In some games, you need to play many hours to unlock achievements. Sea of Thieves stands out with its achievements.
For nearly three weeks, you have been able to play Sea of Thieves. Overall, the game is received with mixed opinions: some love it, while others can’t get into it at all. In addition to lacking content, Sea of Thieves has received criticism for its achievements. It seems that the requirements for some achievements are far too high.
“More than 10,000 play hours for an achievement”
The website TrueAchievements has conducted an in-depth investigation and compared the achievements of Sea of Thieves with those of other popular games. Of the 60 achievements from Sea of Thieves, 19 were unlocked less than five times, and 15 of them were not unlocked by any registered users.
Other games that also had many unresolved achievements after three weeks were games that were hardly played. But that is not the case with Sea of Thieves. On the TrueAchievements website, there are over 51,000 SoT players registered. The following image compares the number of unresolved achievements across various games, 24 days after their release.
24 days after the release of Sea of Thieves, about 32 percent of the achievements in the TrueAchievements community were unresolved. These include:
- Blind Trust – ‘Robbing a captain is great fun, so bring the loot to the harbor, and it will be worth it!
- Golden Sailor – Received commendation for completing 500 Gold Hoarder voyages
- Sailor of the Golden Horizon – Received commendation for sailing 1,000 nautical miles on Gold Hoarder voyages
- Gunpowder Dealer – Received commendation for the timely delivery of 1,000 gunpowder kegs
- Master Hunter of the Infamous Skulls – Received commendation for selling 1,000 infamous skulls
The only game that ranks higher in the statistics than Sea of Thieves is the MMO Onigiri, known for its grind demands.
However, according to TrueAchievements, grinding is not the problem with Sea of Thieves’ achievements. The issue is that the grind is considered so unrealistic. The article adds, “We wouldn’t be surprised if Rare let third parties design the achievements and then just gave it the green light while reviewing.”
Achievements in Sea of Thieves require unrealistically much time
As an example, TrueAchievements mentions the achievement Wilds Merchant. You unlock the achievement after delivering 1,000 crates of bananas. These crates are extremely rare. The author of the article on the achievements website states that he has not found a single crate of bananas in 50 play hours. Players on Reddit explain that they themselves didn’t find a banana crate even in 100 play hours.
Perhaps the players in both cases just had bad luck. Assuming you find a banana crate on average after 10 play hours, you would still need to play 10,000 hours to unlock the Wilds Merchant achievement. And that is just one of the achievements that requires an enormous amount of time. By the way, you still have to fill the banana crates yourself with bananas that also need to be found first. You can only have five bananas in your inventory at a time.
Another example is the sailor achievements, where you need to cover 1,000 nautical miles for the three factions. You do this by activating a quest from a faction and then sailing across the sea. However, only one faction quest can be active at a time. So, anyone wanting to achieve 1,000 nautical miles for the Gold Hoarders, the Trading Company, and the Soul Order cannot do so simultaneously.
Clearly, Sea of Thieves is meant to be a game that keeps players engaged for a long time and is not meant to be completed within a few hours. According to TrueAchievements, the achievements of SoT are set so unrealistically that they sometimes no longer fit the game. “If the developers want players to deliver 1,000 banana crates, then the drop rate for them should be clearly increased,” they demand.
As we have already established, the developers take player feedback into account. They emphasize this repeatedly. So it might be possible that they reconsider these requirements and perhaps address them with a hotfix.
What do you think about the achievements in Sea of Thieves? Is this okay, or should they work on it again?
