Sea of Thieves is the most controversial game I've ever seen gameplay-wise. You can absolutely have fun in it, but expect it to cost you your sanity. There is a lot of content for new players to engage with, just be prepared for your fun to get ruined by literally anything, not necessarily other players. If you do want to buy this game, make sure to have a friend in your crew to share the highs and lows with - solo slooping can be a challenge even for veteran pirates. Treat the following wall of text as a warning a la "abandon hope all ye who enter here" - don't expect to always be able to have your cake and eat it too, especially as a new player. PvP may be in a weird spot right now, but it's still a core part of the game - just remember that you can often choose whether to interact with it and how. Awareness will be your best defense, but you'll have to get used to sticking your head up and out to the horizon like a paranoid meerkat.
Now onto the breakdown. I'll start with the easy stuff and get the good points out of the way. The visuals are great if you're able to max out the settings and certainly add to the atmosphere of the game. Unfortunately the devs had chosen to stay on an ancient version of UE4 because reasons. Whatever "2026 edition" is supposed to mean, it's got absolutely nothing to do with the technical aspects of the game - no modern graphical features are available; I guess the only thing it has in common with modern AAA titles in that sense is the install size.
But back to the good: the character design is a masterpiece of comedy if you nail the right pirate appearance. The faces they can have, the way they can walk or crouch, the expressions they make in emotes is a big part of why I still enjoy SoT. IMO you're better off looking and dressing like some stupid mental asylum reject than going for a more serious or grounded look - it's guaranteed to get at least a chuckle from most of the people you meet.
The audio aspect is more straightforward. The music is fantastic, the sound effects are nicely made. In fact, here's a bonus - if you enable text to speech in the game's settings (might also have to dig around in xbox settings as well) and pick some wacky TTS voice, you can have a lot of fun with whatever gibberish it says from what you type in chat. You can't hear your own, so have a friend in your crew stream their game back to you (they probably need to have TTS enabled too).
At the end of the day, the game is founded on player interactions and the situations that come out of it. It's not called Sea of Thieves for nothing - be mischievous, take risks, have a bit of a laugh at someone else's expense. It's these kinds of situations that end up becoming memorable feats.
Unfortunately this is where my platitudes end. Time to get to the real reasons for the negative review. There are two sides of this coin - the state of the game and the development process.
Your first clue for the technical state should be the aforementioned install size. Over the years it had gotten bloated from ~30 gigs all the way to 140. This is thanks to the ridiculous amount of cosmetics, plus the tall tale assets (the game's campaign mode), coupled with a lack of effort on Rare's part to optimise the install size actively or retroactively. As such, if you're not interested in said tall tales or owning dozens of wardrobes worth of dresses, the game will happily waste your disk space whilst you only really interact with 20-30% of its size.
The gameplay itself is riddled with bugs, inconsistencies and oversights. The servers are sluggish and unstable, with high overhead and lag spikes on a regular basis. This alone creates a whole spectrum of gameplay issues, including SoT's infamous "9/10" hit registration (it's more like a 50/50 dice roll), backspawning, long loading times, broken captaincy books, bugged inventories, unharpoonable loot, occasional disconnects and more. How they function in general is still a mystery to me because, for example, even though the game has servers in both Europe and North America, it's still entirely possible to encounter an American whilst playing from Europe or vice versa. If you dive to a quest, the game will try to put you in a different instance with other people, and if it succeeds, you might just find yourself in a server full of hourglass players. This is a PvP mode where participants dive directly to each other to fight. Since the game doesn't create dedicated hourglass instances and just mixes the participants with the rest of the people, you might find yourself surrounded by sweaty or at least PvP-interested players, some of which might stay on the instance after their fights are finished.
The existence of hourglass itself is a symptom of how Rare have been treating the concept of PvP in the game. In its early years, a good balance was struck in its design - PvP was less of an activity and more of an intrinsic risk involved in doing just about anything, but especially world events. A massive glowing beacon in the sky is an invitation not just for you, but for everyone else on the server. Most importantly, you'd always have the opportunity to choose whether to engage with it, based on your circumstances. Do I already have a lot of treasure onboard? Are there any players near the event or actively doing it? Are they new or experienced? Should I sneak onboard, roll in guns blazing or just leave? Questions like this are what is supposed to shape your choices and your adventure, driven by risk, reward and uncertainty created by the activity of other crews. But apparently it's not something new or highly casual people could handle, so Rare in their infinite wisdom have sought to throw this balance off completely by introducing a gamemode with PvP only (hourglass), a gamemode with no PvP whatsoever (safer seas), events with forced PvP (such as the skull of siren song), and as the cherry on top, diving anywhere at anytime with effectively no cost.
Diving itself is a very problematic mechanic. It was introduced in line with Rare's misguided philosophy of trying to cater to new players as much as possible. On paper the idea appears good - a smoother learning curve and a faster way to start off your adventure. But as with many other features, it was implemented carelessly, its costs never considered. The game's core design encourages and thrives on player interactions which need time to happen, but since diving lets you change servers the moment things start to feel boring or inconvenient, it effectively has every server reset itself continuously, which paradoxically makes them feel even more empty and boring. People who stay and commit are not rewarded, and people who disengage are not punished.
I could go on for a while like this listing the bugs and mistakes alone, but let's move on to the development process. Today's Rare has nothing in common with the Rare that once released legendary titles like Battletoads or GoldenEye 007. Any sort of competency has gone out the window. The inability to properly schedule and distribute workloads has given rise to technical debt, missed deadlines, failed events, a sharp drop in content amount [b] and [/b] quality, meaningless FOMO slop, dramas within the community and an all-time low player trust in general. A number of incidents such as the recent bruno thing or the doubloon reset reveal the utter lack of respect the devs have for their players, both the new ones they apparently were trying to please so hard, and the old ones that had been supporting them and playing their game ever since its release. This has gotten so bad that their admitting to "missing the mark" with almost every dev update for the last several years has solidified itself as [i] the meme [/i] within the community.
Leave it to Rare to hit a new bottom every single time they try to deliver content or even just open their mouths.
