Sea of Thieves Review

Sea of thieves is thrilling pirate world opened up for you to carve out your own story, be the pirate you want to be, live your wildest sea bound dreams. But above all make your own way to becoming a pirate legend.

Starting out in sea of thieves is fairly simple, the first thing you will be doing is choosing your pirate, The system on this is not for everyone. Rather than you traditional click and select mixed in with various sliders to change the appearance of a basic model character you will be show a group of random pirate models and can randomise as many times as you want until you find one that you like, and once you have chosen them that’s it, that is your pirate from there on out, as far as i know you can not change this i have only found an option to delete.

Once you have chosen your pirate you are thrown in to the world of sea of thieves, you will wake up from what seems like a jolly good bit of grog in a tavern and on you way you go. That’s it, there is no tutorial, no starting quest nothing to actually tell you what to do or where to go, or give you any indication of how to do or what anything actually does.

This is what i consider to be sea of thieves biggest flaw, that you have to either have someone to tell you what to do or just figure it out on your own.

Once you get past the initial frustration of figuring how to do everything and who is who you will end up picking up a voyage or two, these are quests from the three factions in sea of thieves that will ask you to complete certain tasks depending on what faction it came from.

If it was a voyage from my personal favourites the order of souls, they will send you on a hunt to remote islands looking for undead captain’s, you will need to kill all of the captains undead crew before he will come out to play, once you have disposed of him you will be able to pick up the skull dropped by the captain and sell it to the order of souls merchant in return of gold and reputation with them.

The gold hoarders will give you treasure maps, which you will have to search your character map for the matching island then make your way to the x on the map and proceed to dig the chest up from the ground.

Again once you have got the chest, you can sell it to them for gold and reputation.

The last trading company is the Merchant alliance, their quests are slightly different, they will basically give you a list of items that they want, whether that be 2 white chickens (they will specify colour of animals) 2 boxes of exquisite spices or maybe a couple of pigs, But you will not necessarily return them to the same merchant. Some of their quest require you to take sed order to a specific merchant in a specific outpost in return for again gold and reputation.

( Below are some examples of loot that i have found during my time in sea of thieves )

Loot

 

Once you have chosen the voyages you would like to embark on to start you swashbuckling career as a pirate you will make your way to the gem of the show, your boat.

Depending on how you chose to play, Depends on the ship you will have.

You can either sail the open seas on a sloop with 1 or 2 people or on a galleon with 3 or 4 people, dont worry too much you can choose how you would like to play every time you want to jump in to sea of thieves.

You may be thinking to yourself that your ship looks a bit…ratty to say the least, maybe it’s not the lavish HMS that you had pictured or the fear striking black pearl of your dreams. Be patient, this is one of the things you have to work towards, they merchant at the end of the dock can help you kit your new pride and joy out with new paint jobs, sails and even a nice ornament to really give you that pirate feel to your ship. For a price, all of the basic customisation for your ship cost 70,000 gold each and this seems like a steep price at first but just keep doing your voyages and increasing your reputation with the Trading companies and you will eventually be offered a promotion. This will be purchasable from the merchants and grants you access to harder and more expensive voyages that ultimately lead to more loot.

So although the price seems unreal at the start, pretty soon you will be getting voyages  for the likes of 4 captains whose skulls are worth above 1000 gold each.

Plus it’s a good idea to get used to sailing the ships before rushing for gold as its not as easy as it seems. You will need to constantly adjust the sails to catch the wind and cater them to how sharply you want your ship to move and your going to spend a lot of time getting the timing of dropping the anchor right because smashing into a island is an easy way to put 4 or 5 holes in your hull and you will be bucketing out water before you know it. Also you need to be half confident before you start doing big loot runs. This is sea of thieves after all and there is no lack of people waiting to blast cannon balls through your ship in hopes to steal your hard earned loot. Again sea combat is not as easy as it looks, you need to keep canon balls on you, load them aim them then hope you hit while worrying about repairing any holes they have blowin in your ship.

The voyages however are not the only way to earn gold, you can also on occasion come across messages in a bottle or voyages left in books. They will be randomly placed on islands and usually led to some lucrative items, and sometimes unusual chests. On my travels i found a quest in a book that led me to a small island with 4 very hard to kill captains and a chest of sorrow( it’s worth noting, don’t leave this chest on your ship. It cries and floods your ship and if it goes in the water will try and swim away) so just from one book found on a beach i got 4 1000 gold skulls and a chest that sold for near 2000 gold, and bumped me up a few levels with the trading companies.

The last way i know of to earn gold may be the most lucrative but also the hardest. Fortresses, when you see a skull form in the sky, get your team together and set sail straight for it as this is a fortress. It’s hard to get through as the skellington just keep coming and get harder and harder, until the captain comes out. If you can manage to get him down he will drop a key to the vault below the fortress and if you can secure all of the treasure down there you could easily net 10,000 gold each.

I have only done 1 fortress and it took me and 3 other players around a hour and a half to complete, but it was well worth it.

Ok so now you know pretty much everything you have to do in sea of thieves to become a pirate legend. So let me share something i found out through a article published by microsoft and rare.

There is more to sea of thieves than just this, your end goal, once you reach level 50 with all 3 trading companies you will in short become a pirate legend, they meant this literally.

You will gain access to a secret hide out that will allow you to take on legendary voyages for unique items and only the most lucrative loot that only pirate legends can get. It also allows you to purchase clothing, weapons and ship customisations only available to pirate legends, plus from what i have seen the hideout itself is pretty cool.

The graphics are beautiful you can see that rare has stuck with their almost signature style, with the bold cartoon ish characters and the vibrant colours. I actually prefer the style, i love that its not trying to be realistic, i love the style it just works.

The gem of that show however is the sea and water in general, it’s amazing, it just looks so good. When the waves smash against your ship and you see the water splash up the sides or when you are in the wilds and the wind is kicking up the top of the waves, it just looks stunning.

As for sound what can i say, just like the graphics and the rest of the game, it’s good everything sounds great, the sound of cannonballs flying in the distance, the groaning of the skellingtons waiting around the corner and of course the crashing of waves as you sail across them. Everything sounds great if your approaching a storm or a bolt of lightning crashes down beside you, you will know about it.

Last if there was one thing i would consider to be missing from sea of thieves it would be a kick player option, i have had one or two occasions where me and my friends will be playing and we get a random player bent on ruining our fun. You can vote to throw them in the brig but it still annoys me that they are getting all the benefits of our hard work, they still earn gold and still increase in reputation and there is no way of getting rid of them.

SUMMARY

All in all sea of thieves is a amazing game, it has captured the pirate life really well and it will swallow you up for hours.

I can’t imagine anyone playing sea of thieves and not coming back for more, there is just so much to do and it’s one of the first game in a long time that need teamwork and relies on it for you to complete some of the harder voyages.