Press have been at Rare all this week, testing Arena and Tall Tales.
Story elements, why?
Wanted to try out the addition of narrative quests into the game and see how it affected gameplay and the stories which emerged. Hungering Deep gave confidence that it was something which could work in the game, so they assigned a dedicated team to focus on this type of content.
Lore from the books, comics and other sources is starting to appear in the world, and more from the expanded universe will be included going forward.
Anniversary update -
A series of tales connected and like Hungering Deep these will play out differently and generate stories depending on the encounters, alliances etc as they're followed.
Unpredictability - is absolutely core to the experience of Sea of Thieves, other players, ai enemies, every adventure to be unpredictable and generate different experiences.
Similar to Hungering Deep, the Tales will introduce new mechanics, tools and encounters.
Releasing the anniversary content all at once creates an opportunity for people to stream, chat about the game, share the enthusiasm, highlight it, a moment in time for the game rather than a series of smaller content additions. This is much more difficult for the team due to the sheer volume of changes and additions - still need to be aware of creating a sustainable way of working, but Rare have every intention of continuing to grow and add to the game beyond April 30th.
For the future both Arena and Adventure will be developed further.
Tease - Might be something special around the music/audio in game being prepared.....
Audience questions
How does SoT sustain itself financially -
Different criteria applied to determine success of a game as part of Microsoft, not just financial. A healthy player base is one of those things and everything is governed by a performance dashboard with different layers of criteria for success - monthly hours in game, gamepass etc, mau more than doubled with the advent of Shrouded Spoils.
Pirate Legends are still a very small percentage of the overall player base.
However pets are coming as a microtransaction when they're ready, which is not likely to be April 30th. If something is being brought into the game it needs to be of a good enough quality regardless of whether it will generate income or not.
New ship damage balancing -
It is hard to do but is part of the balancing challenge for any new feature, testing, tweaking and feedback. It provides many more options for ship vs ship combat.
Single player ship? Smaller than sloop?
Always want Sot to be a shared world experience with other players and will try to include content for the larger population rather than smaller minorities at the moment, but looking forward, will be thinking about how to add content that works for specific groups of players in the future at some point.
Subtitles and second language?
Non verbal communication system in game does automatically translate into other languages, which is one option, Joe unsure what would be possible in real time situations. Perhaps crew language options could be included in the front end as selection criteria. Also there is the view that encountering and trying to communicate through that barrier is something interesting and can be an additional adventure in the game.
Zero progression apart from cosmetics, how did this come about and will there ever be progression/power systems in game?
No progression system was very deliberately made.
Rare were very passionate that there would not ever be any system which would divide players from each other, e.g stats, powerful weapons, no barriers between players or groups of players. No intention to change or tweak this at all.
Sea of Thieves – The Story Continues | Developer Sessions | EGX Rezzed 2019
Rare’s Craig Duncan: ‘I believe gaming can be a force for good’ - MCV
