Sea of Thieves has grown massively year after year, causing Rare to believe that this year may be its biggest yet. The company gave fans a look into what’s in store this year with its Sea of Thieves 2022 preview event. Accompanying this, Game Rant also spoke with executive producer Joe Neate and creative director Mike Chapman regarding this new content.
Perhaps the biggest additions to Sea of Thieves comes in the form of Adventures and Mysteries—the former is community-oriented content designed to bring the Sea of Thieves world to life, focusing on immersive, cinematic, and game-changing elements, while the latter adds a little more intrigue to the world, inside and outside of it. Mysteries will be doled out over a long period of time, but Sea of Thieves will add new adventures to the game frequently.
Rare pulled back the curtain on the first Sea of Thieves Adventure, Shrouded Islands, which features players investigating a new fog covering the Golden Sands outpost. Not only does this change the location, but it helps show how the world of Sea of Thieves is not a static thing anymore. These adventures will be live for two weeks, while Chapman said players can expect it to take about 45 minutes to 1 hour to complete, depending on what happens and the overall playstyle.
The most notable aspect of these Sea of Thieves Adventures is that they are intended to showcase the players’ impact on the world, with how players respond to certain events and choices change the direction of the Adventure. While promising, we had to asked if how drastically Sea of Thieves players get to impact these, and Chapman had a powerful response: “Drastic, Deliberately So.”
“A big part of the idea of this was you as a player feeling like you can be part of Sea of Thieves history. Your actions and the outcome is going to have a big impact on the story. And even after that event, seeing the scars of what happened and seeing the changes in the world will remind you about what happened.”
Indeed, Chapman went on to say this was the impact of real choice, not an illusion of choice as seen commonly in video games. The cumulative actions of the community drive the story, and he mentions Rare will provide feedback in terms of how players are approaching certain choices. This may even cause some players to switch sides or play a little harder to try and determine the outcome. Of course, these are not grindy elements either, given the time frame of them, but a new way to impact the world around them.Rare, as a result, isn’t sure what will happen adventure after adventure and Sea of Thieves season after season. On the subject, Neate also added,
Yeah, it's interesting for us, right? Because we don't know where or how that's going to go. We don't know which way it's going to go, and then we have to kind of follow that path. It's really cool as a team to be handing that control over and finding out a lot about our community.
Sea of Thieves is out now for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.