For a while now I have been wondering what the potential future is for the Sea Dogs faction in Sea of Thieves would be. As of now and the last couple of years since 2022, the Sea Dogs Tavern has kinda just sat there in the middle of the map with no purpose.
With 2024 looking really good so far with the upcoming additions to the game such as new weapons, burning blade event and mechanics - it does leave me with some questions regarding the Sea Dog tavern and of its current uselessness.
Now I don’t think bringing back arena is the way to go forward with Sea of Thieves. It is obvious that the developers at Rare also don’t have that in mind. But there has to be a new purpose for the unfortunately forgotten Sea Dog faction right?
Perhaps the new Burning Blade event could have something to do with the potential return of the Sea Dogs. Since we know that the Burning Blade will have the option of being captained by a crew of players and with that the crew will also get Flameheart’s “to do list” around the server, the Burning blade should obviously get contested in a way.
Obviously the first natural enemy of Flameheart would be the Athena’s Fortune and the Pirate Lord. But the Sea Dogs should also make sense. After all they have a lot of reason to challenge Flameheart, since he killed DeMarco. So that leaves Lasedi as the leader of the Sea Dogs. It would make sense for a Sea Dogs return in some fashion sooner or later as a faction in the world of Sea of Thieves.
Somehow integrating new or/and old cosmetics and rewards for siding with the Sea Dogs would certainly compensate the players and above all it would make the Sea Dog Tavern lively again.
Ideas for the Sea Dogs Faction:
- Just ideas BTW ;) *
Perhaps making the Sea Dogs a kind of Police faction of a sort. Making them the defenders of the sea by helping players and balancing out the alliance systems to give and giving more necessity to alliances again. This could also help increase the ratio of players completing alliance based commendations which are by current standards really hard to achieve unless players decide to join a 3rd party Alliance Server.
Sea Dogs would be operate within open high sea servers to chase down the Reapers and most importantly the Burning Blade to perhaps retrieve an item of a sort ot sorts to the Sea Dogs Tavern. This would obviously make joining the Reapers faction much harder to be a part of since it has been before. Since Sea Dogs would a bonus of a sort by chasing Reapers. But this could be balanced out by seeing how the current lore of the Sea of Thieves is heading with the actual return of Flameheart himself. So perhaps adding more reward for the risk of being a Reaper would perhaps make sense.
Achievements:
Personally I consider myself a huge achievement hunter in all games I own. And Sea of Thieves is no exception. Unfortunately I belong to the vast majority of players that have started playing Sea of Thieves after the Sea Dogs Arena has been announced to be closed off as a feature. Although I see it making sense and I do see Hourglass as a very good replacement/compensation for pvp based game mode although I personally still consider it unpolished to a certain degree. I do still see those “Legacy” Achievements in my Xbox account which I will never be able to unlock unfortunately. And with more players bound to play the game since Sea of Thieves has also been announced to be available on Playstation 5. I do know that achievement hunting completionists will have that same itch that I do. So perhaps removing the legacy achievements would be an option for those that no longer can get them and never could to begin with. Or perhaps the harder thing would be to somehow bring the achievements back from arena and incorporate them differently just like it was done with the “Veteran Voyager” Achievement where a player had to originally complete 30 captain voyages that had to be purchased from the Shipwright. And now its much simpler by just completing 30 voyages on a captained ship alone. Which is now much easier as a captain voyage could take up to 2hrs compared to a single voyage that could be just 7min.
Anyway and anyhow, I really love the game and would with nothing but the best for its future, and although no one will probably see the post I still wanted to make it since the game gave me a lot of good memories (some bad ones too due to unfortunate bugs/cheaters/hitregs) and I wanted to give something back although being pretty small.
Thanks Rare!
