Hey Everyone,
It was only a few days ago I was sitting in front of the camera filming our latest Developer Update, and for you folks it's only a few hours old now. However, things move real fast in development and a few days can bring around big change or often in our case - new challenges. Ahead of our game update later this week, I want to share an update following decisions we've made about the upcoming feature set.
I've shared previously that overhauling processes on a live game the size of Sea of Thieves is just going to take some time. While I've begun sharing some of these process improvements in our recent updates, some features aren't able to truly benefit from them due to how far they are through their production journey.
I stand by the fact however that something we can do today is be much more pragmatic with our risk assessment of issues and step up to make difficult decisions to hold features that are not meeting our quality bar in order to protect the experience for all of you. Unfortunately we've had to make this very call this week with our latest addition to the Blowpipe's toolset - the Mimic Dart.
Mimic Dart
This new addition to the sandbox has had plenty of time with Insiders and we felt confident we could address the issues that had been raised as we began to close down the build for release in December. As we deployed fixes to these remaining issues however, these generated further issues due to the complexity of a shared world multiplayer game like Sea of Thieves.
When faced with challenges like this, we often can see the light at the end of the tunnel and push on with good intentions and rally to address the issues, however there is a point in the release cycle where we have to take a step back and make an assessment on whether a feature is truly ready to release.
With our December update especially, the holidays play a big part in our decision-making, to ensure we safeguard the experience for you all while our teams take some time off to be with their families.
We've assessed the status of the feature this week and while there is only a few issues remaining, when combined together we feel these issues affect the overall quality of the Mimic Dart experience amd pme we are unhappy knowingly releasing.
We don't take these decisions lightly, and the fact that this feature is one we've shared updates on for a while now isn't at all lost on us. We've however made the difficult call to hold this back from release in December and will continue to work on addressing these quality issues for a future release. Given the challenges we've faced here, we aren't committing this feature to a specific follow-up release but will share more updates on this in the new year.
While it's disapointing we can't get the Mimic Darts into your hands for the holidays, there's still some great value arriving in our December update later this week, with improvements to the tools launched in Season 14, further fixes to the experience and the changes we've previously shared to Safer Seas.
Thank you again for your patience, we'll work behind the scenes to get this latest addition brought up to quality and back into your hands as soon as it's ready!
Drew 'Sonicbob' Stevens
