After years of teases and press-only demos, Microsoft and Rare's pirate-battling game Sea of Thieves has finally arrived in a form that looks like the online game we've been promised for so long. And, shiver our timbers, this week's closed beta test on Xbox One and Windows 10 has honestly been promising—and sometimes danged good.

Moreover, it lets us get closer to describing this as a living, breathing online game, as opposed to the 15-minute pirate-on-pirate battle bursts we've seen at early preview events. Waddle on over with that peg-leg of yours, sit ye down, and let us tell you tales about Rare's new virtual seas—along with our hopes and concerns for the game going forward.

A pirate's life for ye?

















When Sea of Thieves was announced in 2015, all we had to go on was a promise of a "shared-world adventure game"—which, ugh, sounded like so many online-game promises at the time. Turns out, Rare had been plotting something surprisingly forward-thinking. The game's open beta feels a lot more like a modern online hit such as PUBG than a stale copy of Destiny.

Sea of Thieves juggles a few things: a giant, island-filled ocean; a series of cooperative treasure-hunting quests; and an always-looming threat of other online players sailing in your direction and battling for your hard-earned booty. Every session begins in a pub on a safe-harbor island. This is where you immediately meet your other crew mates, assuming you opt for the game's default four-player mode. (You can also set sail as a duo or all by your lonesome, but I'll get to why you shouldn't do that.)

Whether you matchmake with strangers or invite a group of friends, your first island will always have a spanking-new pirate ship at its dock, ready to board, along with at least one starter "mission." The game's early missions typically ask you to plot a course to a nearby island, then read a mission-specific map with a big, red X to find and dig up a single buried treasure chest. (Other early missions may forgo the map and instead contain cryptic riddles about a particular island. Once you land on said island, more clues appear on the map advising you to find things like "a dimly lit waterfall cave" or "a bridge between two mountains," then walk a few paces to a treasure-digging spot.)

With chest in hand, go back to your safe-harbor island to cash it in for in-game currency and "reputation" points; the more of the latter you accumulate, the more complex, and more rewarding, missions you can unlock. Pick up new missions at the same place you drop off your booty, then shove off again—with later missions including more riddles and more multi-part requirements to pick up valuable treasure. In these later missions, players risk having more booty on board between harbor drop-offs and are thus susceptible to hijacks by other online players.

Four Jolly Rogers









One of the big gameplay hooks is that your ship is designed to be the slightest bit too complicated for four people to manage. Think of games like Spaceteam or Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, only with multiplayer combat and 1800s-era pirate technology making the cooperative chaos all the clunkier.

Sea of Thieves' standard pirate frigates are just manageable enough for four comrades to maintain on calmer seas. One person can steer; one can manage the direction and length of sails; one can keep an eye on a world map in the captain's quarters; and the fourth can deal with lookout duties at the top of a mast, boosted in part by a default spyglass. All pirates start with a relatively beefy collection of items, including weapons (pistol, sniper rifle, cutlass), utilitarian items (compass, shovel, bucket), and goofy stuff (beer mug, pair of musical instruments).

When trouble arises, from rocky seas to a rival ship appearing in the distance, that four-person crew will feel stretched. Someone may need to peel off of standard sailing duty to arm, aim, and fire a series of cannons flanking the port and starboard sides. Should your ship collide with anything—an island, an unseen rock due to giant waves, or an enemy's cannonball fired through the bow—then you'll need multiple people to both repair any holes on the lower level and scoop rising water with a bucket. And someone may very well decide to dive off the ship (or launch themselves by crawling into the cannon) with designs on boarding a rival, which will further stretch your remaining crew mates' ability to rapidly steer, attack, and escape.

All of which is to say: the pacing and momentum of Sea of Thieves is designed to feel like the dusty, low-rent accordions that your pirates just happen to keep in their knapsacks. As in, those musical squeezes back and forth. In the game, with every squeeze of tension and excitement comes an equal stretch of placid adventuring. You'll have time to group up and deal with crises, and you'll have time to take it a little easier, play some music, and get drunk on virtual booze.

ESRB will surely rate this Arrrrrrrrrr

But does the gameplay work out as advertised? Based on our beta tests, the answer, for now, is: somewhat.

The first major thing we noticed is just how long the game's most dramatic moments take to unfold. Brace yourself for long stretches of ho-hum sailing and island hopping in the early goings, if not in general gameplay. A slower-paced opening experience makes some sense for the sake of learning the game's basics. But three of my group sessions, some of which included higher-level missions, needed a full hour before we ran into any serious surprises, whether those came in the form of online opponents appearing or from any wild treasure surprises found by digging into curious landmarks in the distance. (Honestly, so many cool-looking things we passed by, like wrecked ships and weird compounds, resulted in nothing but dregs.)

When other ships approached, however, drama picked up in exactly the way we'd hoped. Our best experiences came once we dedicated someone to the lookout point on the mast, at which point we began appreciating a "start combat ASAP" strategy, as opposed to waiting for rival ships to get a bead on us. Positioning is everything when it comes to steering ships that can only unload cannonballs from the sides (any Assassin's Creed junkie will tell you that), but Sea of Thieves' multiplayer, co-op insanity is unique—and you don't want to be the crew in a ragtag fight that is the first to get overwhelmed with hull repairs and water scooping.

We got only a small taste of some of Sea of Thieves' more interesting missions, which required hopping between islands to deal with increasingly difficult computer-controlled foes. We got caught off guard, for example, by one of our destination islands firing upon us with cannons as we approached—turns out the game's "skeleton pirates," which attack you with swords on even the easiest islands, increase in complexity and aggression very quickly. So, again, our pirate on the lookout tower became all the more important as we progressed. (Rare says none of the pirate ships in the game will ever be computer-controlled, if you're wondering.)

Walk the sexy plank It has been a long time since Rare has produced a "beautiful" video game, and Sea of Thieves sees the British designer making up for lost time. Even on a standard Xbox One, the game delivers gorgeous and striking combinations of lighting, weather, and water effects, and the game scales ridiculously well on a range of PCs. Getting up to 60fps is a cinch, as is boosting visual quality and resolution if you have the bandwidth. Sea of Thieves is all about a range of weather and daytime/nighttime effects, and its visual engine is up to the task of rendering every possible pirate moment in bold colors and gorgeous effects. Some of the game's too-simple geometry designs don't quite match up with the weather systems, but all in all, the game looks quite striking.

Rare has also promised that later-game progression will be designed so that online players are matchmade with equally powered rivals. The same cannot be said for those who set sail in one- or two-person boats. We learned this the hard way when a solo voyage was interrupted by a four-strong crew, at which point we, as the kids say, "got rekt." Be warned, parents: in Sea of Thieves, Rare has enabled an always-on microphone effect for teammates and foes [: to clarify, this can be turned off in menus, but it does start out enabled by default], and in my four-on-one downfall, a wave of F-bombs rained down on my feeble corpse. Unlike PUBG, there doesn't appear to be any option for smaller groups to request a server with only solo or duo teams. This is a major blow to any Sea of Thieves hopefuls who would rather not depend on the kindness of Internet strangers. (All of this is further hindered by a lack of local split-screen play thus far.)

Additionally, the payoff for that 4-on-1 conflict was strange. I had my entire experience upended and interrupted by this four-strong team, and I was constantly reset into their line of fire, even when I timed out for my death, then respawned into a brand-new ship; my only true escape was to hard-quit the entire game. And for my rivals? They got no treasure, loot, experience, or reputation out of taking my no-loot pirate out. Their only payoff was pure sadism, and it soured my take on the game. Will that sort of unbalanced chaos regularly emerge in the final, standard game? It's hard to say.

For every weird experience of pacing or frustration came another one—of exhilaration and conquest. A 1:1 ratio, really. That's just with a closed beta, of course, and the final product will benefit from more progression systems and types of quests. Those include weird stuff like animal herding and enemy-compound raids, but as games like Destiny 2 have made abundantly clear, a great first-blush multiplayer explosion can peter out very quickly if a game's creators don't have a plan for how to keep fans engaged as they seek new challenges, new loot, and new spikes in enthusiasm. (By the way: if Rare decides to liberally borrow from the Destiny playbook and introduce pirate-ship races at a later date, we won't mind a bit. Might we suggest the "Jack Sparrow Racing League" as a name?)

There's a lot to like thus far. The opportunities for chatting and getting along with a crew are abundant, and Rare understands how to give players a wealth of silly stuff to do during their travels. On occasion, the rise and fall of momentum and intensity felt perfect and engaging—but that will be harder to maintain in an open-world sea than, say, PUBG's always-around-20-minutes matches. In its battles, Sea of Thieves' mix of navigation, positioning, cannon wielding, and "arrrr save the hull" chaos is absolutely unique and riveting to either play or watch. (Sea of Thieves' current high ranking on services like Twitch is indicative of something interesting happening here, for sure.)

My favorite quality of Sea of Thieves' beta is its utter openness. Its lack of formal instructions and structure don't just seem like a beta oversight. They feel like a good match for the game's "go be a pirate however you want" mentality, which already feels like it can be as structured or as loosey-goosey as a group of friends might want and still be fun at either extreme. My most optimistic self imagines this game will turn out like PUBG, Minecraft, and Goat Simulator, all somehow squished together and dressed like a pirate. Even as a beta, the game looks like a particular boon to Microsoft, whose Xbox line hasn't had this memorable of a game in years. Though, again, enough issues listed above make us wonder how much more Rare will be able to fine tune with less than two months to go.

So, yes, our interest is as high as Sir Francis Drake's highest mast. We've lifted our collective eyepatch to keep our not-so-good eye on Sea of Thieves as it nears its March 20 release date on Xbox One and Windows 10.