Sea of Thieves

Most multiplayer games hand you a story and a role. Sea of Thieves hands you a ship, a compass, and a shrug. What happens next is on you.

Developed by Rare Ltd.—the storied British studio behind GoldenEye 007 and Banjo-Kazooie—and published by Xbox Game Studios, Sea of Thieves arrived to a chorus of “beautiful but empty.” That criticism was fair then. It is not fair now. What launched as a gorgeous tech demo with a hollow core has been rebuilt, patch by patch, into one of the more distinctive live-service experiences on the market. The Steam release, which arrived on June 3, 2020 at $39.99, is a fundamentally different animal than the one critics tepidly praised at launch.

The pitch is simple. You and up to three crewmates board a fully-crewed sailing vessel and set out across a shared open ocean. There is no hand-holding, no waypoint marker dragging you by the nose. You raise the sails by hand. You steer the wheel while a crewmate shouts depth readings from the bow. You plot your own course on a physical map table below deck. When cannon fire punches a hole in your hull, someone had better grab planks and start bailing—or you all swim home.

Its market position is unusual. This is a PvPvE shared-world game that refuses to pick a lane between cozy co-op and cutthroat competition, and that refusal is the design. Rare monetizes cosmetics, not power. Every player sails the same ship on the same terms, whether they bought the game yesterday or logged thousands of hours. In a genre bloated with battle passes that gate advantage behind a wallet, that egalitarianism still feels quietly radical.

• Fully Manual Sailing: Nothing about crewing a ship is automated. Sails, anchor, wheel, cannons, and repairs all require a human hand. On a four-person galleon, this turns basic navigation into genuine teamwork—and turns a panicked storm escape into a genuinely memorable set piece.
• Emergent Player Encounters: Every other ship on the horizon is a real crew with real intentions you cannot read. Alliances, ambushes, and betrayals aren’t scripted events; they’re the natural byproduct of dropping strangers into a world with loot and no rules.
• Trading Company Progression & Tall Tales: Structured quests from rival factions give you buried treasure to dig up, bounties to hunt, and cargo to haul. The Tall Tales campaigns layer in well-directed narrative set pieces that prove Rare can still tell a story when it wants to.
• Continuous Free Seasonal Content: New events, mechanics, and the Custom Seas creation toolset arrive on a regular cadence at no extra cost, which is the single biggest reason the game outlived its rocky launch.

The Gameplay Loop

Strip away the pirate dressing and Sea of Thieves runs on a beautifully cruel loop: earn loot, then try to keep it.

You accept a voyage from a Trading Company, sail to an island, solve a riddle or dig up a chest, and haul that chest back to an outpost to sell. Simple. Except loot has no value until it’s sold, and it only sells at an outpost, and the entire ocean between you and that outpost is populated by people who would love to take it. Your treasure is never yours—it’s a liability you’re carrying across a battlefield. That single design decision is the engine that makes everything else turn. It converts a chore (fetch item, return item) into a high-stakes gauntlet where the tension climbs with every chest you stack on the deck.

This is where the game earns its reputation. The best moments here aren’t authored by Rare at all. They emerge. You spot a sloop limping toward the same outpost, holds visibly heavy with loot. Do you strike a deal? Do you open fire? Do you offer an alliance and knife them the second they let their guard down? The game doesn’t answer these questions. You do, and so does the stranger on the other ship, and the collision of those two decisions produces stories no scripted quest could match.

Onboarding Friction

The flip side is real, and it shouldn’t be softened. Sea of Thieves has a punishing onboarding problem. The game explains almost nothing. New players routinely spend their first hour fighting the wind, the anchor, and the map table instead of the actual content. There’s a steep gap between “I can technically sail” and “I can sail well enough to survive a fight,” and the game does little to bridge it. Rare treats confusion as part of the adventure. For some, it is. For others, it’s a wall.

The Grind and the Griefing

Two structural complaints follow the game everywhere, and both are legitimate.

First, the grind. Cosmetic progression is slow, and because everything is cosmetic, the reward loop can feel hollow. You’re not getting stronger. You’re getting a nicer hat. Whether that’s enough depends entirely on whether you play for the stuff or for the stories. If it’s the stuff, burnout is likely.

Second, griefing. Because there’s no matchmaking by intent, a chill treasure-hunting session can be ended by a sweaty PvP crew who sinks you for sport and takes nothing. When your ship goes down, so does everything in the hold. Losing two hours of loot to someone who then sails away without even looting it is the design’s harshest edge, and it’s built into the open seas. Rare’s Safer Seas private-server option, added in a later season, is a meaningful concession here, letting solo and cautious players opt out of PvP for reduced payouts. It’s the right call, even if purists grumbled.

Solo play deserves a specific mention. You can crew a sloop alone, and it’s a tense, rewarding way to play. But an unlucky solo run—empty seas, no encounters, a long grind interrupted by a galleon that erases your night—can feel bleak. The game is built for a crew of friends on voice chat. Alone and unlucky, it can be a slog.

The art direction was ahead of its time and still is. Rare chose a stylized, slightly cartoonish aesthetic over photorealism, and that choice has aged like fine rum. The game doesn’t look dated because it never chased a look that could date.

The real star remains the water. Sea of Thieves’ dynamic ocean physics are, full stop, among the best in the medium. Waves have weight and menace. A storm doesn’t just look dangerous—it shoves your ship, tilts the horizon, and drowns your lantern light in sheets of rain. The way sunlight refracts through a swell as the bow crests it is the kind of detail built to make new players stop and stare. Years on, few games render open water this convincingly.

The bigger caveat is that this is an always-online game, and that dependency is its Achilles’ heel. By design, any server hiccup, lag spike, or connection drop lands at the worst possible moment—and in a game where a stutter mid-fight can cost you everything, the stakes of that dependency are higher than in most multiplayer titles.

On Steam, Sea of Thieves is squarely a mouse-and-keyboard-first experience, and the setup suits it. Aiming cannons and firing on rival crews rewards the precision a mouse provides—controller players are at a real disadvantage in serious PvP. Because the game supports full crossplay, keyboard-and-mouse skirmishes will regularly pit crews against console players on pads, and the input gap is real.

The PC version also supports higher frame rates and resolutions, which matters more than usual here. Reading the horizon early—spotting a distant sail before it spots you—is a genuine competitive edge, and a sharp, high-framerate display buys those precious extra seconds. Steam’s flexibility with ultrawide monitors and uncapped performance makes it, on balance, the preferred way to play. Just be prepared to remap keys; the default bindings for the sheer number of shipboard actions can feel cramped at first.

Sea of Thieves is a game that only fully makes sense in hindsight. Judged at launch, it was a stunning ocean with nothing to do in it. Judged today—after years of Rare stubbornly building outward instead of walking away—it’s one of the more honest multiplayer experiences you can buy. Honest because it doesn’t pretend to protect you. It drops you in the water with everyone else and lets consequence do the rest.

It is not for everyone, and it doesn’t try to be. The grind will lose some players. The griefing will infuriate others. But for the crew that clicks with it—four friends shouting coordinates through a storm, treasure sliding across a pitching deck, an enemy galleon closing fast—there is little else quite like it. Rare made a bad idea, then spent years making it good. We recommend it to the right crew, with eyes open. Set sail.