Sea Of Thieves Should Have Copycats By NowHeres Why Its Still One Of A Kind

There are very few games I've spent more time in over the past several years than Sea of Thieves. Part of that is because there's still, quite surprisingly, no other game attempting the same style. There are other pirate games, but the piracy setting is really just a wrapper--a well-suited one, no doubt--but one could see a Sea of Thieves-style game existing in other frameworks, too. In fact, when Rare was first creating the game, it had considered several other settings before landing on an open-world pirate sandbox, no pun intended.

The first time I interviewed Rare for GameSpot, I asked about the lack of copycat games, and how interesting that is in an industry that loves to chase successful trends. Three years since then, it's still true. While a few games have received some Sea of Thieves comparisons as of late--namely Jump Ship, Wildgate, and Sand--none of these are really attempting to fill the same space as Rare's multiplayer adventure game. I caught up with Sea of Thieves' creative director Mike Chapman to once again pose this question, and this time drilled down more to the point: What the heck would make a game a "Sea of Thieves-like" anyway?

"I actually think about that all the time, Chapman revealed. "I think if you'd asked me seven years ago, I'd have thought, 'Oh, if we're any kind of successful, there are going to be other games in this space, certainly a pirate game, or very close to it.' It feels like [games such as Jump Ship, Wildgate, and Sand]--which look great, by the way--they take one dynamic from Sea of Thieves and really focus in on it. I loved all the previews of Wildgate, for example, but it's kind of like this really tight competitive loop. It's like one aspect of Sea of Thieves, whereas I think what gives Sea of Thieves this incredible life and allows us to keep evolving it is that it's not any one thing. I think it's almost like the genre that we've created, that we're playing in, and that other people aren't playing in."