Introduction:
Hey, and we’re back with first blog of First Impressions and Gameplay Review, the show where we give you straight-up gameplay and our first impressions of the latest game releases. Today, we’re talking about the Sea of Thieves.
Background:
We’re taking a quick look here because it’s been like six years since Sea of Thieves released on Xbox and PC. It was March of 2018. It’s an ongoing live service-type game, and we tend to revisit these every few years, as we did with Fallout 76 and a couple of MMOs, but we never got back around to Sea of Thieves. Now, with it being released on PS5 as part of Microsoft and Xbox kind of opening up some of the floodgates and putting their games on other platforms, it felt like a good time to jump back in.
Player Base and Community:
Sea of Thieves has maintained a player base and a community for a long time, and the developers at Rare should be commended for that. It might not be a game for everyone; it may not even always be my type of thing, but for the folks who found it, or it found them, they tend to love it. The move to PS5 seems to be working for folks because the Premium Edition of the game and I think the regular edition at some point as well—was the number one spot on the PS5 store’s pre-order best-selling page in multiple countries. So, I guess there was some hunger for this one.
Gameplay Overview:
What you’ve got if you’re jumping in is a reasonably priced pirate jaunt that’s good with friends, has a community and works fairly seamlessly. I played Sea of Thieves quite a bit back when it first launched. I thought it was cool but felt like it needed more. The foundations were there for a simple, fun game, but I wanted more to do, more to progress through. The game has a bunch of new stuff now, particularly with Season 12, which just dropped.
New Features and Content:
I’ll start with the newest things: new cosmetics, seasonal rewards, all that stuff, and also new weapons to use on your ship and land, particularly throwing knives, which I found to be pretty fun. They’re cool and satisfying to pull off because you can slash or do a heavy slash like with a regular melee weapon like a sword, but then you can also ADS and throw the knives. The impact of the knife is satisfying and cool. You can get something that allows you to summon skeleton warriors to help you out, and there are also new ways of getting around. The zipline-type things that were added in a Monkey Island update are now more prevalent. Also, harpooning from your ship leaves a tightrope that you can walk along to get to peculiar places or try to save yourself from a dip in the ocean.
Content Updates:
There’s more, but those are the general basics. I’m mentioning them to hammer home that this is the 12th seasonal content update, meaning there have been 12 others with significant content throughout. It has to have been good enough to keep people coming back to this game for so long. The game is still kind of beautiful in its simplicity. You’re gallivanting around with friends, navigating your ship, finding treasure, fighting enemies, doing bounties, and searching for mysteries on the sea and land. All of it walks a fine line between being simple and easy while also not holding your hand, or letting you get into your shenanigans. There is a big map with a lot to discover. It feels like you can endlessly quest, battle, goof off, dig up treasure, or find a weird island. You get that satisfaction here that you don’t get from other games that have tried this more recently, like Skull and Bones.
Combat:
Combat, even with much more fun weapons added, is still really basic and one-note. You’re swinging a sword or shooting at enemies with pistols, rifles, and shotguns, but there’s not a lot of depth to it. It’s really simple and still feels a little soft around the edges. It is better, but it just gets the job done and doesn’t always feel compelling unless it’s a really big, exciting moment, because those are worth it. On the other hand, the stuff that I like is getting a ship going with a few people or trying to navigate a map while one person holds a light, one person holds the map, and another with the compass. The game doesn’t spell anything out for you or give you massive quest markers everywhere. That’s where the magic of the game can still really lie. It’s about hanging out on a ship with your friends, playing music, doing emotes, chatting, and doing whatever. If you don’t have any friends, you can still pilot a smaller ship on your own, but the game feels way more lonely with towns and outposts mostly filled with glorified quest-giver menu people who don’t have much to say.
Social Experience:
The simpler stuff is filled in with you and your friends goofing around. If you’re into finding your fun, this will work for you. If not, you might hit a wall fairly quickly. Like when the game launched, and even more so now, you have to spend a few hours with it to get to the good stuff: more advanced ship battles, swimming for shipwrecks and treasure, sea monsters, and stuff like that. Anytime you’re on land at a major place now, there’s more to take on, more to do, more bounty-style stuff, and more factions to do jobs for. It’s still structurally the same, but there’s more. And of course, more rewards: getting a cool ship custom-tailored to you with cool sails, weapons, and a pirate hat. The stuff you’ve been working for can be satisfying. There are also the Tall Tales, which have been nice for me as an old returning player. You can jump into these right after the tutorial in the beginning and do them solo or with friends. They’re essentially big, fun, handcrafted adventures in the world of Sea of Thieves. You’re still doing a lot of the same things but with more storytelling elements, characters, cool scripted moments, different and more interesting puzzles, and surprises. There’s a Pirates of the Caribbean-themed one with Jack Sparrow, and also a Monkey Island one, which is cool, complete with the characters you know and love if you like the old games, and a beautiful town to explore.
Crossplay and Account Linking:
Who’s back to meddle in my affairs? Ye must be even more stupid than ye look. Freebooter belongs to me now, and that’s the way he likes it. You can try and talk sense into him until you’re blue in the face for all the good it’ll do, but while ye waste your breath, I’ll be doing as I please on the Sea of Thieves. I’m still working my way through it, but these Tall Tales are a nice value-add. With the PS5 version, I was able to seamlessly link up my old account and get going. I was prompted to link my Microsoft account to PSN, and just logging in with that on my PC next to me, I was good to go with all my old stuff. From there, I immediately jumped online and started playing with a friend on PC. Crossplay worked well, and more importantly, the connection was good. It doesn’t seem like the PS5 launch borked anything. Most games usually launch with some rough patches, but server-side connection-wise, I’ve been okay so far.
Graphics and Performance:
Graphically, the game looks great. I think the YouTube videos don’t do the colors and HDR justice; it looks awesome stylistically, and better than it did on launch. The colors, the water, the sunsets are out of this world. That style is where Rare cooked. On the PS5 side, I did have a couple of graphical issues in dark areas like interiors: some weird glitchy color artifacts at the bottom of the screen here and there, and some slow texture loading on close-up items. Occasionally, stuff would be blurry for a few seconds, and every so often, I noticed a weird turning blur effect when moving around. It’s not a motion blur; it’s just a muddy look at some things. These sound bad, but they’re very small issues I expect to get ironed out, and they weren’t super distracting. I’m just covering my bases and mentioning everything I saw. Most importantly, the frame rate was rock solid for me.
Conclusion:
Long story short, if you don’t like sandbox social player experiences or games as a service, you still might not be into this one. It has microtransactions, seasons, and all that stuff, but most people would argue that Rare has been doing right by players, providing value. If you’re a solo player, you might be a bit bored sometimes, wandering around empty islands or sailing quietly. You better matchmake and find some folks. If you embrace the community, there’s some charm and fun. Long story short, I may not be the biggest Sea of Thieves fan. It’s something I’ve appreciated since the beginning, even if it never held my interest long-term, but I respect it.
Now it’s on PS5, and it doesn’t seem like they screwed up the launch. So, PlayStation fans, have fun. But of course, this is Before You Buy, and we had to keep it quick today. Just some first impressions, pros, cons, and personal opinions. Now I want to hear yours. What’s your history with Sea of Thieves? Maybe you played on PC and are jumping to PS5. Maybe you never played at all. I want to know your experience. Let’s talk Sea of Thieves down in the comments.But as always, thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next time.
