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Sea of Thieves is a 2018 action-adventure game developed by Rare and published by Microsoft Studios. The player assumes the role of a pirate who completes voyages from different trading companies. The multiplayer game sees players explore an open world via a pirate ship from a first-person perspective. Groups of players encounter each other regularly during their adventures, sometimes forming alliances, and sometimes going head-to-head.
Sea of Thieves was released in March 2018 for Windows and Xbox One; it was one of the earliest first-party games released for Xbox Game Pass subscribers. It received mixed reviews; critics praised the ship combat, multiplayer, visuals, and physics, but criticized the progression, gameplay, and lack of content. Rare envisioned Sea of Thieves as a "game as a service" and has released numerous content updates after the initial release, which improved its reception. Sea of Thieves was a commercial success and became Microsoft's most successful original intellectual property of the eighth generation, attracting more than 40 million players by April 2024. A native Xbox Series X/S version of the game was released on March 13, 2024, and the game was released for the PlayStation 5 on April 30, 2024, making it Rare's first game to be released on a PlayStation console.
Sea of Thieves is a first-person perspective action-adventure game. At the beginning of the game, the player selects their procedurally generated player avatar.[1] The game is set in a shared world, which means groups of players will encounter each other throughout their adventures.[2] Solo and duo players sail around in a nimble sloop while players playing in a group control a larger three-person brigantine or a four-person galleon cooperatively by assuming different roles, such as steering the ship, manning the cannons, navigating, boarding enemy ships, and scouting from the crow's nest.[3][4] Players can save the loadout of the ship and customize the ship's hull, figurehead, sails and captain's quarters, as well as name their ship.[5] Occasionally players may encounter hostile players who may attack them with cannonballs or board their ship.[6] If areas under the deck take damage, water will flow in and cause the ship to gradually sink. Players need to patch up the holes with planks of wood and bail out water using buckets.[3] Alliances can be established with other player crews. When a treasure item is sold by a member of an alliance, all other members receive gold and reputation points at half of the item's normal value. Ships in an alliance fly the same flag and are visible on the map tables on other ships in the alliance. Forming an alliance does not prevent players from attacking each other.[7] If a player dies, there is a limited window of time during which they are able to be revived by crewmates or allied player crews. If they are not revived in time, they are sent to a ghost ship known as the Ferry of the Damned where they wait until they can respawn on their crew's ship.[8] A competitive multiplayer mode named "Arena" was introduced in the Anniversary update, allowing up to six teams of players to compete against each other by gathering silver in smaller maps. Due to low player participation, this game mode was subsequently removed in a later update.[9] A player-versus-environment mode named "Safer Seas" was introduced in December 2023.[10]
Players can complete voyages offered by the game's three main trading companies: Gold Hoarders, Order of Souls, and the Merchant Alliance. In the quests offered by Gold Hoarders, players are given a treasure map or a riddle to locate a treasure chest. The voyages offered by the Order of Souls are combat challenges, in which players travel to islands specified by the quest to defeat waves of skeletons. The Merchant Alliance's missions require players to deliver animals or cargo to certain vendors within a limited time.[11] Three smaller factions also exist. Two of them, the Hunter's Call and the Reaper's Bones, do not offer quests. The Hunter's Call will reward players who bring them cooked fish and meat, particularly from rarer types of fish. The Reaper's Bones will pay for all kinds of treasures, and players can also give them special cursed treasures or emissary flags stolen from other ships. Players must deliver treasure to representatives of the quest-giving faction, though the player holding the chest is defenseless and it may be taken from them by other players.[12] Selling the treasure earns players gold,[13] which can be used to purchase cosmetic items.[14] Pets, emotes, and further cosmetic items can also be purchased using real-world currency by accessing the Pirate Emporium store.[15] Doubloons, earned through completing commendations from the Bilge Rats, the fourth trading company that distributes quests, challenges, and cosmetics added to the game via post-launch updates, can be traded for cosmetics, gold, or reputation to the other factions.[16] The Anniversary update added Tall Tales, which are a series of structured narrative missions.[17] Selling treasures to any of the three main trading companies, as well as Reaper's Bones or Athena's Fortune, earns the player reputation points, which unlock more complicated quests from each faction and additional purchasable cosmetics.[11][14] When players reach rank 50 with any three of the six trading companies, they will earn the title of "pirate legend", which grants players new cosmetic items and access to a pirate hideout, the Tavern of Legends, as well as a special trading company called Athena's Fortune.[18]
Players can freely explore the game's open world on their own or with other players.[19][20] When exploring islands players can find various resources: food like bananas, coconuts, and mangos, which restore their health, as well as wood planks, firebombs, blunderbombs, and cannonballs. Rowboats can be used to carry cargo while avoiding potential hazards.[21] There are six weapons players can choose from, including cutlasses, pistols, blunderbusses, sniper rifles, throwing knives and double barrel pistols, that can be used to defeat hostile enemies.[8][6] When players are sailing on the ocean, they may sometimes face adverse weather conditions such as thunderstorms,[3] or encounter shipwrecks, messages in bottles, barrels, skeleton ships, ghost fleets, or two monsters: the megalodon and the kraken.[22][19] Skull-shaped clouds indicate the locations of Skeleton Forts, which are raids that can be completed by players in the same server.[23] Players can interact with each other using emotes and by speaking via an in-game text and voice system.[24] They can also play musical instruments together and drink at taverns.[25][26] The Anniversary update allows players to engage in leisure activities like fishing, hunting, and cooking.[27]
Sea of Thieves was developed by the UK-based developer Rare. Almost all of Rare's 200 staff members worked on the game.[28] The team began conceptualizing the game in 2014 and wanted to create a title where players could create stories together. The team took five months to create the game's playable prototype, named Athena, using the Unity game engine.[29] After playing the prototype, Microsoft executives including Phil Spencer and Kudo Tsunoda agreed to green-light the game's development.[30][31] Rare employees also provided the voices for all of the non-playable characters.[32] Sea of Thieves marked Rare's shift from using its own proprietary engine to using Unreal Engine 4.[33]
Prior to Sea of Thieves, Rare was often considered a secretive studio. Since Sea of Thieves is a multiplayer-focused game, the studio adopted a more transparent approach to the game's development to ensure that the game's content would resonate with players.[34][29] The team allowed fans to take part in the game's development by joining the Insider's Program, which granted players access to an early build of the game. The program allowed Rare to experiment with different features while collecting players' feedback. The participants could also discuss with the developers in a private forum.[35] More than 30,000 players joined the program.[36] Through the program, Rare learned more about how players interact with each other and used the information to help the team make gameplay decisions;[37] for instance, the team decided to include solo play after many players from the Insider's Program requested it.[38]
"I love the idea of things happening in the world that literally can shape the ongoing fabric and lore of Sea of Thieves. The Black Beard of Sea of Thieves being a real player in a real crew with a real name - that's really hard to do if you've already painted everyone down a path you want them to go through."
Studio director Craig Duncan described Sea of Thieves as the "friendliest" multiplayer game.[39] While Rare is traditionally a console game developer, it realized how players from PC survival games like DayZ and Rust and simulation games such as Eve Online crafted their own stories by using the tools provided in the game. However, Rare remarked that these games are often very punishing in nature, and the team aspired to create a more light-hearted and accessible version of these games.[40] Sea of Thieves was designed to be a "light canvass of a world" where players create their own stories.[39] The game did not feature any narrative component at launch because the team felt that by offering players a structured narrative, they would only be playing a handcrafted experience. Joe Neate, the game's executive director, described the game as an "improv" comedy, and added that the game is about going "off-script".[39] Rare shaped the world and the game's lore to reflect players' actions, including various easter eggs to celebrate their actions or achievements. The team believed that if a narrative campaign was included, incorporating players' actions into the game's lore would become difficult.[39][40]
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