I understand there are likely many people that still don't know when they can play Sea of Thieves. Some of us already have it figured out, and luckily RARE has posted an article today showing when you can start playing your copy down to the hour. So for the TL;DR for the most of you I'm sure, here you go:
For those still interested in a more thorough comprehension of how this works, I'll be discussing it lightly. Firstly, if you don't know your time zone and how it compares to UTC, you really should. It's a nice piece of knowledge to have.
UTC stands for "Coordinated Universal Time" (even though its acronym doesn't match the word order). It sits right on Longitude 0 and is the mathematical base for the rest of the time-zones. Its also effectively the same thing as GMT, which you will likely see used often by Europeans and people who live in the zone's region.
For example: I'm in the western US which uses PST (Pacific Standard Time) and is UTC -8:00. Eight hours behind UTC. But we are however currently in Daylight time (PDT: Pacific Daylight Time) which is UTC -7:00. UTC has no Daylight time for itself. It is always the same. Knowing what + or - to UTC you are is immensely helpful in these kind of situations.
Back to the launch at hand. Sea of Thieves by the charts information will be playable earliest and first By New Zealand, followed up by Australians shortly after. They will be playing the game well into the US's mornings. Fortunately the chart lists PDT for comparison which I explained, the math is easy. NZ will be playing the game at 4:00am on the 19th! Essentially a whole day earlier. 17 hours earlier than the US gets access, to be precise.
Now, the launch isn't happening exactly to your time zone at midnight, not everyone's anyway. While some countries' time-zones inter-lap, their launch is not the same like the US and Mexico both using Central time, US has a sooner launch time. The whole US will have access as soon as the East coast hits midnight on the 20th, even though PDT is 3 hours behind the East time, EDT. (EDT = UTC -4:00.) So West Coasters will be playing as soon as 9:00pm on the 19th, while East Coasters will have access at 12:00am on the 20th but fret not, any American and Canadian friends you may be looking to start the game right off with will all be getting access at the same time in the grand scale of the universe, not bound by our made up spinning rock segregation.
Anyway, that's about all you really need to know, at least for Sea of Thieves. I hope it adds clarity to Launch and gets you prepared to play at the right time rather than being let down waiting for the wrong time. More-so, I hope any who read through this walks away knowing more about time and how made up and relative it really is. If you didn't know all of this already of course. Have a wonderful Launch day.
