A Pirate adventure in an open world with friends who set sail with us? That sounded pretty good in 2018. Development studio Rare brought the pirate MMO Sea of Thieves on March 20th on PC and Xbox One. What sounded like a lot of fun at first glance almost ended in the mast and sheet breaking.
So much potential fell by the wayside back then. After all, what do you do with a huge open world in which there are hardly any quests to complete? The interaction options within the community were also extremely conservative at the time of release. The game was threatening to close flop and sink to the bottom of the sea forever.
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Six years later Sea of Thieves (buy now €69.95 ) to one of the most popular MMOs blossomed – and now also appears Sony's PS5. A lot has happened since the original release and we'll take a closer look at the updates.
What is it actually about?
The story of the pirate MMO is quickly summarized because every player writes their own story. There is no one right way. Rather, we are allowed to travel the open game world as we wish. If we meet certain characters, we receive quests that we can complete at a time of our choosing.
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If they don't fit into our plans at the moment, we'll just complete the orders later. There are just occasional random events that disappear after a certain amount of time. But we'll get to that in more detail.
Before we set off on the seven seas, we simply select a figure and determine the size of the ship. We don't have the opportunity to put together our character in small parts, but instead grab a ready-made pirate. But that's not a bad thing, because little by little we receive countless cosmetics for individual design.
Which ship we choose depends on how many people we are traveling with. The sloop is designed for one or two people, the three-master for a trio and there is space for four of us in a galleon.
Theoretically, we can also steer the large boats as a solo player, but in order to set three sails and operate eight cannons, we have to have a talent for multitasking. The different pots can also be visually adjusted to suit our preferences.
Source: Rare
First updates
After the bumpy start to the release, the developers tried to turn things around as quickly as possible. The first patches brought, among other things, more extensive orders into play.
With the update called The Hungering Deep there was an event for Sea of Thieves from the end of May to mid-June 2018 – two months after publication – in which we and our crew were allowed to hunt the prehistoric shark Megalodon.
The story-driven section Cursed Sails followed at the end of July with patch 1.2.0. The campaign introduced the army of skeleton ships and had us fight the crew of the undead in the missions.
Rare not only brought a lot of big updates to the pirate MMO during this time, but also a variety of smaller improvements. In addition, the map continued to expand, there were a number of secrets and more random events were introduced.
Source: Rare
What a coincidence
If we now watch the sky in the distance, we discover the events in every nook and cranny. If we set off there, we can either plunge into the fight alone, support the sailors who are already there, or stab them in the back and collect the loot.
Sea of Thieves shines with a diversity that many other projects can learn from. Each player can decide for themselves how they approach the adventure. There are difficult raids like Fort of the Damned, simple quests and lots of ocean and pretty little islands to casually explore. But sometimes we also have to be careful of storms and sea monsters such as the aforementioned megalodon or the giant octopus. If we defeat the monsters, it's always a great feeling.