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Games

'Sea of Thieves' Ain't The First Ship Sailing These Waters

Prepare your crew for "Sea of Thieves" with this co-op victorian submarine sim.
Image courtesy of Microsoft

Microsoft's press conference earlier this week gave us more information in Sea of Thieves, a pirate game where you and your crew can wander around a pirate world doing pirate things. That includes, of course, digging up treasure, fighting skeletons, and navigating your big boat around the open seas. Earlier today, an E3 Coliseum session about the game and its community revealed even more information about it.

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The game is going to exist in a large, open, shared world where you will encounter other players fairly regularly. There will be pirate reputation. There will be, in the words of the developer, "epic adventures."

In the Waypoint podcast about Microsoft's offerings at E3, Patrick and Austin talked a little about their own experiences demoing the game, and very little of that stuff I mentioned showed up in their conversation. Instead, they talked about the moment-to-moment things: A hole appears in your boat, and you have to patch it. Your boat sinks, and you've gotta bribe a mermaid to get it back.

Allegedly, a McElroy got into some hijinks and ruined Austin's good times boat. Apparently all of this was enjoyable. The description, gameplay, and discussion about Sea of Thieves has gotten me thinking about a game that came out into Steam Early Access a little while ago.

We Need To Go Deeper Screen courtesy of Deli Interactive

We Need To Go Deeper replaces boats with submarines, pirates with Victorian explorers, and a shared world with multiplayer sessions.

However, what it shares with Sea of Thieves is the cooperative experience of trying to operate a craft under dire circumstances. One person drives the sub, another manages torpedoes, and yet another balances the supply of power between shields, weapons, and the engine that drives it. It's a fast-paced and stressful game that had me yelling at my friends when I played it, but it was also a joyful experience that had us all saying "hell yes, this is rad!" when our submarine exploded after being wrecked by a giant squid.

Since Sea of Thieves isn't coming to a wide release until 2018, if you're looking for that kind of screaming/cooperating experience, We Need To Go Deeper might be the thing that you're looking for to tide you over. Yeah, that's right. Tide.