It has been a little over two weeks since Rare and Microsoft Studios have released one of the most anticipated Xbox One titles yet, "Sea Of Thieves". "Sea of Thieves" is a game that allows you to openly explore the lifestyle of a pirate. From controlling every aspect of your ship to digging up buried treasure, the game has an initial presentation that is very promising. However, after gamers have finally been able to get their hands on "Sea of Thieves", the game has been receiving a tremendous amount of negative feedback.
What is causing all the backlash? Well, it all is being generated from the lack of content the game has as of now.
When you initially start the game, you are prompted to create a character. This is where the problem starts, as you are only permitted to select from 8 characters that the game randomly generates. If you don’t like any of the characters, you can re-generate a new selection of characters. A lot of gamers do not like this as they are spending hours re-generating characters to find one they are satisfied with and ultimately want a traditional character creation where you customize your character yourself. Rare claimed that they handled character creation this way in order to ensure that no two characters were the same. You are then spawned inside of a pub with absolutely no tutorials instructing you where to go or what to do. This is up to you. But once you figure out all the mechanics of the game, you soon realize that it is very repetitive. At this point all the game consists of you obtaining quests, setting sail to complete the quest, and returning back to turn in the item the quest calls for. The only real incentive to continue playing is to gain enough in-game currency to obtain cosmetic items for your created character. That’s about it. Many are comparing "Sea of Thieves" to "No Man’s Sky", a game exclusive to the PlayStation 4, as it had undelivered a similar approach to exploration.
Luckily, the game is only one or two content patches away from being great.
The "Sea of Thieves" we have now produced a great experience, however, it gets old quick. What gamers really want is a reason to come back. An easy way of doing this is by creating a faction system where gamers can join a faction of their choosing and using the combat system the game already has to allow gamers to battle rival factions. The game would also benefit from a leveling system where you can level up certain attributes so that players specialize in different things and can exploit each other's weaknesses. Gamers also want to see a wider selection of weapons as there are currently only 3 if you are not counting the traditional cutlass pirate sword.
The "Sea of Thieves" was supposed to be Microsofts most ambitious exclusives for the Xbox One. Unfortunately, this was not the case due to a lack of content. While the game can easily bounce back from its not so successful launch week, there is still a lot of Rare needs to add for it to avoid the same false advertisement lawsuits Sony’s "No Man’s Sky" faced. Hopefully after a few weeks, Rare can provide enough content to make "Sea of Thieves" the game they promised it would be.
