E3 Q&A w/ Sea of Thieves Dev team takeaway

Joe Neate, Mike Chapman, Shelley Preston & Adam Park had a short Q&A session at E3 today; while there wasn't too much secret information leaked, here's what I took away from it.

• Player feedback from The Hungering Deep is being incorporated into Cursed Sails, specifically mentioning "replayability".

• Cursed Cannonballs: It seems like these will be dropped by the ghost ships in the new map. When a cursed cannonball hits a ship, it will effect either the ship or the crew. They were not super specific but they did offer effects such as dropping the ship's anchor, raising the sails or making the crew drunk.

• Crew size: The dev team seems happy with the current crew size, The Hungering Deep was their first test with having 5+ players needed for events and they believe it was a successful test, citing a roughly 50% drop in hostilities between crews for the event. They seemed to indicate this 5+ format would be how they continue to go from here. That being said, they are aware people want more options when it comes to playing with people they know.

• Parley?- They mentioned they were working on a mechanic for forming "uneasy alliances" between crews, but were nonspecific as to what form that may take other than saying you could still kill each other but perhaps you could split loot.

• They are still looking at fine tuning death, in the sense of distance and amount of supplies upon respawning. However, they don't want to make death too punishing because they don't players to feel like they cannot take risks and they don't want to make it very annoying for you when when of your teammates die.

• No current plans on increasing the song list but they are all very fond of the music system so its something they'd like to do.

• More instruments coming (stringed instrument obviously being already in the game, at the pirate legend hideout)

• There will be a new enemy type besides skeletons, at some point.

• Pirate Legends- They mentioned there were 5k + pirate legends currently and that number will only continue to grow, so they are looking to add more content for legends. They were nonspecific as to what that might be.