My day 1 experience in this game as a brand new solo player:
- Fumble around after spawning, clearly clueless
- Player with a lot of cosmetic items sails up, I panic, I try firing off my cannons to ward him away
- He kills me, repairs my ship for me, and offers to show me the ropes
- He proceeds to spend 3+ hours teaching me everything about the game
- At the end of the 3 hours, right before we sell all the loot we got, he blows up my ship with a keg and teaches me his final lesson: "Trust no one"

- When it’s good it’s really good but when it’s bad it goes to pieces. Sea of Thieves is one of the deceptively *strangest* game designs I have ever played.

- SOT’s design insists that its gameplay value hinges on player interaction - slightly in the friendly sense, but predominantly, and I say again INSISTENTLY, in the conflict sense. SOT genuinely believes, fears, that without the restless paranoia of another player deleting your play time, that their game will not be fun. This has so many weird implications for its open-world, casual-cozy aesthetic, and crucially, its economy.

- SOT, for some bizarre reason, does not advertise itself as what it wants to be - certainly not as what it is. And I do believe SOT is what it wants to be - it’s had what, 8 years to change its mind? Let me pull up the Steam page description real quick: “Sea of Thieves is a smash-hit pirate adventure game, offering the quintessential pirate experience of plundering lost treasures, intense battles, vanquishing sea monsters and more.” “Intense battles” is as close to “ruthless, time-deleting, spontaneous aggression at any moment” as it’s willing to get.

- Let me be clear: when I say SOT deletes your time, I mean it. When you “lose” in SOT, you lose everything: every piece of treasure on your ship; the ship itself; travel time to wherever you were. I have never seen a partial exchange, where you lose only a bit of treasure, or only your ship, or only your character. If a player eliminates any 1 of these things, they’re going to eliminate them all, because that’s the correct strategy: if you lose your treasure, it’s 99% because it fell off your broken ship; if you lose your ship, good luck transporting 1 goblet at a time to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Landing by way of breaststroke, and there goes your ability to teleport back on respawn as well; and if you die, your treasure will almost certainly be taken, most likely because your ship’s been sunk to prevent you from teleporting back. Fully back to zero

- SOT is not gentle in the time department, even without pvp. Sailing voyages can be long, and so can treasure extraction missions. Any substantial haul of loot will take, at minimum, 2 hours uninterrupted round trip. But do you know how long it takes to sink a ship? I’ve had it, or near enough, happen to me inside of about 30 seconds. So my 2 hours’ labour translates to 0 gains for me, and pays for about 30 seconds labour of my slayer - give or take a few minutes of stalking me. This attack can occur anywhere during the voyage. It can happen before you’ve even acquired any treasure; it can happen while you’re land-bound, giving you no ship to bring the treasure back and so no way for the treasure to pay off; it can happen just as you’re leaving the extraction site, and it can happen DURING THE SALE OF THE TREASURE. Nowhere does there exist a single moment of safety - it’s insane.

- Complaints about this lack of instancing, or framing of PVP - even PVE in some cases - are common on SOT forums. The most common response is, of course, “get good”. The second-most common response is, “Gold doesn’t matter.” This is such inside-out logic that it makes my brain want to bleed. According to the game, gold is basically the sole motivating macguffin of the game. It sure takes enough time and effort to find, gather, transport, and then fence the gold to feel like it matters. Fun, convenient, and even useful things end up costing you gold. But what these try-hards mean when they say, “Gold doesn’t matter,” is that gold “only” buys cosmetics. So? Cosmetics are the only currency, the only meaningful progression track, in the entire game. The entire design revolves around gold. Put it this way - if gold doesn’t matter, then why kill other players for it? Why do anything at all in SOT, if gold is so “meaningless”? If gold’s meaningless, then there’s no reason to play, because all that happens is that I might gain, or lose, some meaningless thing. It’s the prisoners’ dilemma - if every player “got good” in the most literal sense, no player would ever go on missions to dig up treasure, because that is the tactically correct choice around a resource that “doesn’t matter”. I’m spilling an awful lot of tearful ink on this silly gamepass game, but it genuinely baffles me, this jenga tower of contradictions that seem fundamental to the designers’ intended vision of the game.

- SOT is absolutely fantastic at furnishing a solid 2-3 hours of hanging out with a friend or two, jumping on some opportunities, and hauling home 10 or 20k gold. Naval warfare with skeleton fleets, vanquishing endless waves of the undead, plundering ancient tombs and unsealing hidden vaults and diving to the coral coliseum at the bottom of the sea - all of that is 100% satisfying to me. Nothing about that experience “asks for” pvp conflict. But SOT is anxious, desperate, to dump conflict onto you, even in the private servers. It’s virtually guaranteed on a private server that, once you’ve been on an island for long enough, or gathered enough treasure, the game will spawn 2 aggressive NPC events directly on top of you the moment you leave the shore. You cannot outpace AND outmaneuver both of them, not with just 1 or 2 players. Even on “easy mode,” I’d say SOT is downright desperate to sink you - to control and deflate the gold economy - this economy of a currency which “doesn’t matter”. It sure matters to the devs a whole lot!

- SOT is incredibly fun and lighthearted when it’s being a game. But when it’s being a trapdoor-spider blood sport (which it constantly threatens on “normal mode,” with other humans around), there is literally nothing tangible to extract from the experience for at least half the participants. When I die in Valheim or a Souls game, I get a “last shot” to recover my stuff. This does not exist in SOT. When you lose, you lose everything that you had, you unwind time completely. This reads as downright inhumane when you look at the heavy time requirements to get loot. The game proactively disincentivizes you from its core loop. Sure, you “get to have the experience” of deleting 2 hours of gameplay from the ledger - but I “get to have experiences” every moment of every game I play. “Having an experience” is not a selling point when it costs me wasting my evening for some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥’s gain.

- I have tried repeatedly to have fun in SOT every way I can, because the core loop is simplistic fun. Jumping in solo, whether in easy mode or PVP, has had a 1/4 hit rate for me - a 25% chance to have a satisfying basic session where, after 2.5ish hours, I successfully collected (any) treasure, brought it back to base, and sold it. In any other design, even if I got sunk, I’d have XP at least, or character upgrades, or questline advancements - there is nothing to hang your hat on in SOT. There’s guild rep which just gives you more ways of spending time and money.

- SOT is some of the most fun I can have with friends online - I guess the weird thing is that this might have more to do with hanging out with friends online, and less to do with SOT. This is a game I do like - rather, there is a game inside of SOT which I like, but in spite of the thing as a whole. With some private server slider settings, or some kind of safe zone or opt-in PVP indicators, I would recommend Sea of Thieves in a heartbeat. As it stands, it’s a volatile tangle of cross-purpose design goals.

It's a fun pirate sandbox game.

I just wish the game was more friendly to playing solo. The difference between a 2-man, 3-man or 4-man group isn't as big as a 1-man group. Give servers for solo players!