Hey Everyone,
In our latest Developer Update I shared our plans to deliver Season 15's long-requested expansion to the Hunter's Call over the course of the Season. I wanted to reaffirm our plans here and also share why we've made this decision and what this means for Seasons in the future.
Changes to Season Delivery
Traditionally our Sea of Thieves Seasons have launched with all of the features delivered at once to kick off the start of the Season. There's multiple reasons behind why we took this approach, from our desire to deliver the biggest 'bang' to our players when launching the Season, through to how we were optimising production behind the scenes and rotating teams to maintain this three month delivery rhythm.
While this original approach was a simpler one to manage and allowed us to deliver some significant changes to the Sea of Thieves sandbox in a single update, its very clear from recent Seasons that this has also had an impact on our ability to maintain the quality of the game experience over the long-term.
While we have a range of quality control stages throughout our development process, there are a few too many scenarios that ultimately require the play behaviour and scale of the Live environment to truly shake out the nitty gritty of a change. The Sea of Thieves sandbox is a particularly complicated one that has lots of moving parts, with players coming and going, and must remain stable for a long duration compared to many online games.
While this is an area we are striving to improve (see my latest update on our new Player Experience Focus team coming onboard soon) we recognised the need to change how we were delivering Seasons in order to mitigate this area of uncertainty.
With Season 15 we are therefore making the change to deliver the features for a Season across Month 1, Month 2 and Month 3's Content Updates.
The primary goal here is to allow us to better maintain Game Health when launching a Season, while at the same delivering exciting new features into the sandbox. This staggered roll-out will slow the rate of change across each update and allow us a better opportunity to maintain the quality bar across all of our features.
Now: this isn't saying there'll be zero bugs - this is game development after all! - but we feel this gives us more time and focus to identify some of those high impact issues and better protect your experience in Live.
This Season in particular will benefit from our Game Performance 'bash' that we diverted a large portion of our team to over the last few months - prioritising improvements to Game Performance. These began rolling out in January's update but we have further improvements scheduled for February, March and April's updates - and the staggered delivery of our Season will help us ensure these improvements stick their landing.
While the primary goal here is very much rooted in improving Game Health, we do feel there is an opportunity with this new approach to keep the Season fresh for players each month as new content is added. While previously we relied more heavily on Live Events to maintain engagement during Months 2 and 3, we can take stock here and reassess our mid-term roadmap of events and better fold in some of the recent player feedback around their impact.
With this all in mind, we've already made the call to rollout Season 16 arriving later this year in summer in a similar staggered rollout with new content arriving across the three month Season. Before we get to that, let's talk Season 15!
Season 15 Rollout
So as I shared in this months Developer Update, Season 15 expands the Hunter's Call Trading Company with 100 levels of progression, new rewards, Emissary play and some great new features to allow you to truly live the life of a hunter on the seas.
- February - Season 15 launches with the Hunter's Call Expansion, rewards and Emissary play. Alongside the expansion, two new Ancient Megalodons have been unleashed - and on-demand Hunter's Call Fishing and Raid Voyages give crews the means to progress further in this Trading Company.
- March - Our mid-Season update will introduce a new throwable item with the hunting spear (I'm particularly excited to see this play out!) and a range of new wildlife across land and sea.
- April - Bringing the Season to a close, wild boars have emerged, making their homes on islands - and hunters can take on on-demand Voyages to track down rogue Megalodons.
Alongside this exciting new content there's also your usual bug fixes, Security updates, Outpost and Emporium cosmetics and the bounty of performance improvements from the team's recent Game Performance 'bash' all arriving across our regular updates. We're excited to see how Season 15 lands over the next few months - stay tuned for the patch notes on Thursday 20th for all the details!
Drew 'Sonicbob' Stevens
