Sea of Thieves

Sea of Thieves is one of the clearest examples in this library of a game whose score depends almost entirely on who's answering. Read a hundred reviews from either side and the same word comes up constantly — "beautiful" — and the same fault line runs underneath nearly all of them: what happens when other players find you.

What it does that few games attempt

Crewing a ship in Sea of Thieves is a real cooperative task — someone reads the map, someone mans the helm, someone raises sails, someone bails water when a cannonball punches a hole below the waterline — and reviewers across every year of the game's life describe the resulting moments as genuinely unscripted in a way few multiplayer games manage. A 46-year-old father writes about playing with his 13-year-old son and letting the kid set the quests; a reviewer with 788 hours still opens with "graphics: beautiful" nearly five years after launch. The ocean simulation, the lighting, the sense of scale on a small wooden ship against open water — these draw consistent, specific praise regardless of a review's overall verdict.

The complaint that never changes

Here's what's remarkably stable across six years of reviews: the dominant negative-review theme is not a bug, a balance patch, or a season's worth of content — it's the game's core PvP design itself. Because open-world combat is enabled by default across nearly all of the map and there is no dedicated PvE server option, small crews and casual players report being repeatedly hunted, boarded and looted by larger or more committed groups — a practice reviewers universally call "ganking." One reviewer with 384 hours frames it starkly: "your jaw will drop at the beauty and majesty of the ocean... then four players will gank you and call you horrible names. You will lose everything you acquired in your journey. This will continue to happen over and over." Another, with 768 hours and clear affection for the game, still writes that PvP is "profoundly unfun for and unfair to small crews," calling ganking "astoundingly easy" and "the most common form of multiplayer interaction" for players not dedicated to seeking it out. This complaint appears at meaningful volume in every single year sampled from 2020 through 2026 — not a launch problem that faded, and not a recent decline, but a structural design choice a significant share of the playerbase has never made peace with.

A real, press-covered controversy worth knowing about

Separately from gameplay, and worth reporting plainly: in May 2026, a prominent member of Sea of Thieves' community partner program was banned from the game following serious misconduct allegations involving minors. The situation was covered by multiple games-press outlets, and several other community creators publicly resigned from the partner program, accusing Rare's moderation team of trying to suppress discussion of the allegations before the studio addressed them. Rare subsequently issued a public statement on 15 May 2026 saying the allegations were "deeply concerning," did not align with the studio's values, and reaffirming a responsibility to protect its community from harm. What's confirmed: the creator was banned, and Rare made a public statement. What remains contested: the specific accusations of an attempted cover-up by Rare's moderation, which the studio's statement does not directly concede. Wanderer reports this because it's real, documented, and surfaced independently in the Steam review corpus itself — not to settle the disputed parts of it, which readers should follow through the ongoing press coverage if it matters to their purchase decision.

Reading the completion data

The achievement curve reflects a game built for broad, casual engagement at the base level. Early milestones sit above 90% of the player base — nearly everyone who buys the game experiences its opening hooks. The long tail, spread across 293 achievements tied to specific rare events and deep collection goals, falls to a fraction of a percent, the expected shape for a live-service sandbox with years of accumulated seasonal content.

6.5 out of 10. Sea of Thieves remains one of the most visually distinctive and mechanically cooperative multiplayer sandboxes available, and the affection in its positive reviews — especially from committed crews and families playing together — is genuine and well-earned. The score sits below what the sailing and presentation alone would justify because of two separate, serious factors: a PvP design that a large and consistent share of reviewers say makes casual and solo play genuinely unpleasant, six years running, and a real, still-unfolding community-safety controversy in 2026 that prospective buyers deserve to know about rather than discover after the fact.