On Friday, Rare released an “Inn-side story” video for Sea of Thieves, featuring Design Director Mike Chapman and Executive Producer Joe Neate, telling us about future content updates and laying out their “roadmap” in response to player feedback. For the most part, they’re staying mum about details, and seem keen on “surprising and delighting” their player base with what they have in store, but here are the biggest points we know:
New content will not come at an extra cost The team expressed that they don’t want to draw a divide between players, and make it so only a portion of their audience could enjoy new content. They’ve said that content will stay in the world even after the events end. This will likely come as a relief to current and prospective future players, who can rest easy knowing they’ll be getting more discovery for their doubloons.
In fact, Rare seems much more interested in bringing their players together, rather than pushing them apart. In many of their discussions of future content, they’ve mentioned cooperation not just within one crew, but across several. In at least one situation, they seem to hope that a large, looming AI threat will encourage ships to work together to conquer it. Most sailors on the thieving seas fear each other at the moment, but it’s not difficult to see where this might be possible: One major reason that PvP is so appealing is simply that there isn’t much else to do. If there’s both new content and incentive to cooperate, we’ll likely see a rise in multi-crew collaboration.
Sea of Thieves will be seeing many updates in the form of weekly events, interspersed between the major landmarks on their roadmap of new content. In this way, the team hopes to introduce new content seamlessly, through the natural gameplay, and allow players to explore new content as it comes out.
We could start seeing this new content as early as May, with “The Hungering Deep.” Then, in the Summer, we’ll be seeing events named “Cursed Sails” and “Forsaken Shores.” There are three more major events planned for the following fall and winter, but no names have been released for those as of yet.
So for those of you currently playing, keep your spyglass on the horizon for new, uncharted territory. If you’ve been waiting for new content before you test the waters, keep your eyes open: You just might get your chance very soon.
