2023 seems like it might be the year of the video game YouTube documentary. Hot on the heels of Double Fine’s 32-episode, 22-hour documentary series PsychOdyssey, a warts-and-all depiction of how the studio created Psychonauts 2, another Xbox exclusive is getting the doco treatment.
Sea of Thieves: Voyage of a Lifetime is a new Microsoft-produced documentary on the creation of Rare’s well-loved multiplayer pirate game. The story of Sea of Thieves creation is a dramatic one and one that, I think, is perfect for capturing in a retrospective documentary. The legendary studio hadn’t had a proper hit since its 2002 acquisition by Xbox and had been dutifully working on Xbox 360 avatars. Viva Pinata had been a critical success and remains a fan favourite to this day. Though it pointed to a desire within Rare to try new things and think outside the box, sales failed to materialise.
And so work began on Sea of Thieves, a game that went through numerous changes and an alpha that has been immortalised by videos that found their way on YouTube. The mid-stream change of engine from Unity to Unreal seemed (outwardly) to set the game back — features seen in those early Unity alphas, like harpoons, breakable ship components, rowboats, and chainshots — wouldn’t find their way to the live version of the game for several years. When its open beta arrived, the servers were obliterated by the interest. The idea of an emergent pirate sandbox was an enticing one, and it drew a crowd despite having precious little content at launch.
And, of course, along came Game Pass, and Sea of Thieves, years after launch, quietly became a hit. It’s been one of the most reliable subscription draws for Xbox since the platform launched — the rare Xbox exclusive that people are curious about. Most of Xbox’s exclusive library are known quantities — everyone knows what Halo and Gears of War play like because they don’t change all that much. Sea of Thieves is different in that respect. Session to session, server to server, you never know what you’re going to get.
That’s all to say nothing of the community that has sprung up around the game in the five years since its launch. Streamers like BoxyFresh, Beardageddon, PhuzzyBond and HappyKraken showed large audiences what the game could be if you were prepared to get a little inventive or just go looking for trouble. They proved that sometimes, sneaking about on an active fort and stealing another crew’s hard-won treasure can be just as much fun as completing the fort yourself. They proved that Sea of Thieves‘ social tools and emergent events could allow for truly grand, entirely spur-of-the-moment adventures. They proved that there really isn’t any other game out there quite like SoT.
Regular readers of this site will be well aware of my love for Sea of Thieves. I put it on front street the day I started on Kotaku Australia. This is a documentary made for me and me alone. Do I expect it to be much more than a puff piece. No, I do not. I will watch the shit out of it anyway.
You (and I) can catch it on YouTube when it drops on March 20, just in time for SoT‘s fifth anniversary.
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