9 Greatest Comebacks In Video Game History
6. Sea of Thieves
Sea of Thieves or ‘the pirate game’–just not the one not made by Ubisoft. Or Sid Meier. Or the one with LeChuck–falls pretty neatly next to Rainbow Six: Siege in that they’re both examples of games that have benefited enormously from the divisive ‘games as a service model’ and, not only that, they’ve made it far more worth your while if you dropped your dollars on them when they first hit storefronts.
When Sea of Thieves set sail in 2018 plenty of people were saying “This looks cool and everything, but what do we actually do here?” to which developer Rare replied, “Hold my banana.” Because in the game you eat bananas, it’s a whole thing, I recognise the phrasing wasn’t the best but I’m two lines down on the Google doc now we’ll just have to press on.
As you’d have expected by now, if you didn’t experience it for yourself, this one launched with more than a few dings in the hull. The bones of a solid experience were there, but without any skin or flesh or blood on them (yeah, sorry, that got weird), players were lamenting that there was little of substance driving them to play beyond messing around with friends, having the odd cool emergent gameplay moment in a ship battle, and eating the aforementioned bananas.
Two years down the line in 2020, and IGN would chuck the No Man’s Sky classic phrase at the game, stating it’s the perfect time for players to give it another go as a result of a number of infrastructure fixes, bug patches, and buckets of new content.
All of this was looped under the Anniversary update that was seen as something of a relaunch for the promising experience.
Come 2024 and that improvement train has kept on chugging, introducing new modes, free expansions, a seasonal format, and story-driven live events called Adventures.
Like Siege, constant updates will always lead to constant bug fixing, but for those who wanted to see this game become what Rare originally intended, it’s certainly done just that. I’m sure the 30 million players in 2022 and 5 million units sold didn’t hurt, either.