Sea of Thieves: how Rare silenced the cannons and brought peace to the seas

Soon after the online pirate adventure Sea of Thieves was released in March, it had become a war zone. The game sees small groups of players board ships and setsail on the open ocean in search of treasure, but every time you spotted another boat, the result would be a fight to the death, cannons blazing and swords swirling. Games developer Rare had hoped that some encounters would be peaceful and cooperative, but the innate competitiveness of the online multiplayer arena seemed to have won out.

Then the studio released the game’s first major update, The Hungering Deep, and for a few days everything changed. Player ships made their way to Shark Bait Cove to receive a time-limited challenge from a hoary old monster-hunter who had lost both legs to a gigantic sea creature, and now wanted players to work together to find and destroy it. So they did. Ships anchored, crews alighted, and – united by an interesting common goal – they didn’t brawl: they communicated, messed around, played their musical instruments and formulated plans. Then they went off together to track down and slaughter the terrifying Megalodon. It was the scenario Rare had dreamed of.

“For the two weeks of that campaign, the game became Sea of Friends,” says lead designer Mike Chapman. “We looked at the stats and found that, during The Hungering Deep, the game was twice as friendly – ship encounters that ended in combat were reduced by half. We’d had our dreams built around bringing players together, to be more than just attacking everything on sight. [The game] landed so well, we knew we had to build that into future campaigns as well.”

The Hungering Deep came off the back of a period of soul-searching for the Sea of Thieves team. Although the game’s light-hearted, highly sociable approach to the open-world adventure format had been largely praised in the run-up to its release, when it came out, many reviewers and players found that the world lacked detail, variety and, crucially, a sense of progression. The islands scattered around the sea all looked very similar and the missions were all identikit fetch-quests. There just wasn’t enough to do.

“A week after release, we sat down in a room, took out our roadmap for the year and pretty much ripped it up and started again,” says Chapman. “The feedback we were getting was: we want more variety in quests, more things to do in between, to come across in the ocean, that can challenge us, more emergent opportunities, goals to aspire to.”

Launching on 31 July, the next Sea of Thieves event, Cursed Sails, will add in skeleton ships. Haunted vessels will rise out of the depths and attack player boats, and defeating them will earn bundles of treasure. This addition represents a philosophical change for Rare. “I’ve said lots of times that every sail on the horizon is another player,” says Chapman. “We took a very principled stand on how the game is designed to be a social sandbox that brings players together … but at the same time, everyone was saying: ‘We want AI ships in the world.’ We looked at the game just after launch and thought: players want to enjoy the fantasy of broadsiding other ships, so it makes sense for AI to take the brunt of that: if you’re giving people the creative outlet of attacking a common foe, it’s going to reduce the wish for dominance over other players.”

Skeleton ships will also bring in a new weapon, cursed cannonballs, which should make combat more interesting. If a boat is hit by a ballast ball, it instantly becomes heavier, dragging it down so that it takes on water; rudder balls lock the rudder in place so the craft can’t be steered; grog balls will make the other crew drunk. “Each one is a simple effect, but players will be able to combine them in lots of emergent ways,” says senior designer Shelley Preston.

Rare wants to give players a chance to increase the power of their boats, but without spending hours and hours in the game first – very much like the way Epic and Legendary weapons work in Fortnite. “You could be in your first ever session and you’ve got just as much chance of finding cursed cannon balls as someone who’s played for hundreds of hours,” says Preston. “It keeps that level playing field.”

Another update called Forsaken Shores, arriving in September, will bring new quests, items and a challenging new chunk of territory, the highlight of which will be a volcanic island named Devil’s Roar. “It’s a tougher challenge that people have to opt in to,” says Preston. “You’ll have to say to your crew: do you think we’re ready for this? Resources will be much harder to come by, so you’ll have to prepare. There are new enemies, but the island itself is a threat, with unpredictable volcanic activity – you might feel a tremor, but you won’t know if the volcano will erupt.

“When it does erupt, you’ll have boiling-hot rocks rain down, potentially destroying your ship. That’s why we have a new rowing boat coming in with Forsaken Shores – it’s a way to navigate more dangerous waters, but it also enriches the whole game. A solo player could use it to get to and from islands to pick up treasure; someone suggested putting a gunpowder barrel in it then rowing it alongside an enemy ship.”

Rare says it is committed to experimenting with new features. “Something we’ve done since launch is set up a separate branch [of the game development code] so we can prototype really quickly,” says Preston. “That’s how we developed Forsaken Shores, and it’s where some little emergent things have come from.”

Producer Joe Neate explains further. “This is where we can iterate as swiftly as possible, prove out the theory of what we’re trying to do, answer the unknowns, and ultimately find the fun in the features,” he says. “Coding standards go out the window; we don’t have to worry about it as it’s not affecting the main version of the game. We can swiftly deploy prototype builds to a machine, playtest it and make tweaks, proving the concept before building it in the main game. What you think is going to work on paper can end up pretty different once you’ve played it.”

Rare’s direction from now on is to bring more life to ships and islands, and to allow different play styles to develop. As yet, there are no plans to charge more money for new content. A new three-player craft, the brigatine, has been added to allow for smaller crews, and players can run up a flag to advertise whether they’re friendly or out for blood. There is, we’re told, much more to come.

“Having crews coming together in interesting ways, and having one idea about what you want to do, but then things playing out in an entirely different way because of that emergence - that’s the heart of Sea of Thieves,” says Chapman. “That’s what we’ll keep going after, because that’s what’s special about it.”