Announcing the Sea of Thieves Technical Alpha

At its heart, our upcoming shared world pirate game Sea of Thieves is all about you, your friends and the high seas adventures you’ll be embarking upon together. With this in mind, our ongoing approach to game design is to craft a wealth of features and systems suited to all manner of player motivations. Our intention is to get that content into players’ hands as soon as possible, giving us valuable feedback and insights into the diverse ways that people will play and experience Sea of Thieves.

As part of our commitment to pulling in player feedback throughout development, we recently launched our Sea of Thieves Insider Programme, inviting passionate fans to sign up and share their experiences and suggestions. Today, we’re excited to announce that our early Technical Alpha phase will kick off on December 16th with a series of scheduled playtests, and we’ll be inviting selected players from the Insider Programme to join us!

As with the rest of the Insider Programme, the contents of the Technical Alpha will be subject to the NDA all Insiders must agree to when signing up for the programme.

We’re powering into this phase of development with three main goals in mind:

1. We want to deliver on our promise to Insiders to help us test early game mechanics and services at a larger scale than anything we’ve delivered before.

2. We want to give our participating Insiders the opportunity to provide feedback about their experience.

3. We want to use this feedback and our data insights to make meaningful changes to our game.

Our first Technical Alpha play session will take place next weekend, from December 16th-18th. It’ll be available during several timeslots throughout the weekend, after which we’ll thank our participating pirates and give the servers a rest while we take on board everything we’ve learned, determining the best ways to apply it to Sea of Thieves’ development.

We’re overjoyed to see that thousands of eager gamers have already signed up for our Insider Programme, but the scale of the weekend’s session will be limited to around 1000 players only. This gives us the right scale and experience for our first test, and will allow us to focus closely on the feedback we receive. As we move on through the Technical Alpha phase, we’ll gradually increase the player base and frequency of sessions in line with the game’s evolution.

Ready to find out more? Watch the video to glimpse which new gameplay features will be included during this first round of the Sea of Thieves Technical Alpha. Fully convinced and ready to go? Jump in now and join our Insider Programme to be in with a chance to play – and check out our official Forums and the Sea of Thieves subreddit for all the latest news and updates!