Sea of Thieves: 2025 Edition

My first session with Sea of Thieves ended with my crewmate accidentally cannonballing himself off our sloop, our ship broadside-deep in a skeletal galleon's fire, and all of us laughing so hard nobody remembered to bail water. That chaos is the whole pitch, and after years of post-launch updates, the 2025 Edition delivers it in the most feature-complete package Rare has released yet. The core loop is still sailing, looting, and surviving other people. You pick a ship class - Sloop for solo or duo runs, Brigantine for a trio, full Galleon for four - then set out across a shared open world where any sail on the horizon belongs to a real player who may or may not want to steal everything you've worked for. On the PvE side you're hunting buried treasure via riddle maps, running voyages for the Trading Companies, fighting skeleton forts, tangling with a Megalodon or a Kraken, and working through the Tall Tales story missions - eleven narrative quests across two storylines that account for roughly 30 hours of structured play. Season 17, which is central to this edition's identity, adds The Smugglers' League: six hidden Hideouts on the map and on-demand Smugglers' Route Run voyages where you're moving contraband like Fine Art and Black Powder Barrels under pressure, with competing crews incentivised to intercept you. It folds PvE and PvP together in a way that feels purposeful rather than just random grief. The 2025 Edition itself bundles the revised base game - meaning all permanent content added since the original 2018 launch is included from the start - alongside the Deluxe cosmetic set (Parrot outfit, 10,000 gold, and the full Dire Dark Warsmith weapon set covering Pistol, Blunderbuss, Eye of Reach, Cutlass, Double Barrel Pistol, Throwing Knives, Grapple Gun and Blowpipe), plus digital extras including the Athena's Fortune audiobook and The Rough Guide eBook. New players skip the starting-gear grind and step onto the deck looking like they've already been to the bottom of the ocean. For a first-time buy, that framing makes sense. Fair warnings, though. Sea of Thieves has a real learning curve around sailing - adjusting sails manually, reading wind direction, and coordinating anchor drops is genuinely involved before it becomes second nature. The progression system is almost entirely cosmetic, which is liberating or hollow depending on your tolerance for that model. Long-time players and a subset of community voices have noted persistent bugs and a sense that certain quality-of-life fixes lag behind the content cadence. Solo play is functional but the game loses significant spark without a crew - the emergent comedy, the panicked ship repairs, the arguments about who forgot to load the cannons - none of that lands the same way alone. Treat this as a multiplayer-first purchase and calibrate accordingly. For the Saturday night crowd this is close to an ideal answer. Controller-friendly with full gamepad support, low barrier to goofing around in the first hour, and sessions that generate stories whether you win or lose. The question of "is it fun for four friends" gets a loud yes from this game every single time, bugs and all.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

Be the first to comment on Sea of Thieves: 2025 Edition.