Date Posted: 14/07/2024

Originally hailed as an Xbox exclusive the game was released in 2018 by developer Rare and published by Microsoft. The basic premise of the game is that the player takes control of a custom pirate that goes on various quests for different factions but can discover new treasures and mythical creatures along the way. The game eventually found its way onto the PS5 in March 2024 and that is the version that I and some of my skin-sack’s friends have been playing.

For the second review in a row I am going to start by talking about the game’s troubled release. Just like Cyberpunk, Sea of Thieves received mixed reviews, and personally I based a lot of what I know about the game once again on Angry Joe’s review of it. Essentially the game was released as a open world sandbox that basically had nothing in it, and was being heavily compared to the promises the developers of No Man’s Sky made and then failed to deliver. The game was also dubbed No Man’s Sea by many players because it was a beautiful world with sweet FA in it. But, like Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky, the updates and patches for Sea of Thieves have been churned out to the point where it actually looked like it was worth playing.

I have gotten into the habit of playing games online with both J and another friend of mine, Matthias have started playing games online most weeks. Most of the time we would play the PS5 version of Aliens: Fireteam Elite, and as everything that I (and J) had unlocked in the PS4 version we’d previously played did not transfer to the PS5 version we were all starting from scratch in terms of equipment. The problem was that I had played the game to death when I first got it so had unlocked everything and the idea of grinding through it all again was not appealing. Yes, it was still fun most of the time but it grew quite repetitive quite quickly. I was on the lookout for another game that the three of us could play, and specifically one that none of us had played before, that way when we started there would not be one player babysitting the others on what to do. So, when Sea of Thieves hit the PS5 I thought this might be the game for us, so when it was on sale, we got it and jumped into the pirate life.

This is likely to be more of an Initial impressions take rather than a full review because additional articles may be written depending on how I get on with the game in the future. There isn’t much of a story as you are basically a pirate that goes on various definitions of treasure hunts for various different factions. What I am going to do is give a rundown of our initial experience as well as the times when I have played the game on my own.

When you start off you have to sign up for a Microsoft account (or pull yours through if you have owned an Xbox 360 or better at some point), and you pick a pirate from a random selection. As we were all very keen on just getting on with it, all of us just picked whoever so we could get on with it. I ended up with a right ugly bastard and initially no way to change his appearance. Still, no matter, we cracked on with the game and after a bit of faffing about we found ourselves in the game with a chartered ship and we set off into the horizon to try and figure out what the hell we were supposed to be doing.

Prior to this game my only real experience with a pirate game was the excellent Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag in which you controlled Edward Kenway when he was off his ship, the Jackdaw, and when he was steering the ship you were able to fire the cannons, change direction, and basically control the ship in the same way you might control a car in GTA or a spaceship in No Man’s Sky.  All the functions could be achieved by using the controller. Sea of Thieves does things differently, in this game the cannons are operated by an individual, have to be fired and then reloaded between each shot. The sails must be manually dropped and turned in the right direction to catch the wind. The ship must be steered as well, and if it is damaged the holes must be patched with wooden planks. Each and every one these functions have to be done Manually. So if you can imagine you have been engaged by an enemy ship then you have to manoeuvre, fix damage, fire back, all while trying not to get sunk. When you pull into a port or up to an island there is no docking animation, you have to park up without accidently crashing into the dock or running aground and causing more damage to your vessel. The game is designed to be played with friends and if you have a crew then doing all of these tasks is great fun and hilarious as someone steers whilst someone else adjusts the sails and someone else might keep a wary eye on the horizon for danger. The thing is if you are trying to do this solo then you are going to have a lot more trouble getting your head around what to priorotorise.

When you start off the only thing that you can do is charter a ship that require different crew, a Sloop which can be crewed by 1-2 players, a brigantine that can be crewed by 2-3 and finally a galleon that can be crewed by 3-4. Now whilst it is possible to crew these ships solo one of the biggest problems with the brigantine or galleon is that when you fully drop the sails and they are facing forward, the driver (? – is the person who steers a ship called the driver?) cannot actually see what is in front of them so either they don’t drop the sails all of the way or they need someone up ahead pointing out obstacles. As you earn more gold by finding treasures and completing quests you can then purchase your own ships to use instead. Being the captain of a ship does mean you can unlock milestones and gives you the ability to interact with Sovereigns, whom I will talk about in a bit more detail later.

Once you do purchase your own ship or ships then you can customise them with new hull colours, sails, cannons and so on. BUT what you cannot do is actually make them better in any way. This is a duel edged sword because like Rocket League players who are better at the game have gotten good at it because they have learned how to be manage their ships more efficiently than the newer players. This isn’t like Black Flag in which you can make the Jackdaw a one ship killing machine with a reinforced hull, more cannons, powerful mortars, exploding barrels to drop like mines, and a metal battering ram. In Sea of Thieves the Sloop has two cannons (one each side), the brigantine has four (again two each side) and finally the galleon has eight (four per side). Now the cosmetic for the galleon includes gun ports which could be raised so more cannons could fire. But within the ship there is no options to add more cannons. So you could be a fresh captain with your first sloop and you would be no more powerful than a player who has been a pirate in the game since its release. A chartered ship can be sunk and you just get another, and whilst you don’t ever lose an owned ship, they can be damaged cosmetically that you need to pay to repair.

One of the features of the game is that you are playing as a Pirate, and just like in GTA Online this means that you have always got the threat of other players looming overhead. This isn’t as bad as GTA because most of the time you aren’t visible on the world map so you can stay out of the way of other players. However, if another player does spot you then they will almost always come after you, and if they sink your ship then you lose any treasure you had on board that they can then steal. If you are killed and your ship is sunk then you respawn half a world away with virtually no chance of getting back to where you sank before to recover your treasure. If you are off-ship digging up a treasure or just exploring and another ship approaches your then your ship with be reduced to splinters before you can do anything about it.

However, in GTA there were safe zones in which you could not be attacked by other players. If you were doing a resupply mission for your bunker or other business, then all you needed to do was get to the yellow reticule and you were safe. A cutscene plays in which you deliver the supplies. In Sea of Thieves there are NO safe zones what so ever. As a result if another player latches on to you like a bloodhound following a scent, then you are fine until you actually want to stop at a outpost to deliver your hard found treasure because the moment you stop they catch up, kill you, sink your ship, you respawn miles away, and they take your treasure for themselves. What I don’t understand is why there are no locations where you can safely unload your cargo. If in GTA you had to unload your supply van or see a tank being broken down for parts then it would give any players sniffing around ample time to stop you. At least in GTA you respawn close to where you died so have a chance at recovering your supplies, but that just doesn’t happen in SOT (Sea of Thieves) so you might have spent half an hour, an hour, or longer sailing around digging up loot only to have some knob head latch onto your ass and follow you with you unable to ever deliver the treasure. I have resorted to doing drive-by deliveries, I will aim for an outpost island, set my ship on a straight course, jump off swim to the island, deliver my treasure, once your ship goes a certain distance from you a mermaid will spawn that transports you back to it. I then head for the next outpost, rinse and repeat, whilst it does give me some satisfaction to be selling my treasure despite the twat following me, it does take an age to do.

The thing is that if your ship is sunk then your treasure will float to the surface where anyone can then help themselves to it. If no one does then after five minutes it will sink. You lose your treasure if your ship sinks but if your internet connection drops or you lose connection with the server then there goes all your treasure too. In my opinion if you own your own ship then there should be a vault or something that you can store your treasure in to keep it safe in the event you are sunk because at present there is nothing to stop another player sitting at an outpost waiting for another ship to approach, sinking it, and stealing all the treasure. Perhaps the space on ships could be limited with a Sloop able to hold ten treasures, a brigantine holding fifteen and a galleon twenty. So you have to choose what to save and what you risk by leaving on the deck of your ship that can be recovered if you sink. There are mechanics in the game which have this function, in the underwater shrines you give your treasure to a statue, and once you return to your ship you talk to a mermaid that causes the treasure to come to the surface. If we can do that, then why can’t we save treasure from dickheads who try to steal it. I am fully aware that this is a pirate game and therefore people are going to be committing acts of piracy and no ports are safe locations in the real world, but, you don’t get skeleton ships, or phantom vessels or megalodons in the real world either.

One of the main advantages to having your own ship is that you can interact with the Sovereigns. Most items that you find, dig up, or whatever have to be delivered to a specific person like treasure chests to the gold hoarders or skeleton skulls to the order of souls. That is different if you are a captain because you can sell everything to the sovereigns, get basically the same amount of gold and reputation you would have gotten for selling into the right faction. It serves to speed up the process of selling your stuff because you are not having to run to the correct person that the outpost in order to sell it.

As I have mentioned you can do missions for various factions, that include the Gold Hoarders, the Merchant Alliance, Order of Souls and the Reaper’s Bones. The more quests you do the more reputation with those factions you get and the more missions are unlocked allowing you to go for higher tier treasures. If you are playing with a crew than only one of you needs to be high enough level to do some of these quests and all of you can do them. Once you hit level 15 you can unlock an Emissary flag that allows you to gain a bonus to the rate at which you achieve Gold, reputation and emissary value. Grade 1 gives the base reward, 2 +33% of base reward, Grade 3 +67%, 4 +100% and finally Grade 5 gives a whopping +150%. BUUUUUUUTTTT if you raise an Emissary flag you immediately become visible to every player in your server on their map screen AND they all know what faction you are the Emissary for. So, if you raise a flag, you are basically painting a bulls eye on your face because every player is going to be making a beeline for you in order to take your treasure, or sink you just for shits and giggles. I have seen numerous videos on YouTube which talk about how to make gold quickly and easily, and all of them start with “Get to Level 15, buy and raise the Emissary Flag…” at which point I click on something else because every single time I have raised an Emissary Flag and attempted to do anything I have been ambushed, killed, and sunk. I have very quickly come to the conclusion that it is simply not worth trying to play as an emissary because you are just a target.

Years ago I would play GTA Online by changing the console’s MTU settings which basically caused a glitch or something that booted all another players out of a server so I could play alone whilst enjoying all the content that you couldn’t do at the time in an invite only lobby. It did take years to get, but finally Rockstar gave players the ability to play in an invite only lobby but allowed them to have access to everything they could so in a public lobby. Players could therefore resupply businesses without having other players attacking them, they could do free mode missions, and basically just enjoy playing the game. I like playing Sea of Thieves when I can get stuff done, finding treasure, fighting sea monsters, and battling mystical creatures is great fun but not when I have to worry about another player popping up and sinking me.

Developers Rare have included a separate version to the main mode of play which is an option called Safer Seas. If you play this then you are on your own in a server so cannot be attacked by other players, unfortunately you basically also get castrated in your ability to do, well, everything. In this mode all of your sales, and reputation are reduced to 30% of the value they would be in High Seas, you cannot fly an emissary flag so cannot get a boost that way. I watched a YouTube video and the content creator (I forget their name) had basically calculated that you would need to grind for ten hours in Safer Seas to bag the same amount of loot you could have got in one hour in High Seas. Ten Hours Vs One. I mean, what is the thinking behind that? Yes there is less risk so less reward, I get that, but considering that you are not unlocking anything more powerful that you could use to dominate in High Seas why the donkey-bollocking hell are your hands tied so tightly in Safer Seas??? I don’t understand it because Rare you have created this vast pirate world for players to enjoy and yet you have made it impossible for players who just want to play the game to do so. I have lost count of the amount of times I have been away from my ship seeking a treasure, doing a quest or something and returned to my vessel only to find another player floating next to it, blasting it to shit with their cannons. I was even attacked during a world event quest in which the players who sunk me, didn’t even steal the treasure, they just sat there and waited until I tried to retrieve it to attack me again.

Personally I have found that the best way to make Gold relatively easily is the quest: Skull of the siren song. Basically you start the quest but clicking on a ghost parchment on your mast, you are give two maps which lead you to the chest and the key to unlock it, you travel to those locations, retrieve the skull and deliver it to this woman on a random island. Most of the time it is realitebly straight forward and I don’t think most players are that bothered about it. Thus far I have done it around a dozen times and only been attacked a couple of times. It is available to anyone on the server and if you pick up either the key or chest then you have a marker over your ship that others can follow if they want. What I have found works well is to start the quest, if both maps appear in your quest reticule then crack on, and if only one does then someone else is already doing it so don’t bother.

If we forget other players for the moment, and if you aren’t flying an emissary flag then you can do that a lot of the time, the main enemies that you will come across are skeletons on islands in various forms, sea creatures, phantoms and sirens. Most of the time they are pretty easy to defeat with some boss type enemies thrown in as well, and it does mean that certain enemies have to be dealt with in a certain way. Gold skeletons are hard to kill unless you lure them into water where they begin to rust, at which point they are easy to dispose of. Enemies can be shot with your cannons if you can line them up correctly. Your cannons cannot aim straight down so you might have to time your shot with the rhythmic raising and lowering of the ship to hit them perfectly. On the open sea you might come across a megalodon or the mythical kraken. Personally I have been chased by a few megs, most of which I have run from, and one I fired a few cannons at and it swam away (sore loser), however, the main enemies that you will have to fight are skeleton ships. Now I don’t know if they spawn based on what ship you are in or it is random. More often than not I find myself facing Sloops, and in my first encounters I tried to flee from them. Unfortunately this tactic rarely seems to work because they will chase after you, and if they come up alongside then you get mercilessly battered with cannon balls. They can even fire ones which have curse effects like causing your anchor to lower locking you in one place until you raise it again. I finally decided to try and engage any ones I came across and using my ships harpoon managed to board them, thinking that if I am on a ship crewed by a maximum of two then there would only be two skeletons on board their ship. Er…no, the sketon ships are crewed with skeletons below deck to fix damage, skeletons that fire the cannons, and skeletons that can shoot guns at you if you get too close as well as a tougher captain. If you board and kill them, then they just respawn, and respawn until you are dead. Eventually I learned (and watched a few YouTube videos) that whilst skeletons can repair damage inflicted to their ship they cannot bail out any water that has leaked in from holes. Therefore, you just need to keep hitting them below the waterline, and eventually you will sink them. If you are playing solo then just turn your wheel hard right or left, and keep going in circles, lining up your shots to hit them when possible and generally patching up and bailing out any damage and water leakage in your own ship. As a result I can generally now take on a couple of skeleton ships and win, I have even gotten bold enough to take on a ghost armada, although my attempt to defeat them was thwarted when another player showed up and decided that my ship that was firing exclusively at the phantom vessels rather than his was a better target than the phantom ships that were firing on us both.  

All in all I would have to say that Sea of Thieves is a very hit and miss experience. When J, Matthias, and I have played it has been really good fun. Perhaps the fact that we were in a galleon spooked other players enough to stay away from us, I don’t know, but we’ve been able to do quests and just have a laugh. Shouting at one another to raise or lower the sails, or locking each other in the brig may not sound like the height of hilarity but it really is. If I was basing this on that experience alone it would probably rate the game at least an 8/10 or higher. Unfortunately when I have played on my own my experience has been 50/50 on whether I am going to enjoy it or not. Despite the fact, or perhaps because, I have been waiting on the phone to my people for forty year I genuinely despise having my time wasted and that is what some of these solo sessions feel like. A waste of time. Rare have made a good fun pirate game but have made playing it on safer seas so massively not worth the time that I have seen no point in doing so, and introduced mechanics that punish players for trying to make decent rewards by making them visible to everyone on the map.

When all is said and done, I do like Sea of Thieves and there have been times when I have finished a gaming session with a big smile plastered on my face because I have earned some decent gold, unlocked some new cosmetics, and had a blast playing the game. Sadly, there have been other times when I have finished a session because I have been sunk yet again, and lost my treasure rendering the last few hours of gameplay an exercise in pointlessness.

I think that this week I am going to have to summarise things a bit differently, because as I said when I play with friends the game is fantastic, great fun and I enjoy every moment of it, even when J inevitably crashes my ship into an island or outpost. If I was basing it solely on those experiences then I would easily give the game an 8/10 with a strong Thumbs Up. But when playing on my own, I would say the experience is little more than average 6/10. If there was a solo lobby in which I could play as an emissary and do all the fun stuff in High Seas without the threat of other players then again my rating would be at least 8 or 9/10. Sadly Rare have not given players that options and from what I have seen they somewhat begrudgingly created the Safe Seas mode for all the crap outs that didn’t want to engage in Player Vs Player combat, so I think it is unlikely that they will ever do a full invite only High Seas mode, but GTA Online did it eventually so maybe they will two. As far as my rating is concerned I think that the game does get a Thumbs Up but I cannot go any higher than:

7/10 – Amazingly good fun if playing with friends, especially if none of you really know what the hell you are supposed to be doing or how to sail properly. Unfortunately, the bad Yin to the great Yang is that if you are playing alone then chances are you are going to be getting hassles by other players or crews as you try to play. 

Date Posted - 22/09/2024

As you may have gathered from my Hogwarts Legacy review I am still devoting quite a fair amount of time to playing Sea of Thieves. Since my initial review in which I basically had no idea what was going on and what the hell I was supposed to be doing, I have since gotten more of a handle on the game so wish to discuss matters further.

I have just read over my previous article about the game and so will address some of the points that I made there, with a new level of understanding now that I know what the chuffing hell I am supposed to be doing, there is also some new stuff that I am going to discuss too. I have achieved the title of Pirate Legend (which is granted to any players who have gotten three Factions up to Level 50) which has unlocked more missions which we can do when I set sail with J and Mattais. 

First off, let’s re-examine the roles of the Emissary. Now initially I was under the impression that the moment you raise an emissary flag you are visible to everyone on the server, but this is not actually accurate. In fact you are only visible to Reaper ships that have reached a Grade 5 Emissary rating. If you are playing as a Reaper Emissary then you are visible to everyone on the map regardless of what Grade you are. As a result you are not a target for everyone on the server the moment the flag is raised. If other ships that are not Reapers come across you it is because they have literally just come across you as they are sailing around. These days with modern graphics the draw distances are massive so smart players will generally spend a lot of time in their crow’s nest with their spyglass (that’s telescope to none Americans) to their eye keeping a wary eye on the horizon. There are times when you are going to be away from your ship but generally if the horizon is clear then you are going to be okay for a while. As I said each organisation has their own Emissary flag (except the hunter’s guild) and the more missions you do with the flag raised the more gold and experience you unlock leading to more missions unlocking. The goal for any Emissary is to get their Emissary flag to Grade 5 as this will grant the highest rewards. However, you can sell your treasure at any point, the rewards are just reduced. The Factions have 100 Levels and as you progress you unlock not only missions but also different cosmetics for your pirate and your ship. Each Faction has rewards for their Emissaries so as you earn more gold you will unlock additional cosmetics. I’m pretty sure the rewards are unlocked monthly so if you are Working Towards a reward, it will be given to you once the month is over and the Emissary ledger resets.

Personally I think the absolute best method for levelling up any Emissary is to do the Sunken Treasury Raid Voyages. Now you have to be at least Level 20 in each Emissary before you can unlock this mission, so if you aren’t there yet just keep doing the other missions until you get to Level 20. It will be a slow process you’ll get there eventually. Once you have unlocked the Sunken Treasury mission, your ship will dive to one of the swirling blue/purple things in the sea, jump in and head down to the coloured coral markers on one side. There is a crab-like symbol on the wall so shoot that, enter the treasury and mission will begin. It is basically a wave mode, in which you must fight and defeat 5 different waves of enemies. Around the room will be the Tridents of Dark Power which can kill anything big like siren leaders in 3x charged shot, normal sirens and ocean crawlers in 2x and skeletons in one. Basically don’t use your own guns, use the Tridents. Once the Treasury Leader and all other enemies have been defeated the vault door will open. There will always be Emissary specific loot, as well as an empty treasure chest. Nearby there will be a mermaid statue. Put ALL of the treasure into the mermaid statue. Completing the mission and loading up the mermaid statue will generally get you between two and three Emissary Grade. Return to your ship, and now this is the important bit and why I think the treasuries are the best way to grind up emissary. A mermaid with a purple flare will spawn nearby, and if you swim to them and collect your treasure then everything you put into the mermaid statue will float to the surface. But this is NOT what you want to do. Instead, mark on your map which treasury you just visited, and select another one, dive to it and repeat the process of killing the sirens, skeletons and ocean crawlers. The game may take you back to one you have done already but it will have reset so you can do it over again.

So why am I telling you to ignore the mermaid??

Well, what I learned after watching various YouTube videos is that as you put treasure into that statue ONLY YOU and your crew can claim it. So if someone sinks your ship whilst you were in the treasury, it doesn’t matter because your treasure is effectively saved inside that mermaid statue. It means that you can simply sail over to the vault (which is why I mark it on my map) and claim your treasure. This is my top tip. Keep doing the Treasuries until you have got to Grade 5 Flag, depending on the faction you are doing it for, it will be either two or three you need to do to hit Grade 5. It is at this point that you should sail around, retrieve your treasure from the mermaids, use your harpoon to quickly get it on board your ship, and head to the nearest outpost to sell it. If you sell nine treasures at a Grade 5 Emissary then you will go up one level with the faction, and as you have to do two to three Treasuries to get to Grade 5 then you are going to be going up at least two or three levels each delivery you make.

Now, you may be asking yourself how you are supposed to retrieve your treasure if someone on the map has attacked and sunk your ship. But the thing is that every time you dive to any mission, you actually change servers, so if you check your map and there are numerous reapers on the map, then cancel the mission, and start another. It takes 10 minutes for the Dive cool down to wear off. Then you can Dive to hopefully another, safer looking server.

Is this method a grind? Yes. Can it get a bit dull once you know what you’re doing? Yes. It is simply the best, and safest way that I have found to protect my treasure. Because even if your ship is sunk whilst you are in the treasury, your treasure itself is safe, you can Dive to a new Treasury in a new server and complete Treasuries to get your Emissary Grade up to 5 once again. None of the treasure will be lost from the mermaid statues until you log out of the game. Just bear in mind that the statues can only hold 20 pieces of treasure (you can put three items into a treasure chest and the chest itself only counts as one piece of treasure so use the chests in the Vaults). If the game takes you back to the same Treasury more than twice then you will need to sell your treasure before you can put more in the statues. Since my last article I have managed to earn millions in gold, and whilst I have favoured the method above I have done other missions as well so I don’t get bored with just replaying the same mission over and over.

World events will also crop up, and since Season 13 the main one is the Burning Blade. I won’t go too much into the lore of Sea of Thieves (and trust me there is a lot of lore), but basically the worst pirate to ever sail the seas was a Skeleton Lord named Flameheart. He was defeated and banished, blah, blah, but he has been resurrected and his monstrous ship the Burning Blade sails the sea crewed by Skeletons. If you engaged the ship and defeat it, then you can either claim it for yourself, and complete various missions in Flameheart’s name. Or just sink it and claim a reward. If the ship is under the command of players then it will have a number under it, and if it is crewed by skeletons then it won’t. It has a swirling vortex above it all the time so you know where it is. All World Events make their presence known with a swirling vortex of some kind, or with unique cloud formations. As these are visible to everyone on the server if you sail over and start fighting an Ashen Lord or something then other players can rock up and help you (yeah, right) or attack you to take the treasure for themselves.

Amazingly, in the last few weeks I have had some wholesome encounters with other players. When you spawn in you have a white signal flare in your ship’s cannon barrel. It is generally accepted that if you fire a white flare then you are signalling to other players that you are friendly. I have had other players pop up with microphone set-ups and ask for my help with missions or just message me to say they are friendly, and generally they have been telling the truth. As a result I have not always fled for the horizon the moment I have seen another ship. I even had a chat with another guy who had been playing the game for around 2 years, and we talked about the fact that the general method of play is to fire first and ask questions later which he couldn’t disagree with. Personally I never fire first so if I fire at another player it is because they have been hostile first. So not everyone will immediately attack you, and now I have mapped the message option to my controller I can send messages to other players to let them know of my intentions as I approach. Admittedly this doesn’t work every time as I had a guy ask me if I was Friend or Foe, I answered Friend, and he proceeded to shoot me in the back and sink my ship.

I think my single biggest problem with the game is the Player Vs Player (PvP). If a skeleton ship spawns near you or you get too close to one sailing around the map, then you engage in ship to ship combat with you firing cannons at one another. I have gotten pretty decent at fighting AI ships, I can take on the Kraken and any Megalodons. Sadly other players do not engage in honourable ship to ship combat. Instead what happens EVERY SINGLE TIME is another player gets into your ship, shoots you in the back, kills you and then runs around setting your ship on fire. Once you respawn after a visit to the Ferry of the Damned (which is for a solo player 15 seconds of real time) your ship will be an inferno, and the player that killed you will be there to just kill you again. Until a very recent update the Blunderbuss (shotgun) was a one hit kill, it has been nerfed to only take of 90% of your health in one shot, but if you are hit and 90% of your health disappears it only takes a sword swipe to kill you again, or succumbing to the fires that are raging on your ship. Other players can help themselves to anything in your storage barrels so if you manage to get a shot off on them, then they can help themselves to your food stores and restore their health to full before you have respawned. The game itself advises you to scuttle your own ship if you are being constantly killed because there is no real way to fight back. If you are attacked by two players then one will get on your ship and the other will remain on their own ship firing cannons to sink you. You have to expect other players to abruptly turn hostile, and one of the sure fire ways to know if they are about to attack is if they drop your ship’s anchor. If your anchor drops then you are locked in place, unable to turn in any direction or move even if you are at full sail. If you try to raise it then you are a sitting duck, and will be quickly heading once again for the Ferry of the Damned.

There are countless games in which people can do PvP. I have called out a few Boarders on the in-game chat because if you want PvP play a game designed for it like Call of Duty or play Death Matches in games like GTA Online. Hell, even Sea of Thieves has an Hourglass mode (which admittedly I have not played but read about) that is described as being a Faction Vs Faction mode in which players who want to engage in combat can easily seek each other out. Still even that does not seem like players are fighting ship to ship. It is a shame because there are NO games that I can think of in which pirate ships or any sea faring vessels engage in naval warfare against each other. I get the whole [in a whiny voice] …“it’s a pirate game” argument and whilst there was boarding in the best pirate game ever Black Flag you needed to do a certain amount of damage before you could board an enemy ship.

In my opinion the best way to improve the PvP experience in the game is to set it so only you and your assigned crew can access your ship’s functions. Therefore, a boarding pirate cannot lower your anchor, climb your ladder or take the wheel, and they especially cannot take your supplies from the storage barrels. If other players cannot access your loot in mermaid statues then I don’t see why it would be difficult to restrict their access to your ship. In GTA Online player personal vehicles could not be driven or flown or sailed if that player hadn’t given other access to them. Sea of Thieves should do the same because it would make players have cool ship battles not have one twat bouncing around on your ship, firing at you with the blunderbuss and killing you every time you respawn.

Some of the commendations requirements also take the piss. In case you don’t know, Commendations are awarded for completing various objectives, and reward you with cosmetic unlocks, or new titles. Working through 100 levels of a Faction is one thing, and I get that Rare is trying to enhance the longevity of the game, fair enough. Unfortunately there is so much in the game that is just busy work. I mentioned in my first article that doing the Skull of Siren’s Song is the best way to earn gold in the game, and now that seems remarkably quaint in that I thought that was the best way to earn gold. Now I make millions using my Treasury grind method I described above. Anyway there are hundreds of commendations that you work through as you play, once again, most have five level grades. Each grade stacks so at Grade I you might need to find 10 treasures, II might be 20 but you don’t reset back to one, you have the ten you have already gathered you just need ten more to get to 20, III might be 30 and so on. It varies depending on the commendations but that is the gist. The thing is some of these commendations are just ridiculous. Take the Skull of the Siren’s Song as an example. To unlock one of the commendations you need to deliver 30 skulls to Captain Briggsy, okay, 30 skulls well they are worth 50,000 each so it does earn you some loot. Unfortunately, to unlock all three commendations you need to open the chest of the siren’s song more times than you need to actually deliver the skull. 50 times to be exact, 50!!! I have unlocked two of the three commendations but to get the last one I need to open the chest another nine times. Why do I need to open the chest more times than I need to actually sell the skull itself? Am I supposed to use the skulls as paper weights once I have opened the chest or just throw it into the sea?

Tall Tales also need to be done 5 times each. Tall tales are story based missions which are generally quite fun, J, Mattais and I will generally play through them together. There are journals that need to be found for commendations as well. Yes they are fun, but not 5 times fun. I don’t really understand it because a later Tall Tale Seabound Soul only needs to be completed 3 times. I have done that because once I play through with J and Mattais, once to find any journals I missed, and finally to just speed run it. The second part of the same Tall Tale has three different paths you need to take so playing it three times makes sense. But why oh why do we have to do the others FIVE times??? It is just padding out the game play and I find it more annoying than fun. Yes I could ignore them but you unlock unique cosmetics from completing all the commendations which I want to use for my ship or equip for my pirate.

I have found that some cosmetics are linked to Tomes that can be found in Ashen Chests but the rewards in these chests are random so you could be searching forever to find a specific Tome to unlock a cosmetic you really want. I am a guy who likes to be told; Go here, do this, get this, simple and easy to follow.  Having to do a Tall Tale takes time but at least I know what I am doing it for is going to be waiting for at the end of the grind.

On the subject of unique customisations there are so many that are linked to progress and locked behind commendations, but despite my complaining above, I don’t really object to this way of doing things. It is like many other games. If you see someone with a unique ship set, or weapons, or whatever then you have an idea what they have gone through to unlock them. If someone has unlocked the Skull of the Siren’s Song figurehead then they have done all of the grind necessary to complete all three commendations to be rewarded with it. Fair enough. Regrettably there are a lot of cosmetics that are found on the Pirate Emporium, which is the micro-transactions store. If you are unfamiliar with what micro-transactions are then allow me to enlighten you. Micro-transactions are payments that you can make with real money to unlock something in the game, and used to be limited to mobile games. You see mobile games were free to play, but you could pay real money to give you an edge in the game. These days it is common practice for full priced games to have items that can be unlocked with real money. Games like GTA Online use dollars as their currency, and so you can choose to buy Shark Cards which grant you in game currency, or you can just play the game and earn money to buy what you want. GTA Online has only one form of currency so all micro-transactions could do was give you more dollars. However, when a game has multiple currencies then game developers can limit the means to earn those currencies. Sea of Thieves has three types: gold, doubloons and ancient coins. Gold is used for the majority of purchasable items, some of which are ridiculously expensive but whatever. Doubloons which can be found by finding different Tomes and completing certain commendations mainly centred in the Devil’s Roar section of the map…bit hit a miss trying to find the right Tome or grind through commendations but not too bad. Finally Ancient Coins…

Ancient Coins deserve their own paragraph because there are only three ways to get Ancient Coins in Sea of Thieves. The first is to find Ancient Skeletons. Skeletons are the default enemies and when you are on an island they will generally spawn every five minutes or so of real time. There is a purely random chance that an Ancient Skeleton will spawn. They are easily identifiably by a money-jingle type noise that plays when they claw out of the ground. Unlike other skeletons they run from you, and you have twenty seconds to kill them before they dig back into the ground and disappear. They grant three Tiers of rewards: Tier I grants 100-200 coins, Tier II 200-400 and Tier III 400-800. Unfortunately they are incredibly rare and in the 250-odd hours that I have been playing the game I have encountered 5 of them. There is no way to predict where or when they are going to spawn. I have done some Google searching and some players have said if you stay long enough on a Fort one will eventually appear, others say if you camp out on an island one will spawn within half an hour, and if it doesn’t it won’t so go to a different island and try again, yet others say they have an increased spawn rate after completing a vault in the final of the Shores of Gold Tall Tale. Personally I encountered two on Discovery Ridge so thought that I had found a good spot to farm them, but after my beginners’ luck I have waited on the island for hours and none have appeared. The long and the short of it is that there is no reliable way to farm Ancient Skeletons and therefore there is no reliable way in game to get Ancient Coins. The second method is through the Plunder Pass. A new Plunder pass is released with each new Season, which itself typically lasts three months. Now similarly to the Outlaw Pass from Red Dead Online you gain rewards by just playing the game when the Pass is active. This will net you 250 Ancient Coins. If you purchase the full Plunder Pass for 1000 Ancient Coins then you will get back all the coins you spent on it, once again, similarly to the Gold bars that you’d unlock in the Outlaw. If you had the gold (or coins in this case) it is worth getting because you will be getting back your investment. So every three months you can get 250 Ancient Coins just by playing the game. Then there is the Third method…you can BUY Ancient Coins with real money

Why do you need Ancient Coins I hear you ask…well, the Pirate Emporium deals exclusively in Ancient Coins. The Emporium allows players to buy ship sets, weapon sets, pets, emotes and the Plunder Pass amongst other cosmetics. If you want a pet, there is no other way to get one other than to buy one from the Emporium for 649 Ancient Coins or £6.49 of real money. Once again a little Google search revealed that a player once posted on Reditt that in 2023 it would take 323,072 Ancient Coins to buy everything in the Emporium which he calculated in Dollars to be 3,295.34 or 2,624 (approx) in pounds. So if you want everything in the Emporium you could either spend years trying to find enough Ancient Skeletons or spend over two and a half thousand pounds on in-game cosmetics that do nothing in game.

The same reditt post also stated that as of 2023 if you want enough to buy everything in the game at that point, you would need 268,941,818 in Gold, and 25,545 Doubloons. Both of which you can earn in game but imagine how long it would take to actually earn enough to buy all of the ludicrously expensive items in the game.

I have also found that the game is quite buggy with servers crashing or freezing. Players disappearing from one spot and appearing in another, apparently modders infest the servers so the problems I have had with boarders may have just been cheaters or people exploiting server issues. Players have reported feedback to Rare but concerns have been ignored, just as Rockstar have ignored modders for years in GTA Online. One video I watched basically said that Sea of Thieves runs on the Unreal 4 Engine which cannot cope with the amount of content in the game and whilst upgrading to Unreal Engine 5 would solve a lot of these problems, however, the video author said that as Sea of Thieves was an Xbox exclusive it would need a more up-to-date hardware to run on than the system it was released for. As a result Rare may face back-lash if they stopped supporting the original version of the game which had been a system seller back in the day, personally I look to GTA Online, which has had three versions over the 13 years since its release. It had a PS3 version, then an upgrade to PS4, and is now on the PS5 and Xbox equivalents. If games can be patched then they could have an engine change and I do not see why the game should have its hands tied by linking it to older consoles that cannot handle the upgrades which are needed to make the game more stable and fun to play.

When all is said and done you may be asking why I have written another article as I have been complaining about the game quite a bit, and there are things about it that bug me. The thing is though that if I did not give a shit about this game then I wouldn’t still be playing it, I wouldn’t be watching videos about it on YouTube or reading about the lore on the Wiki. I criticise because I want this game to be better, yes I have come into it several years into its lifecycle, and am enjoying features which we not in the game until recently. Hell, in the time I have been playing a patch has dropped which enable you to sprint/swim faster whilst holding a single hand item which last week you couldn’t do. Rare are making improvements but at some point the game is going to collapse under the weight of its own content. I have read articles and seen videos which say the game is dying because the numbers of players are at an all time low, servers are unstable and cheaters run rampant, and yet logically all of these problems can be fixed. If Rare want the game to survive then they need to take a partial leaf out of Rockstar’s book and do what they did with GTA Online by upgrading the versions, improving the engine, and try to combat the cheaters because otherwise players will abandon the game for pastures new.

Skull and Bones was supposed to be an open world pirate game which has been a complete flop, and if you want to know why check out Angry Joe’s review of it. Assassins Creed Black Flag was the best pirate game of all time but it was single player and was designed as a game you played through and finished. Rare has a game that they keep added content into, they have a game that was slow out of the gate but has improved over the years. Sadly, veterans of the game are saying that Season 13 has been the weakest in a long time, and whilst I have only recently gotten into the game, I come back to the point that if the game was released on PS5 this year it was because it needed to attract a wider audience. Well, Rare you have a wider audience so give us want we want, improve the servers, upgrade the engine, and for fuck sake do something about the cheaters.