I’ve been a pirate in Windrose for four hours now, and I’ve been up to all sorts of classic pirate activities in that time: Chopping down trees, picking up sea shells, making huts out of grass, and getting killed by boars, elite-tier dodos, and giant crabs.
There’s not much in the world of Windrose that can’t kill me in a couple hits, but I’m marooned on a small archipelago and need to rescue my crew from around the islands before I can actually get to the life of sailing that stepping into the boots of a pirate should offer. So I get in a tiny boat and put up its sail—which actually just means pressing the W key like it’s a throttle, since there’s seemingly no wind system in Windrose—and putter over to one of the pirate camps where my crewmates are held hostage.
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After spending a few minutes trudging around the beach picking up rocks, I use my workbench to craft a handful of crude bullets for my pistol, hoping I can pick the pirates off one-by-one. But wouldn’t you know it—I haven’t progressed far enough in the tech tree to craft gunpowder yet, so the only way to get it is to kill some of the pirates that just wiped the floor with me. Guess it’s time to fight more boars and pick up more grass so give my armor a trivial defense buff!
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Windrose is a hit: In its first day on Steam, the Age of Sail game from Palworld publisher Pocketpair reached nearly 70,000 concurrent players and pulled in about 1,500 positive reviews, despite launching into early access. I’m sure there’s good stuff in it I haven’t seen yet—the famous pirate haven of Tortuga, for example, or the upgrades that will eventually make my ship feel unique to me. But I don’t think I’m going to play enough of it to get there.
Windrose, despite the green-blue waters of the Caribbean and my skull and bones tattoos, does not really make me feel like a pirate. This is a survival game with a pirate skin—whereas Sea of Thieves, which is still going strong close to a decade after release, is a pirate game that happens to be multiplayer.
The pirating life is a life of hijinks, not a life of rote crafting systems (woohoo, I can make barrels now!) or pressing E to mark a tent as my new spawn point. Sea of Thieves is all about hijinks.
You can mostly play it without running into other players, but the danger of someone lurking around to steal your loot—or to have some loot of their own worth stealing—adds so much excitement and tension to what would otherwise be a stale world. You need dirty pirates like Chris who may ambush you when you go to turn in your treasure. You need clumsy pirates like me who may accidentally blow up the ship by getting too swing-happy with a saber. And you need to be able to drink so much grog you can puke all over your fellow pirates.
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While Sea of Thieves launched many years ago without all that much guided progression—no grand skill trees to level up through, no campaign, not much to unlock beyond cosmetics—from the jump it nailed being a pirate, from the tactile rigging of the sails to fixing leaks in the ship to climbing the mast to sweep a spyglass over the horizon. I used to hate Sea of Thieves’ awkward swordplay, but a couple hours of Windrose, which has the stilted feel of an MMO, had me missing Sea of Thieves’ slapstick physicality. From the jump Windrose offers a whole lot to do and even more to unlock, but none of it actually feels good, and precious little shouts “now this is pirating.”
And where Sea of Thieves did once feel sparse, it’s long since filled out. Pets, all sorts of weapons, an imaginative string of Tall Tales that form a rousing adventure campaign with pirating staples like deciphering vague maps and navigating via the stars. I haven’t played in years, but I know there are now all sorts of timed adventures, new mechanics that deepen the pirate fantasy, and new factions and quest types. It’s even got solo servers, something I imagine Windrose players who just want to go about their survival game grind in peace would appreciate.
In my experience Sea of Thieves’ online play always pretty much just worked thanks to dedicated servers, while trying to play Windrose with PC Gamer’s Chris Livingston has been an exercise in frustration—it’ll often lock up for multiple seconds at a time or send one of us rubber-banding around a battle.
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There is a certain allure to the idea of building my ultimate pirate fortress, as teased in a recent trailer for the new survival game. But there’s no way I’m going to spend the next 50 hours—or even the next five—hitting rocks with a pickaxe to get there.
But hey, if you have more of a stomach for survival games than I do, we’ve got some guides to help you get started:
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