There’s a lot on the horizon for Sea of Thieves, with developer Rare recently giving a fan a sneak-peek into 2022 and season 6. Everything from a new Sea of Thieves roadmap to the new Adventures and Mysteries was discussed in detail, really making 2022 an exciting year for the franchise.
Game Rant was recently able to sit down with creative director Mike Chapman and executive producer Joe Neate to discuss all of this new content coming to Sea of Thieves. While our conversation focused on this by large, such as with how drastically Sea of Thieves players can impact an Adventures’ story, we also posed a question about the ship count per server.
For context, a recent update made Sea of Thieves support six crews at a time with a limit of 16 players. Citing ‘overnight feedback,’ Rare reverted the ship count from six to five. The overall community is somewhat split on this, as many are glad that they are less likely to be attacked, but those who enjoy the PvP are not as ecstatic. Thus, we asked what the current plans regarding the ship count in Sea of Thieves was.
As described by Chapman, everything about Sea of Thieves is designed to have six ships per server. This is supported contextually by the number of outposts, the distances between locations, the average encounter rare, the shared world, and all of that. Sea of Thieves has continually expanded over time though, meaning more and more content makes it harder on the servers and to keep it all optimized.
When Sea of Thieves devs let the servers go back up to six players, what they saw was a working experience but a degraded one that they were not happy with. “[T]he absolute commitment is to get back to six,” said Chapman, regarding all of this. There’s ongoing work and optimizations to ensure that it’ll get there, but Rare doesn’t want to give players a degraded experience—something many Sea of Thieves fans may appreciate.
It's intended to have six ships in there, and that was critical in terms of the number of outposts, the distance between the islands, and the average encounter rate that we see with ships out there on the seas. Like you said at the start, as a result of how ambitious we are each year, we add a whole range of new content to the game. And in a game with a shared world, we have an inside testing program, we get a lot of data from that, we get feedback around performance, but you only really see how it performs when you go to a broad audience on that scale.
Then, we get data back based on the memory on the servers and how things are performing and frame rate and all of that. So, it's something we're always keeping close tabs on. What you saw recently was that desire to get it back to six ships, but then seeing knock-on effects and going, 'It works, but it's a degraded experience that we're not comfortable with,' which is why we've gone down to five again, but the absolute commitment is to get back to six. And there's always ongoing work and optimizations to ensure that we can keep that optimal experience going.
Obviously, there was no timeline given for when fans could expect this, but they can rest assured that it is something Rare is actively working on. In the meantime, Sea of Thieves season 6 is bringing in a ton of new content that will certainly keep fans occupied in the meantime.
Sea of Thieves is out now for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.