Sea of Thieves
Developer: Rare Ltd.
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
June 3, 2020
Yo ho, Yo ho, a pirate’s life for me. C’mon. Don’t deny you’ve had a pirate fantasy at least once in your life. Watching the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films always makes me want to be one… so why not play a game that allows you to do so!
I had such high hopes… (more on that later on).
If you get the game through Steam, you still need an Xbox account. You can generally sign up for one if you have Windows 10. I got mine from originally downloading Minecraft through the Windows store. It’s easy to get, and costs nothing, so it isn’t a big deal to get one. You can connect the two accounts to invite friends to the game, and so on.
There is some spoken dialogue (depending on which scenario you get). On the demo island, the ghost has full spoken dialogue, but in the game, there is limited voice acting. When they don’t speak, the mouths just do a generic animation while you click through the conversation. The voice acting is done well, and professionally.
You can play an arena mode against other crews, or in adventure mode with your own crew. There is the option to play by yourself, but it appears that’s where the game lags. You can’t get much done without other players. I chose an adventure, I have my ship, I’m ready to go… but it wouldn’t let me continue. It appears that this game is made for multiple players only. This highly disappointed me as I like playing games solo to feel a game out before deciding to play with others. But I couldn’t get a good feel for the game. ALSO, make sure your computer can handle high graphics! It certainly kicked my fan into high gear, which is always concerning to hear. I have an Omen gaming laptop with NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1050 and Intel Core i7 7th gen CPU. The minimum GPU spec is a GTX 650, which falls behind the 1050 in performance. This computer is reaching it’s third year, so it may be slowing down. But just keep this in mind before purchasing the game!
Lastly, whether you have a crew or not, you definitely need to tinker around in the game to learn how to play it. Nothing is fed to you, and it’s largely all about figuring it out yourself. At least, that’s the impression I got while trying to play it.
All in all, I had such high hopes for this game with its amazing graphics and crisp sound design. It’s just not user friendly.