There’s a lot of fantastic games on show at the E3 convention this year and we’ve been lucky enough to get hands-on with a lot of them.
There’s still a day left to go and a few games left to try so this might seem like a big call, but I think I found the best game of the show on day 1.
It’s called Sea of Thieves, an open world game where you and three mates take to the seas as pirates in search of treasure. How you choose to get it is up to you.
If you consider yourselves a lovely group of people, you might decide to get a map from an outpost and head to the big red X to dig up some loot. If you’re a bunch of assholes, you might be more inclined to track down another ship and loot the shit out of it.
It’s that level of freedom that makes each session you play completely different to the last. As I learnt during my first game, the plans you make at the beginning can very quickly fall apart when the unexpected shows up.
I was teamed up with a couple of Aussie journos – both of whom I knew before the game – and an influencer I had only just met.
Regardless of whether we knew each other or not, each one of us fell into a role we were entirely comfortable in and began working as a team. There was the captain who steered the ship, one who kept watch from the crows nest, one who controlled the sails and me – the ship drunk.
As soon as I realised you could bust out a tankard of beer at any point, I was throwing them back like nobody’s business and within minutes, my character was pissed as hell, causing my screen to get all wavy.
Being able to dick around like this adds another layer of hilarity onto an already very fun experience. Each player even has a musical instrument so the whole crew can sing sea shanties together.
We had set course for a small island in search of some sweet buried treasure and once we were off, things were looking good. After weathering quite an intense storm, we spotted another ship off the coast of the island we were heading to. This is when our priorities shifted.
Basically, we said fuck the treasure, let’s take these guys down. We made a couple of successful passes and hit them numerous times with our cannons, but unfortunately for us, they were able to sink our ship before we could take them down.
Every encounter you have in the world is with a team of other players and how you choose to carry out that interaction is completely up to you. You could pass them by, say g’day or jump on board and loot their precious treasure.
Sea of Thieves is currently in development with Rare, the godly studio responsible for classics like Goldeneye, Banjo-Kazooie and Conker’s Bad Fur Day, to name a few. Studio head Craig Duncan says the tools and abilities in the game are all there to craft a unique adventure every time.
“What we want them to do is create their own story,” he told PEDESTRIAN.TV. “As people do stuff we immortalise it in the world, so the first player to ever die in our technical alpha, if you go onto the ghost ship when you die, his initials are engraved into part of the ship.”
Everything they create is done so with the community in mind, something that Craig and his team are very passionate about. So far, about 70,000 people have played the game via their insider program that you can actually sign up for right now.
It’s a great way for fans to get early access to the game and for the team at Rare to get ideas or implement changes based on how folks are actually playing the game.
“The great thing with players is you never really know what they’re gonna do,” Craig said.
The game also looks fucking gorgeous, particularly the water. I mentioned this to design lead Ted Timmins who was kind enough to point me towards a video on that very topic which you can check out below.
Sea of Thieves is due out early 2018 on Xbox and PC, but if you wanna play an early version right now, you can sign up right here. You should also suss out the Xbox briefing video below.
