There’s a lot of big news coming out of today’s Xbox E3 press event, including two new consoles, but the piece of news that has the hype seeping into the cockles of my gaming heart is Rare’s Sea of Thieves. The open-world pirating MMO shivered me timbers with a great gameplay video that boldly announced the players were experiencing the game with no tutorials or training. The footage (above) showed fans that Sea of Thieves is going to be easy to pick up and even easier to enjoy. The first-person canon battles, the real-time damage to ships, even the simple logistics of trying to sail a boat but not being able to see around the sails.
The real root of my enthusiasm for Sea of Thieves comes from my love for the open-world pirate game genre, a genre that is very underserved in this console generation. It’s a genre that is underserved in general, with only a handful of notable titles achieving excellence in the last 20 years. That might be why the fan base was so excited they crashed the forums earlier today. Here’s three of my personal favorites that will help tide you over until the Sea of Thieves release date which is still unscheduled.
Sid Meier’s Pirates!
This is, far and away, my all-time favorite pirate game. It’s basically like six games in one. There’s a counter-based sword fighting system, ship-to-ship combat and open water navigation (complete with ship upgrades for cannons, sails, etc), a turn-based combat minigame for land invasions and a QTE-style mini game centered around ballroom dancing. Add to this a wide open Caribbean map to explore, complete with buried treasure, national factions and bounty hunting. It is an incredibly dense game with nearly limitless replayability.
What makes it so incredible is that it’s an OLD game. The first iteration launched in 1987 and has been re-released a number of times since then. I recommend buying it on Steam or GOG.com, its usually around $5-10 and the file size is negligible. You’ll be amazed at how much content and variety fits into such a small package. If you only play one pirate-based game to get hyped for Sea of Thieves, this is it.
Pixel Piracy
This quirky little pirating game may have flown under your radar. Unfortunately, it appears the dev team hasn’t spent much time fixing bugs and issues lately but I have been able to lose myself in the game for two or three hours at a time without much issue. The crux of the gameplay centers around a procedurally generated world and a scrappy crew of pixelated pirates with a lot of stats and abilities. The deeper you get into the tech tree, the more you realize just how much specialization is required to crew a successful pirate ship. You need more than fighters to be successful, including cooks and doctors and even lawyers. Lots of skills and lots of gear make for a surprisingly deep game despite it simple surface appearance. Better dev support could’ve kept this game relevant, but I still prefer it to other, more generic pirate games that are just basically trying to be Sid Meier’s Pirates! Pixel Piracy has a cool style, a silly vibe and just enough good content to hook you for a play session or two.
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
This is the AAA flavor your pirate craving is looking for, even though it’s not technically a pirate game in the traditional sense. There is still plenty of Assassin’s Creed franchise-level stabbiness and follow quests, but it is the open sea adventuring that makes this game a must play for pirate nerds. It’s got the best ship-to-ship combat to date, with equal amounts of ordinance exchanges between ships as well as hand-to-hand combat during boarding. There are also collectible sea shanties which make sailing from place to place feel authentic and adventurous.
The missing component from Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is plunder. Sure you can explore some ruins to find treasure, or even attack certain ships, but there’s nothing close to the Sid Meier’s experience of raiding towns and chasing treasure or chasing girls. But I think it shows fans waiting for Sea of Thieves what’s possible on the Xbox One when it comes to graphics and gameplay in naval combat scenarios.
From what we’ve seen so far I feel like Sea of Thieves is going to be a combination of these three games. It will have the open-world flow and balanced mechanics of Sid Meier’s Pirates!, the fun and frivolity of Pixel Piracy and the AAA-polish and power of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Unfortunately, we still don’t have a firm release date although some rumors suggest we’d see a release this year. I don’t think a 2016 launch is likely, otherwise we would have been given more to go on at E3 than just a brief gameplay demo. Regardless, Sea of Thieves looks like it’ll be worth the wait and, in the meantime, there’s plenty of swashbuckling to be had elsewhere.
