The Next Few Months in Sea of Thieves

Hi everyone. Following the Inside Xbox reveal of our next monthly content update, Ships of Fortune, and the recent announcement that we are bringing Sea of Thieves to Steam, I wanted to take the time to share a further update from us here at Rare.

Like people all around the world, we have been affected by the social distancing measures put in place to combat COVID-19, but we’ve been lucky enough to be able to make the transition to working from home fairly smoothly. This is thanks to some amazing work across the studio, particularly from our Facilities, Operations and IT teams, who have made this about as smooth as they possibly could. Thank you!

As we’ve transitioned to working from home, our focus is on the health of our employees and their families, and the impact of the change to their working environment. From a personal perspective, I have definitely felt the lack of regular social interaction. It turns out I liked to talk to people a lot, who knew?

Our team members have adapted really well to their new circumstances, but as we work through the realities of working from home we’ve definitely found a few areas that are just more difficult or time-consuming when everyone is working remotely. As such, we’ve been taking another look at our plans over the next few months for how we’ll continue to update Sea of Thieves. I’d like to take the time to talk you through what those plans currently look like.

April

Ships of Fortune is a sizeable and meaningful update evolving how progression works within the Adventure sandbox, and as such requires a significant testing investment to ensure it all functions as we expect. Moving the studio to home working coincided with the final phases of development for this update, and as such we decided to push it back a little to give it the time and focus it needs to land in a polished and stable state on April 22nd. Our community will know we usually deliver our monthly update in the first or second week of each month, so there’s a little longer to wait for this one, but it’s worth it!

May

For May, we’ve had a bit of a shuffle around in terms of content. This update will deliver some really important quality of life changes, together with fixes for a few long-standing bugs. There will also be a number of new engagement events as part of this update to make sure that everyone has plenty of new things to do and rewards to go after. One of the key features originally planned for May is moving to our June update to ensure we have time to playtest appropriately and deliver it to the quality we all expect. We’re still very excited about our plans for May, so stay tuned for more info as we get closer!

Steam release

We’re making good progress on the Steam version of Sea of Thieves and we aren’t too far away from announcing its full release date. The decision was made to hold back on giving a date until we were feature complete and 100% confident we can hit that date. It’s been brilliant to partner with Valve on this, who have been really helpful and are as excited about Sea of Thieves coming to Steam as we are!

Finally, I wanted to say it’s been really heartwarming to see how many people have been using Sea of Thieves alongside other games (I’m looking at you Animal Crossing, I never thought I’d have to mute ‘turnips’ on Twitter) as a way to stay socially connected. It’s genuinely uplifting and motivating to know we can contribute to helping people out in times such as these. As always, thanks for all your support on the adventure so far.

See you on the seas.

– Joe “Three Sheets” Neate