Watch a Sea of Thieves pirate crew battle the Kraken

Sea of Thieves officially arrives tomorrow, though there a number of folks playing Rare's open world pirate game a day early, and some have already faced off against the game's biggest monster. After first learning of the Kraken from dataminers, then discussing it with Rare back in February, and then being teased with a bit of video last week, we've all been dying to know what it's like to actually encounter and battle one.

Granted, we're sure many players want to discover it for themselves in the natural course of playing the game, and if so, we understand you closing this article and reading no further.

However, if you're curious and don't mind having the battle spoiled for you, check out the video below (around 1:15 in is a good point to start watching). So, spoiler warning, and also profanity warning if you've got your sound on. There's quite a bit of swearing when the creature appears, not that pirates were known for mincing words.

You can see that, first, the ocean around the ship turns inky black and the ship loses speed. And then the towering tentacles appear. Lots of them. I had sort of imagined having to sail in a semi-circle around the beast, similar to how you battle other pirate ships, but it looks like you basically become anchored in place and fight it on all sides without needing to steer or worry about your sails.

I have to say, the battle also feels a bit anticlimactic. First, there appears to be nothing to the creature beside the tentacles above the surface: the water is turned black perhaps to disguise that fact, but one would think after having it's tentacles shot down, the entire leviathan might appear. Second, it's not really that crazy of a battle. Tentacles can be damaged by both cannonfire and by guns, and for the most part they appear to wait patiently to be shot. . A couple of the pirates are snatched and dragged off the boat, which is fun, but they appear to escape without too much trouble.

We're hoping to stumble across a Kraken today ourselves, and naturally we'll have a review of Sea of Thieves sometime soon.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.