#i hope it all makes sense pls dont take it in bad faith 💙

[titanofthedepths]

I was talking about this on a call the other day but one of my favorite things about Sea of Thieves is that the characters are allowed to be ugly and so wildly diverse. Even the skeletons are diverse and have compelling and fun designs.

Note that when I say ugly I don’t mean that as a bad thing - I’m a firm believer that ugly doesn’t have to be a bad word, just the same as fat doesn’t have to be. Nobody’s perfect and that’s beautiful etc etc, when I say ugly I mean “not conventionally attractive” and it’s something I wholeheartedly appreciate

Like. Player pirates are randomly generated, which can be frustrating but at the end of the day it’s refreshing to not be able to sit and put together the perfect pirate. There will always be little scars or nicks or features you didn’t choose to place there, but they’re your pirates’ features. Just a couple days ago I realized my pirate has a snake bite on her cheek, and I LOVE that it’s there, though I never would have considered it for her had I been given the option to build her from scratch.

The NPCs, too, are diverse, and allowed to be flawed, and ugly. With their crooked or missing teeth and imperfect proportions and scars and asymmetrical faces - Rare could have very easily chosen to make every last NPC a perfectly pretty face fit for a magazine, and they chose not to. It makes the characters feel a little more real, more like they’re people - I can’t tell you how often I sit and examine the models of NPCs to look at every little detail and just appreciate how imperfect they are.

And like previously stated - and perhaps the thing I appreciate the most - even the skeleton characters are widely varied. Rathbone moves with a hunched posture that hides the fact his frame is fairly small, Grimm is tall and wide in that way that Sea of Thieves builds their fat characters, one of Chi’s horns is growing from her eye socket and she’s lankier than Ruth’s sturdy frame, Horatio has arms that are just a little too long, so on and so forth.

Just… Sure, I don’t by any means love Rare as a company, but the character design we see in Sea of Thieves is some of the best I’ve ever seen. I have a lot of love for this pirate game and the amount of love the design team put into every single character they offer us