SEA OF THIEVES
Friendly, fair and forward-thinking: Rare’s co-op adventure gives pirates a good name
Hop aboard, chug some grog, adjust the sails and check the map: having blundered merrily through previous demos, we’ve grown quite accustomed to pirate life in Rare’s cooperative adventure. So have a quarter of a million alpha testers. Indeed, it is already something of a sensation several months ahead of its full release, thanks to its accessible, and frequently funny, swashbuckling action. Considered design makes teamwork a requirement in the face of mild peril, with camaraderie a pleasant sideeffect. Perhaps it’s hard to go too wrong with a game that assembles a group of four firm friends on a quest to find some treasure. But this time, our demo presents a true test of Sea
Of Thieves’ multiplayer chops: we’re playing with strangers – and strangers who speak a different language, at that.
We’re almost positive it’s not going to work. So much of the fun we’ve had previously has been reliant on team chemistry and familiarity. But we find ourselves quickly striking up a wordless conversation with our new crewmates. One person shows a particular map to the others, suggesting a trip to Snake Island. We, meanwhile, manage to call attention to the crucial map room below deck by hopping up and down and pumping away on our accordion so they can follow the music. It feels like just the right mix of useful tools and improvisational play. Rare has worked hard to achieve it, removing barriers that might discourage people from picking up a multiplayer game, even one with so alluring a fantasy as this.
“Some players don’t want to use voice chat and identify themselves to other players,” executive producer Joe Neate tells us. “They may be worried they’ll get harassed. They might have a speech or hearing impediment.” A non-verbal communication system of localised phrases will be implemented fairly soon, we’re told. So will smaller, speedier two-man ships, the drawback of which is being more vulnerable to the firepower of bigger crews. But communication is the core of the game, and part of the fun is giving players a bit of room to get creative with it: Neate tells us he’s seen players taking out their blunderbusses to point with, for instance.
Building a community from that player interaction is another key part of keeping players engaged and challenged, which is why Rare is already testing the waters with the game’s growing online following. This year’s E3 and Gamescom saw the studio post ARG campaigns to Internet forums. They hinted at hidden in-game loot in tricky riddles. “We thought the E3 one was really difficult,” says senior designer Shelley Preston. “The community solved it in half an hour.”
Fans duly requested that the Gamescom campaign be a little tougher. A special map
of the game’s archipelago-studded world suggested eight tiny skulls that, when found and decoded in a certain way, ended up pointing to buried treasure. No help or explanation was given whatsoever. The victorious crew cracked it in a day, with a custom Sea Of Thieves Xbox One S the real-life spoils. While the experiment sparked real excitement and inspiration in devs and players alike, it also prompted the devs to stop and think whether the game’s approach to piracy was, well, fair. Introduce a product of realworld value into a system where stealing is permitted – you can filch other crew’s chests and cash them in at an outpost for the rewards – and it’s soon all too clear where frustrations might infringe upon fun. “We were like, ‘Should they have to turn in the Chest Of Sorrows once they’ve found it?’”, Neate recalls. “No, because what if somebody steals it from them before they can? That’s like stealing an Xbox!”
Balancing the risk/reward element, the team realised, was essential. “Your progress in any session of Sea Of Thieves is always at risk,” Neate says. “But we felt that that was really cool, so we put it in the alpha, and we got telemetry for the amount of chests that are stolen, as opposed to found. Only about five per cent of chests were actually stolen. We’re satisfying players who like to go out and prey on others, but it’s not too frequent, because we’ve made it hard to do.”
Indeed, you’ll have to sneak or fire yourself, via cannon, aboard other ships to plunder a chest. Then there’s actually finding where they’ve put it. Teamwork is essential, given you can’t defend yourself from angry enemies when you’re carrying your swag. They might not even have any to take. We wonder how long it’ll be before crafty crews will abuse the proximity voice-chat system to set traps with boasts of fake loot.
Rare is inching ever closer to revealing exactly what that booty will be, and why we’ll be so compelled to read maps and solve riddles in pursuit of it. “It’s perfectly suited to Sea Of
Thieves, and also to a game that is a service,” says Neate. “It’s not going to be something you just get to the end of after 100 hours and think, ‘What do I do now?’” Whether you’re out to pillage and plunder, chart the seven seas as an explorer, or simply tool around with a gang of pals, there will be rewards. It’s being worked on at the studio, but hasn’t been switched on in the alpha just yet. Neate, however, believes it is the game’s secret sauce.
The question, naturally, is: why not do it now? With Crackdown 3 delayed to next year, a new Xbox One launching this winter and a seemingly fully functional feel-good multiplayer title being regularly played by a quarter of a million people, we’re keen to know what’s stopping Rare from releasing the game now, if only in Game Preview.
Plenty, as it turns out. A game-experience team is still dreaming up fun new details – drunkenly vomiting into water buckets and chucking it at friends is one recent addition – and implementing more communication tools. An AI team is reworking enemy behaviours: previously, skeletons were bony Terminators, marching endlessly towards you until they died. Now, they’ll back off and eat bananas when low on health, just like players do. “There will be other threats in the world that we want to have for players,” Neate says. “There’s a very cool one that the team’s prototyping and working on at the moment.” The studio is also developing new kinds of quests that reward different play styles. And, of course, there’s progression, which is the least developed aspect of the game in its current state. “Players have high expectations. There’s more to do to bring it into a coherent whole that a broader audience will expect when they buy into a game.
“On a normal game, we’d be looking at the date and worrying, thinking we should fix the mountain of bugs,” Neate says. “But we’re investing a ton of time in our culture and our technology to make a game that will keep growing. There’s a gap in the market for this kind of silly, social game. We believe that this game is going to take off because of that watchable, shareable nature. It’s just funny.” As we demonstratively fire ourselves out of a cannon to shrieks of surprised laughter from our new French friends, we’re inclined to agree.
Drunkenly vomiting into water buckets and chucking it at friends is a recent addition