of Thieves." Now that we've spent some time sailing it, we have to concede that the gold age indeed isn't there yet, but there's a promising glint of adventure on the horizon, and nosotros're really rooting for that golden age to arrive.

Is at that place a better alternative?

No. While Bounding main of Thieves shares a lot in common with many of the most pop multiplayer games, its particular tone and focus on low-central fun and accessibility is unique.

How long will it last?

Rare wholly intends to support Body of water of Thieves for years to come, with costless, regular content updates ranging from small-scale additions to major expansions. The question remains of how strong and invested the community will remain through that.

Should you lot buy it?

Aye, if you are excited by the fantasy that the game presents, and especially if you have friends that are besides willing to play with you, then Body of water of Thieves is a rewarding and lovingly-fabricated experience. People on the fence will likely desire to await several months until Rare has had a hazard to start adding additional content and we become a sense of where the game will evolve because it's a little bare-bones at the moment.

Body of water of Thieves is available now exclusively on Xbox One and Windows PC. We reviewed the game on PC using a digital code provided by Microsoft.

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Sea Of Thieves Shops Not Working,

Source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/game-reviews/sea-of-thieves-review/

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