With Custom Seas on the cusp of launching, we wanted to take a moment to talk about our plans for the feature and how we plan on approaching the development of the toolset moving forward. But before we do that, we want to reflect on the journey we’ve had to this point.
Firstly, Custom Seas is a love letter to our players and communities who’ve been staging amazing events over the years, without a dedicated toolset. We’ve been in awe of your creativity and ingenuity (and your persistence!), and we’re thrilled to be equipping you with more tools to set up different game modes and events more efficiently.
So many of you have run incredibly fun and engaging events over the years, using our alpha custom server tech or gathering people on retail servers, and the introduction of Custom Seas is going to immediately relieve you of a lot of that set-up labour - as well as provide you with new options for shenanigans. Getting these tools into your hands feels like a seismic moment for us, and we hope you feel similarly.
We can’t wait to see what you get up to, and have exciting plans to spotlight some of the amazing modes we see surface once Custom Seas goes live. Please expect to hear more about that over the coming weeks and months.
As well as unleashing our community leaders and creators to go host amazing events and experiences, Custom Seas is also going to provide all players with a brand new opportunity to play. The keys to the seas are being put in everyone’s hands, and from Thursday, your blank canvas servers await. Want to level up your #SoTShot game with a free camera? You can do that now. Want to practice PvP and naval combat? Go nuts. Just want to use Sea of Thieves as a digital hangout for up to 23 of your nearest and dearest? That’s immediately on offer too.
It’s worth noting that Custom Seas has marked a fresh approach to developing content for us here at Rare. We shared our ideas earlier than before, brought community leaders and creators in to the studio to road test and ideate with us, and have tested various parts of the feature in Insiders much earlier than we have previously. This is a feature we’ve wanted to build with our players, as well as for our players – and that doesn’t just stop once Custom Seas releases with Season 20.
We know that this is feels like an early version of the toolset landing in retail. That is intentional; we want to get this into lots of players’ hands as early as we can, so we start developing the toolset with as many of you as possible. Because while we’ve had a set of signals from Insiders and creators that the feature is heading in the right direction, we know there’s work to do to give you a broader set of options and capabilities.
This is where we want to be clear: Season 20’s release is not the end of Custom Seas, but the start. We intend to continue building out tools and features with you all from day one, and we’re committed to learning and learning at scale once it releases in live.
We can’t wait to hear what you think, and we’re so excited to see what happens when we hand over all these tools and possibilities into your hands. Tell us what you love and what you don’t, what you’d like more of, and what you’d love to be able to do. We’ll be listening keenly and planning behind the scenes, with a goal to share with our development priorities for Custom Seas in the coming weeks.
For now, thank you to everyone who’s shared feedback and a perspective so far – from folks who’ve come to visit us, to every Insider who has shared thoughts on the feature set. The keys to the seas are about to be yours, and we can’t wait to see what you all unlock with the sandbox at your fingertips.
