State of the Game: Sea of Thieves – a few big buts in an ocean of booty

If you ever want to give yourself a mild existential crisis, take a glance at the stats for your favourite game. It turns out I’ve spent a solid 40 days of my life sailing the Sea of Thieves since its launch back in 2018 (I’ll admit to that being considerably less than I was expecting), which might go someway to explaining why, four and a half years on, its vast oceanic expanse feels like a second home.

Sea of ThievesPublisher: RareDeveloper: Xbox Game StudiosPlatform: Xbox One, Xbox X/S, PCLaunched: 2018Monetisation: £34.99 up front, battle pass from £7.99, cosmetic microtransactions.

Given how much of a sucker I am for a swashbuckling pirate yarn, there was a certain inevitability to my love affair with Sea of Thieves, but pretending it was a foregone conclusion would do a huge disservice to developer Rare’s astonishing work imbuing its game with such distinctive charms. Even at launch – when, for all its fancy pirate dressing, its endless roiling oceans and multitude of beautifully wrought islands, it was, at heart, a pretty simple game of tug of war – there was a special kind of magic to Sea of Thieves that made it so much more than its component parts.

Its core loop was, and to a certain extent still remains, a simple one, where every treasure gained was treasure waiting to be stolen, and every treasure stolen was treasure waiting to be retrieved. But its power was in the peripheral details, where every journey existed on the thrilling edge of chaos as its emergent additions – the pervasive threat of other players, a passing storm, a kraken attack, or perhaps even all three – coalesced around its functional core to create always unpredictable yarns.

But beyond even that there was just something completely intoxicating about the richness of its vast, gorgeous world – an expanse that always seemed too big, too full of potential to be left in service of such a simple core. And that seemed to be the general consensus at launch: this is fine, fun even, people seemed to agree, but give us more to do and more to see in this huge, beautiful world. And that’s exactly what Rare did, slowly imbuing Sea of Thieves with new life, new purpose, new threats, and new tools, and the resulting first year brought some indelible gaming memories that remain special nearly five years on.