In 1997, as the Blade Runner game at Westwood was winding down and getting ready to ship, the core team was tired.
The project had been a long haul, with many ups and downs. We were proud of the final product, but none of us relished the idea of starting on a sequel – and it wasn’t even clear whether a sequel would be warranted by sales, or the studio would be able to obtain the license for it.
So a small group of us pitched a passion project to the studio heads – an odd little pirate game with both single-player and multiplayer modes.
Dancing in Sea of Thieves.
Miraculously, the project got off the ground, in large part due to the team’s excitement. It was a game we all felt would be a blast to work on and a blast to play, and we were all passionate internal salesmen for the project.
We used a couple of working titles along the way, but the one that stuck was Pirates of Skull Cove. We were Gen-Xers who grew up with The Goonies and the goofily cheerful presentation of the topic in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Those were our touchstones, and the game we designed embraced all the tropes.
In the end, the game didn’t ship in its original form. After about a year, a couple of us departed Westwood for a start-up opportunity. But even before we were gone, the concept had already started to shift from the original pitch as it met the white-hot light of publisher and executive gazes.
Sometime after I left Westwood, the studio released the game. During development, it had morphed into a solid but less innovative action title for consoles. While the final product used a lot of the narrative and some of the mechanics we’d prototyped, it wasn’t the game we’d originally envisioned.
I recall thinking there was still an opportunity for another studio out there – room for someone to build an open-world pirate fantasy where you play the role of a gold-hungry captain in a shared world with others.
Sid Meier’s groundbreaking 1987 Pirates! was a compelling game and a commercial success, but otherwise, the game industry had mostly ignored pirates. Something about the theme scared studio executives, who had collectively convinced themselves there was no market for a game with scruffy antiheroes commanding wooden ships (while wearing puffy shirts).
Given my personal history and love for the topic, it was silly to wait so long to pick up Rare’s excellent Sea of Thieves. The game is approaching the sixth anniversary of its release in March. Having played the game, I’m kicking myself for not grabbing it sooner.
Because at its heart, Sea of Thieves is the dream pirate game I saw in my head a quarter-century ago when we pitched Pirates of Skull Cove. In fact, it’s even better.
A Delightful and Enticing Playground
Sid Meier’s classic Pirates! game aimed for a veneer of plausible realism. While still whimsical – especially in its famous dancing minigame – it attempted to loosely simulate the real history of piracy.
In Pirates!, players took on the role of privateers with letters of marque – British, French, Spanish, or Dutch – and spent much of the game setting various colonial governors against each other.
Sea of Thieves has no time for actual pirate history. Instead, it’s a fictional playground stuffed full of parrots, monkeys, treasure chests, and fantasy tropical islands shaped like skulls and anchors. It’s far closer to Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride in its setting.
For a pirate game to work, the visuals have to strongly evoke the theme. Especially considering it was Rare’s first time developing a game in Unreal 4, Sea of Thieves is beautiful to look at.
Excellent water effects (a must for any pirate game), fantastic lighting, colorful islands, old caves, and gorgeous stylized art bring the theme alive – whether you’re in port, digging up a treasure, or fighting with other pirates.
but probably not good.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how Hunt: Showdown uses audio as a key element in its design. Sea of Thieves’ superb sound work is also an important design element. The creakings and popping of the hull, or a sudden rush of water, are key to knowing when your ship’s in trouble when you’re focused on raising the sails or firing a cannon.
As has always been the case for Rare’s titles, Sea of Thieves has a strong visual presentation and great style. But what’s keeping me playing the game are some clever and unusual design choices.
For a game published by Microsoft, Sea of Thieves takes some surprising risks. There’s no character skill progression or gear unlocks. Every player is on equal footing from Day 1. Every player has access to the same four weapons (from which you can pick two at a time) and the same three ships with the same cannon loadouts.
Instead, all of the progression is cosmetic. Earning gold, the game’s main reward, lets you trick out your pirate ship with fancier sails and decorations, or buy jauntier hats and bejeweled peg legs for your pirate, but doesn’t grant any mechanical benefits.
Though this model sounds conceptually out of step with a world of modern game design where progression is an element in every game, leveling the playing field allowed Rare to open the game up. If another player kills you, it was because of superior skill or game knowledge, not because they were higher level or had better weapons.
Rare made another bold choice by including elegant puzzle elements in the game. Whether you’re pouring over maps trying to match up island shapes, mulling over the meaning of a riddle that leads to buried treasure, or frantically gathering up runes to open a secret vault, the organic, lightly procedural voyages in Sea of Thieves tickle your brain at a level that’s rewarding and challenging but seldom frustrating.
Though the game was criticized at launch for having not enough to do, there’s more than enough today. There are treasure hunts and player-vs-player battles; there are sea monsters and ghost pirate fleets; there are island caves to explore, riddles to solve, and puzzles to find. If you can think of a pirate activity, there’s a good chance it’s in Sea of Thieves.
In my short time with the game, I’ve seen players fight, scheme, and plot elaborate heists to rob treasure chests from others before they can be sold back at port. When you’re in the thick of the action, the game is often frantic, but creativity in piracy is amply rewarded.
The game can be played in groups of one, two, three, or four, and rewards good teamwork. Sailing a ship in a combat situation, especially a large galleon, requires the kind of well-timed communication you’d see in any competitive shooter, but with a much larger vocabulary of potential actions. Every action from loading the right cannonball to picking the proper sail angle might mean the difference between victory and defeat.
may not be the best idea.
Friendly cooperation and cutthroat competition walk hand in hand in Sea of Thieves. The penalty for death is nearly inconsequential, and the loss of your ship is barely more so; losing a haul of treasure still hurts and costs time, but it’s hard to stay mad for long. A host of funny emotes, musical instruments that can be played in harmony, and other tools to promote social interaction make playing Sea of Thieves as social and silly as any good MMO.
Risky Voyages
Good pirate games are few and far between, and sometimes it feels like the theme is cursed. For years, most publishers ignored pirate games entirely.
But there have been notable successes. Curse of Monkey Island remains a beloved classic adventure game (with a strong recent reboot). Sid Meier’s Pirates! got an excellent remake in 2004. Other teams have periodically dabbled with the theme for trading games or action-adventure games, with mixed results.
On the big-budget side, Ubisoft achieved solid success when they rolled out a pirate iteration of their Assassin’s Creed franchise with Black Flag, in 2013. And the company is about to set sail again into pirate-infested waters with the upcoming release of Skull & Bones.
I always want pirate games to do well. I’d love for Skull & Bones to be good. But prevailing news stories about the game suggest it’s been stuck in the bad kind of development hell for over eight years.
After reading the previews, I’m not particularly optimistic about it. Everything that Sea of Thieves gets right about the fun of the pirate theme sounds like something Skull & Bones gets wrong.
I’m thrilled that Sea of Thieves seems to have broken the pirate game curse. That said, I know I’m the perfect target audience. I’m not only a fan of the pirate theme, but I like any game, movie, or book with a nautical element. (I often fall asleep at night with ambient ocean noises playing.)
Yes, I know I’m late to the party – talking about a game that’s six years old in 2024 makes me an out-of-touch dinosaur. I probably should be blogging about Palworld or Enshrouded to be relevant.
I’m also not blind to the flaws in Sea of Thieves. The community varies from insanely friendly to incredibly toxic. The game suffers from an aggressive set of real money purchases, including pets, and also has the typical live-service season pass model that was all the rage when it was released.
And there are still bugs in the game – small stuff like missing strings, periodic glitches and server issues, and periodically frustrating pathing issues on terrain. I once had a hiccup in the game and “spawned in” on a flat default Unreal level with no art, characters, terrain, or UI – a surprisingly bad bug in a game that’s as mature as Sea of Thieves is now.
Still, if the truth of a game’s success can be measured by how much fun a player has on a moment-to-moment basis, Sea of Thieves – even coming to it five years late – is a 10/10 for me.
players, but I was proud.
Properly delivering the fantasy of being a pirate captain is a design vision that’s a great foundation for creating a compelling experience. Like knights and war heroes, pirates tap into childhood memories and our shared romanticized versions of history.
To all the designers out there: don’t let a publishing executive tell you “Games with a pirate theme don’t sell well.” Maybe in the past they didn’t… until someone like Rare made a good one. Then other developers rush to follow along in their wake.
So raise a glass of grog, fire up your favorite sea shanty, and head out on the open water for adventure. Pirate games can be great!
Sea of Thieves is available on Steam, Game Pass, and the Microsoft store. Scree Games posts new blog content every Tuesday.