Sea of Thieves!

It’s true I can get carried away with punctuation but that exclamation was to meet the 15 char title minimum. Better than a question mark, I figured.

MS has loosened up their NDA on this to allow some discussion of the game. I’ve been part of the technical alpha and was just curious if anyone else around here was. Not a huge Xbox crowd around here I know, but figured it was worth asking. And if you haven’t been fortunate enough to try it out yet, well, you’re going to want to play this one, I can tell you that.

Oooh, very interested in this.

Definitely interested in this. Reminds me of the Disney PotC MMO, which was pretty fun for a while until you started hitting paywalls hard.

agreed. I enjoyed that game a lot at first. Will check this out since I do a lot of XB1. How do we try it?

Will this be cross platform and available on PC? Cause you have me geeked!

Good question - I think so since I believe all new first party Xbox games are Play Anywhere.

As far as how you play right now, I think you have to be invited to the technical alpha? But there’ll probably be a beta soon and maybe it will be open or at least have more slots.

Not sure on cross play, but yes to PC. The downside is, being MS published, it’s Windows 10 only, I think.

Looks like it could be lots of fun!
Not sure I’d be willing to give up on Win7 for it though… But since I’ll be buying a console for RDR2 at some stage, this would be a good argument for a XBone over a PS4!

I got a stiffy watching those broadside volleys, and I love pirate themed games. Then again with a forum name like Skipper, I’m supposed to I think. I played PotC with a few folks on here if I remember correctly.

Very interested if PC is an included platform.

It is, per the game’s website.

Awesome. I’m Windows 10 on my gaming system, that’ll work. :)

Plus I’ll add that even in alpha stage this game is really fun. You get a few folks on a ship using voice chat and you can distribute duties and weigh anchor - and you’ve got to actually do that, one or more persons manning the capstan (think that’s the word) to haul up anchor, then set the sails, angle toward the wind if necessary, then someone at the helm to steer the ship (in my game, this was me).

You have a goal of finding an island with buried treasure and there’s a world map below deck that you can check out to help locate that island. Then you sail over, dig up the treasure and bring it back to the merchant on your starting island. Pretty easy, or it would be if all these other pirate ships weren’t slsonoyt looking for treasures and, of course, blood.

Ship to ship combat is fun and also requires coordination. You’ve got to bring your ship to range and fire away with your cannon. In my test game at first there were only two of us, then a third joined. Hard to be effective with that small or a crew, so we decided we would board the enemy ship and steal her. Unfortunately the game didn’t really seem to allow for this - when we died we respawned on our ship or a nearby island, while our enemies re spawned on their ship, putting us at a tactical disadvantage. Eventually had to give up that tactic. Still, a ton of fun even at this point in development.

That sounds fun! If you’re able to comment, how are ships obtained? Are they upgraded at all? Do you have hand-to-hand fighting too?

I’m about half way through that video now so it may actually answer those quesions, I don’t know.

I can only really answer what I personally saw, but I don’t think there’s a problem with me doing so with regards to the NDA.

  1. how do you get a ship? In the game I played, it was just there, and like I mentioned kind of “bound” to you and your crew. Here’s another funny thing - if your ship is sunk, you’ll all be left just bobbing in the water for a bit. But soon a mermaid shows up and she’ll teleport you back to the starting island where you’ll find another ship. All that may be streamlined in the alpha - there wasn’t any tutorial, we just jumped right into the game.

  2. can you upgrade your ship? Not that I could find. If your ship is damaged by cannon fire, you can repair the holes but, funny enough, we couldn’t figure out how to bail out the water we had already taken on. So we sailed around with our lowest level fully submerged for some time.

  3. is there hand to hand combat? There’s armed combat, you carry a musket and a larger blunderbuss kind of thing. Naturally the second is more powerful but has one shot and then a long reloading time. I don’t think there is swordplay, at least not that I found.

A pirate game without swordplay? Really?

I may be wrong about that, honestly once I found myself under fire from enemy pirates I only concerned myself with shooting back. Trying to close the distance to engage in melee combat was just a quick death.

That video has a lot to it, but I’m interested to see where this goes.

Oh crap is this a multiplayer only thing?

Pretty sure, yeah.

Almost forgot - you can sign up here to get on the list to test out the game: