Hands On At EGX – Sea Of Thieves

‘Hmm matey’ was my first thoughts before I managed to get hands-on with Sea of Thieves during EGX this year, but since playing I have been left with a feeling of wanting more, more grog, more booty, more everything!

Sea of thieves is a co-op pirate game which has four friends join together on a pirate ship to hunt treasure, fight other pirates and explore the open world. The art design harkens back to monkey island and it’s easy on the eyes. The look and feel of the water alone is enough to impress even the biggest graphics enthusiast.

I sat down unsure what to expect, I’d heard that you go in blind and don’t have much in the way of a tutorial on what you’re doing or how to do it, but here in lies one of the beauties of the game, it’s so intuitive. You know that to sail you’ll need to drop sail and to weigh in the anchor. I bumbled around for less than five seconds before I found the anchor, my fellow pirate at arms dropped the mainsail, and we were off. We made way for an island, only having to stop twice because a few of the grog riddled pirates fell off… including me, when we spotted an enemy commanded ship and gave chase. You get the impression that Rare are really relying on you to make your own stories with your own friends in this as there is no true pushed narrative. and what ensued during the chase was exactly that, I loaded myself into the ship’s cannon and blew myself onto their ship, I took down one privateer but was bested by the captain of their ship with a pistol. Thankfully my crew did a damn sight better than I and avenged my death, we sunk their ship and made away with their treasure. Whilst on the way back with the treasure I was set upon by sharks that I had completely forgotten riddle the waters and jumped out of my skin when eaten whole.

After getting back to my ship, The self-appointed Captain (you have to choose a captain to help coordinate the rabble) decided that we should cash in our chest to have some grog and play music, which coincidentally is what I would have done as well. The game always requires you to be connected online and I know that might put some people off but I feel it’s perfect for this game, you do need to have some semblance of camaraderie between yourself and your crew and having the unpredictability of human characters will result in some fantastic tales.

Coming from Rare studios the creators of Perfect Dark, (Everyone’s favourite) Goldeneye 007 and the Banjo-Kazooie universe. It seems as though they’ve got another doubloon in the works and all they have to do is give it a polish.

 

All this considered it has left me feeling ‘Arrrrrrr Matey!’. I’m looking forward to where Rare will push this title and what they’ll do with it, I have a circle of friends who would love this and would play it as religiously as others would play destiny or even FIFA. I’d happily be put in the captains quarters to play this again.