These are just excerpts, definitely recommend reading the whole thing which is linked at the bottom!
Is that the future of Sea of Thieves? As opposed to a Sea of Thieves 2, or a season two? It’s going to be expansion, expansion, expansion, etc.?
Duncan: Yeah, I think for us we always built Sea of Thieves as a game for players to come together. We like the regularity of giving players like, “Hey! I just saw the megalodon released. We should go play some Sea of Thieves!” Sea of Thieves is a game about bringing people together, so we love this idea of going, “Cursed Sails has taken over the Sea of Thieves and introduced these great skeleton ships!” Let’s bring people together to play it.
On Cursed Sails:
Chapman: In terms of lore, the cursed cannonballs kind of come in with the skeleton ships and it’s a thing players can find in the world. These are essentially magical cannonballs that you can find that have cool effects on players and ships. They can make your ship heavier so all the holes on deck take on more water. There is a silence ball that prevents players from communicating together and there are ones that can jam the rudder or prevent the sails from being lowered. It adds an extra strategic layer to ship encounters and we hope players will come together using the speaking trumpet to take down skeleton ships with cursed cannonballs. That’s going to be a really cool thing.
On stats on weapons:
Will you ever consider giving items – sword, guns, or costumes, etc. – stat boosts of any kind?
Chapman: It’s really tricky. We made a very defined choice around ensuring that we had a level playing field, and I think we’ve already got an example of progression in a session in the form of the gunpowder keg. It’s something that you find in the world. You may or may not have it when you encounter another ship, so I think doing things in that space is kind of interesting, but the idea of coming across someone who has better stats than you, is a pretty divisive thing when we’re actually trying to bring players together in new and interesting ways, rather than segment them off from one another because you have that balancing concern.
Interesting tidbit:
Chapman: There is one, it’s a very slight thing. A bit of fun that we had as a team. Someone actually worked it out last week and it hasn’t really picked up traction yet, but we played with this idea, in terms of the lore and everything, we always like that sort of aspirational garland.
If you only knew where the Sea of Thieves was, you would be able to get to it. The idea that pirates from the outside world are drawn to the Sea of Thieves to find their fortune. So, we have this kind of playful intro at the start of the game where you’re in the tavern and you’ve just got to the Sea of Thieves, and there is a map on the table that you follow to the Sea of Thieves. We seeded in some real place names, from the real world, and someone actually worked out longitude and latitude where the Sea of Thieves is in the real world. So, there it is. The Sea of Thieves is actually north of the British V****n Islands.
On Battle Royal Mode:
Chapman:...We see the battle royale thing, but I think there will be opportunities to do that kind of thing differently. It’s interesting where you can take PvP in the game, but we’d want to put a unique Sea of Thieves spin on it and do something completely surprising.
Duncan: It’s not about taking something that works super well in another game, and going, “Hey, let’s start everyone in a Sea of Thieves map from different points and have you all come together.”
Chapman: Our shared world is unique and the thing we’re most proud of is what you see, is a new I.P. and we wanted to do things differently – it has landed well with players and the feedback we’re getting is, “We love this foundation that you built. I just want to have more of it,” and that’s what we set up the team to do. The fact that we’ve kind of changed the perceptions of multiplayer, and the way we use mechanics in our world? We always want to surprise people. We want to keep doing these kinds of unexpected things that only we can do.
