Sea of Thieves Review (Greaves)
Do you like the idea of sailing around a magical sea, alone or with up to 3 friends, and gathering treasure, sparring with mermaids, monsters and skeletons, defending your ship against megalodons and krakens, and most importantly, getting drawn into fights with other players? Then this will probably be up your alley.
Sea of Thieves is a PvP game wrapped in a PvE environment. The core idea behind it is to create varied experiences between players, with most else being there to facilitate that. Treasure is the driving force that keeps players sailing around, fighting skeleton ships, looting ancient vaults, and many other activities.
Other players doing the same thing or looking to steal your loot are the real variable, and keep you on your toes and looking over your shoulder.
You can go entire sessions just doing your thing to gather gold and never interact with other players, if you aren't looking for engagement. But inevitably, you will run into people that are, and aside from some fairly rare alliances and peaceful interactions, they will attack you and try to take your loot. This seems to be the eternal struggle in the Sea of Thieves community. Some players embrace PvP, and some just want the PvE experience, and would rather destroy themselves and sink their own loot than even try to defend their ship. I understand there aren't a lot of games out there that facilitate the kind of PvE sailing and loot gathering that Sea of Thieves does, but if this is purely what you are looking for and you are not interested in PvP at all, i'd say give this a pass. PvP is inevitable.
Progression wise, there are only cosmetics. Every player is on equal footing, the only thing seperating fresh newbies and 1000 hour veterans is skill and experience. Every weapon is unlocked from the start, and every player has to find or buy their own supplies like food to heal, wood to repair your ship, and cannonballs to fire. All the gold you end up hoarding is used to buy pirate clothing, sails, cannons, wheels, capstans, hull colours and figure heads. There are a bunch of achievements to unlock that give you access to even more cosmetics and player titles.
There are 3 different types of ship, the small Sloop for 1 or 2 players, the powerful but fragile Brigantine for up to 3 players, or the big lumbering Galleon for up to 4 players. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, and while having more players on your crew is an advantage, this will only count if your crew plays well together. 2 man Sloops sinking 4 man Galleons is a common occurrence when the Galleon crew is not very experienced, because in such situations the Galleon loses any advantage it has and becomes more of a burden to it's own crew.
If you decide to give this a go, maybe i'll run into you on the Sea of Thieves. I'll either be blasting cannonballs or fireworks!