Following Sea of Thieves’ seventh birthday celebrations back in March, developer Rare has cast its spyglass toward new horizons, outlining its vision for the multiplayer pirate adventure’s future in its first-ever Community Direct livestream. And those plans include the introduction of multi-ship private servers and paid custom servers “early” next year.
Today’s stream wasn’t perhaps the most revelatory of affairs, despite its hour-long runtime, but it did see Rare admitting to having dropped the ball in terms of game health and narrative momentum in recent years. Both are things it’s talked about before, but it’s now detailed some of the ways it hopes to keep players onboard as Sea of Thieves sails into year eight and beyond.
To that end, the studio talked at length about “finding balance” between introducing new features, reinvigorating and expanding some of Sea of Thieves’ neglected legacy systems – including the likes of captaincy, hourglass battles, and guilds – tackling long-standing bugs and issues, and implementing some of the community’s most-requested features.
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As to what that’ll look like in practical terms, from Sea of Thieves’ upcoming Season 17 onward, seasons will “focus more consistently on reaching a broader set of player motivations”. That means a mix of new stuff, revisiting previous content to “tease out more value”, plus a renewed sense of narrative and world-building to ensure seasons are “always moving the world forward”. The studio did, however, stress story won’t be “front and centre”, implying the likes of Tall Tales and long-abandoned Adventures are now well and truly a thing of the past.