The closed beta phase for Sea of Thieves is currently underway and Microsoft has provided us with a key for it. As such, below you can find our first impressions of it, accompanied by a playthrough showing 30 minutes of PC gameplay footage on Max settings.
Sea of Thieves is a pirate-themed shared world adventure game, offering the essential pirate experience, packed to the seams with sailing and exploring, fighting and plundering, riddle solving and treasure hunting. With no set roles, players have complete freedom to approach the world, and other players, however they choose.
Now while this sounds great on paper, and as you will see below, Rare’s title desperately needs content. Moreover, the game wasn’t friendly at all to newcomers. During my playthrough I was able to figure out some things (like how I can sail the boat) but I couldn’t find where I was supposed to go in order to get a quest. Furthermore, I couldn’t find any treasure chest even on islands that were full of skeletons, and this is exactly what I mean when I say that Rare needs to add more content to it. Unless the game will not feature many treasure chests and if that’s the case, the game will get boring really, really fast.
So yeah, this game is a bit chaotic at the moment and most players won’t know what to do or where to go. There is also no tutorial to teach some basics. Still, Sea of Thieves can be fun, especially when played with friends. Understand that this is a game you can fool around. Actually, the game’s big ace is when players start fooling around.
Instead of getting a quest, you can immediately go to your ship and start sailing. You can then lower the anchor and start searching the bottom of the sea for any treasures. And then you can start fighting sharks. And then you can get back to your ship and enjoy a beautiful storm. And then fight some players. And then start repairing your ship. Or you can let it sink. And then get eaten by the sharks.
So yeah, Sea of Thieves is not your traditional game. It’s a game that encourages you to have fun and you will have, especially if you like pirate-themed games. If you are not into this kind of games, though, Sea of Thieves does not feature anything that will make you a believer (apart from its amazing storms). As such, while some may find it a fun experience, others may find it boring.
The closed beta build ran fine on our PC system (Intel i7 4930K (overclocked at 4.2Ghz) with 8GB RAM, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, Windows 10 64-bit and the latest version of the GeForce drivers. We were able to maintain constant 60fps at 1080p on max settings. We’ll talk more about its performance, though, when the game officially releases on March 20th.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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