When Sea of Thieves launched in March, it didn’t take long for players to notice the game wasn’t exactly packed with things to do. Rare eventually came forward with a content roadmap, outlining their plans for Sea of Thieves through the summer of 2018. Since the reveal of the roadmap, The Hungering Deep DLC has come and gone and Bilge Rat Adventures have begun to keep players busy until the next major content update. But neither The Hungering Deep nor Bilge Rat Adventures have given me the impression that Rare knows what it wants Sea of Thieves to be.

The Hungering Deep came the closest to giving me a glimmer of hope that the best days for Sea of Thieves lay just over the horizon. Specific quest destinations were replaced with hints that required checking your map and doing something more complex than matching shapes. Some destinations weren’t on the map at all! For the first time, I felt like I was on the sort of swashbuckling adventure I wanted from Sea of Thieves rather than playing the part of an errand boy. But as I approached the final confrontation, the spirit of adventure was slowly replaced with the doldrums I knew all too well.

The final confrontation in The Hungering Deep requires a minimum of five players to call forth the final boss. The maximum player count on the largest vessel is four. Those two facts add up to mandatory cooperation between pirate crews that to this point had only been incentivized to shoot each other on sight. The Hungering One, a particularly nasty megalodon, was certainly more than most pirate duos could expect to defeat easily, so the forced co-op didn’t feel totally unnatural. The problem lay in the fact there was no incentive for any crew to complete the encounter more than once, making willing partners rather difficult to find in the waning days of the Hungering Deep questline’s availability. A crew I killed the megalodon with on the last days of the quest told me they had waited for three hours before finding me.

Unfortunately, the “co-op problem” didn’t end when the Hungering Deep questline was removed. Bilge Rat Adventures were introduced the following week, and the first such adventure revolved around newly-added Skeleton Thrones. Like the Hungering Deep’s destinations, the locations of the thrones are given through vague hints (though this time the hints are easily recalled in a menu rather than found in un-logged NPC conversations). And again, mandatory cooperative play is part of the equation. The difference this time being that being forced to ally yourself with another crew feels arbitrary.

There are two kinds of Skeleton Thrones, small and large. The small thrones can be completed individually, requiring only that you can fire yourself out of a cannon into the chair and sit down. The large thrones are so large that, according to the Bilge Rats, they require two pirates from different crews to sit on them at once. I cannot for the life of me understand why I can’t simply sail with my best friend and sit in the throne with him! Again, there is no incentive to sit in a Skeleton Throne more than once, meaning that willing partners are few and far between once the opening days of the adventure have passed.

It’s this trend of mandatory cooperation that worries me. Sea of Thieves, for better and for worse, is a player-versus-player experience. There’s a tension in sailing to an outpost to cash in a night’s worth of treasure, knowing that anyone that crosses your path is going to challenge you for it. There’s excitement in seeing a ship sail from a Skull Fort or toward an outpost, your mind fixated on the treasures lying in their hold. Alliances can be formed, it’s true. I have even teamed up with another crew to clear a Skull Fort in the past. As we battled our way through the skeletal hordes, the thought, “What if they double cross me?” never left my mind. I did what I thought any other pirate would do, I made sure to keep at least one of the other crew members in my sights the whole time. The boss fell, the key dropped, and the vault was opened. As I feasted my eyes on the riches within, I felt something I hadn’t experienced since the days of Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast. I felt a pang of greed, I immediately began to plot how I could kill them and send their ship to the horizon as my crew emptied the vault and ran for an outpost.

I ultimately didn’t act on my treacherous instincts, but the fact that this game caused me to feel that way at all is meaningful. The magic of Sea of Thieves doesn’t lie in working together with other crews, forming fleets to overcome whatever challenges Rare throws your way. Sea of Thieves is at its best when you’re desperately trying to get the upper hand on another crew to take their lives or treasure while protecting your own. I hope Rare can remember that going forward. The experience of Sea of Thieves certainly isn’t for everyone, but a game dedicated to its niche will be better remembered than one that hedged its bets.

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