Rare’s Commitment to Accessibility

Accessibility is important to us – whether the gap between capability and the expectations of an experience is permanent, temporary or situational, everyone can benefit from more accessible, inclusive experiences.

Since Sea of Thieves’ launch in March 2018, at least 39 of our updates (as of September 2021) have contained accessibility improvements or entirely new features in addition to the many accessibility features included at launch.

As with any other part of our evolving experience, we strive to continually build and improve on features to make Sea of Thieves a more accessible, inclusive game. Whether it’s refining our systems for better narration, ensuring new experiences are accessible by design or taking feedback and listening to players, we’re always working to improve Sea of Thieves for everyone.

Inclusive Experiences – Expectations and Capabilities

Sea of Thieves is an online shared world, so you can always expect to encounter other players during a play session. You can form a crew with up to three other players, and our Alliance system allows multiple crews to work co-operatively.

Player communication is central to Sea of Thieves. Players can make use of both voice and text chat (with text-to-speech and speech-to-text support), as well as our Pirate Chat Radial for quick access to preset contextual messages. In addition to this, players can use in-game tools such as the Speaking Trumpet to extend the range of their communication, use our rich set of emotes to communicate non-verbally or raise flags to visually communicate their intent.

Playing Sea of Thieves requires traversing different terrain types and steering a ship across the seas – adjusting the sails, dropping the anchor, turning the wheel and aiming the cannons. While we do have audio and haptic cues in many areas, the physical nature of in-game interactions can be challenging for players with low or no vision without some visual assistance. This is an area of in-game accessibility that we are actively working to improve, with some exciting additions coming soon!

Visually, Sea of Thieves has been designed to have easily readable environments and models, with high visual contrast between elements. Most gameplay cues are delivered through multiple sensory modalities, such as on-screen VFX, audio and haptic feedback.

All our important dialogue is delivered through voice acting, and subtitles are provided for this by default in more than 10 different languages. Interactions with non-player characters are delivered via narrated multiple-choice menus.

Options for Enhancing Accessibility

The following options are available to players.

Input and Navigation

Find out which features have been implemented in Sea of Thieves to aid player input and navigation.

Audio

Information on the audio features implemented in Sea of Thieves to assist players with low to no vision.

Communication

Learn more about features implemented in Sea of Thieves to help players communicate, whether via voice or text chat.

Feedback

Check out ongoing features implemented in Sea of Thieves to let players adjust the level of physical feedback.

Visual

Learn more about features implemented in Sea of Thieves to assist players with colourblindness or other visual impairments.

Provide Your Feedback/Request a Feature

We fully support the accessibility community’s ethos of “nothing about us, without us”. If you want to help us in our continuing efforts to make Sea of Thieves as accessible as possible, we recommend signing up for our Insider Programme to gain early access to updates and provide us with feedback on future accessibility features.

If you wish to suggest improvements to existing features, request new options or have experienced a bug that has impacted your accessibility, please raise a support request with the Sea of Thieves Support team.