I’ve been playing a ton of Sea of Thieves lately with my family. The four of us have been playing off and on since launch but in the last month or so we’ve been playing nearly every day. It’s a great game but it’s also an incredible team building exercises for a family. When we first started I will admit we had some frustrating experiences. My boys are 14 and 8 and I love them very much but getting them to work together can be… challenging. Sea of Thieves really requires you to work as a team and that’s been a great lesson for my kids.

Early on we would get into trouble and my boys would be off doing their own thing. These days, when we are taking on water our crew performs like a well oiled machine. My little guy Noah is a beast below decks. He’s down there fixing holes and bailing water as soon as we get into a scrape. Watching my other son Gabe on the wheel call out directions and seeing the family execute under fire is really cool. “Sails in the wind!” is met with a flurry of activity on deck now instead of playing instruments and drinking grog. I will admit my 8 year old still likes to get tipsy and throw up all over the boat, but he knows not to do it during a job now. He also doesn’t understand that flying the skull and crossbones means something very specific and isn’t just a cool flag with a skeleton on it. Lessons have been learned.

Sea of Thieves has seen numerous updates since it launched and the game itself is significantly better now. The world feels much more alive with NPC’s on various islands and more frequent encounters with ocean beasts. The quests are more varied now and getting them feels very organic. The game is still absolutely stunning and I’m blown away at how good it looks on a variety of hardware. I’m playing on a pretty solid PC these days butt Noah is on an original Xbox One (sucks to be the youngest) and it still looks great. Even on a GTX 1050 I was impressed with the water and lighting effects. I don’t even have a monitor that supports 4k or HDR and I still find myself staring mouth agape at some of these vistas.

I know getting your entire family into a game that requires each of them to have their own hardware is not easy. Doing anything as a family can get expensive and gaming isn’t cheap to begin with. Cross play between PC and Xbox makes this a bit easier with Sea of Thieves but it’s still tricky. HOWEVER, if you can swing it, I highly recommend spending some time with your family being pirates. Your kids can learn a lot of good stuff by pretending to be bad.

-Gabe out