IT’S THE ANTITHESIS OF ANYTHING THAT’ S EVER FIT ONTO A CARTRIDGE OR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS
January’s public playtest saw 332,000 players log in across Xbox One and PC. Over 25,000 of them streamed, or made videos of, their adventures; viewers watched around 14.5 million hours of it. “That’s the power of watchable, shareable games,” Neate says. “Both are valuable. You see people use their imagination and creativity, and that makes you think, ‘What can I do?’” While many may watch
Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds to enjoy the show, knowing full well they’d get teabagged into oblivion if they so much as stepped foot on a server, Sea
Of Thieves is designed to work both ways. It both facilitates and celebrates moments of gleeful silliness that anyone with a twinkle in their eye and a barrel of gunpowder could pull off.
You can adventure across the open seas with a trusty crew or completely alone, learning to sail a ship by angling its sails against the wind and navigating from island to island with just a compass and a map. The goal is treasure, naturally: chests buried in the sand, sunk in shipwrecks or stolen from others. And while it’s perfectly permissible to head out into the world solo, weighing anchors, battling skeletons and duelling other players, having a solid crew at your back makes all the difference. The more hands you put to anchor, the faster it rises, making getaways quicker. Fighting off enemies is impossible with an armful of booty, so it pays to bring along a bodyguard on quests to pick off assailants. And while you certainly can fire yourself unassisted out of a cannon onto a foreign ship, you might want to consider trying to make friends while you’re over there: an impromptu jam session with strangers can often be far more entertaining than simply pinching their cargo and legging it to the nearest trading post.
Sea Of Thieves is a multiplayer game designed to be not just about rivalry, but also camaraderie, and all the playful variations in between.
“I’m biased, but I actually don’t think there’s another game like Sea Of Thieves,” design director
Mike Chapman says. “Even though Rare’s never really made such a multiplayer-focused game before, I think the type of multiplayer game it is is so different anyway. I don’t think any of us here
“WHEN YOU GET A HEAD SHOT, YOU APPRECIATE IT MORE– OR JUST THE FACT THAT YOU HIT THEM AT ALL”
have ever made a game like this before. But I think it means we’ve looked at it with very fresh eyes.” While a new era of games including DayZ, Rust and Eve Online sparked early interest in making a multiplayer title, the team was keen for the game to inspire a broader range of emotion in players than simply anger or fear. The idea was to build a game around ‘soft skills’ – building rapport, dynamically assigning roles, being adaptable in unexpected situations and working together as a team.
Indeed, none of Sea Of Thieves’ swashbuckling weaponry requires any strict degree of accuracy: timing and experience wins out over twitch reflexes. The pistol is a chunky, clunky little thing that takes an age to reload, while the bullet-drop on the longrange musket is so significant that simply hitting an opponent who’s bobbing up and down on a ship of their own is almost farcical (a haphazard crack in its scope serves as a delightfully makeshift crosshair). “At first, when you fired a gun, it used to feel very much like firing a laser,” Timmins says. “It hit you straight away. Now when you get a headshot, you appreciate it that bit more – or just the fact that you hit them at all! We made the decision based on cross-play, but once we actually played it, it tonally felt much more fitting to these ancient weapons.” And while a few swipes of a cutlass are all we need to dispatch a bog-standard skeleton NPC, it’s plain to see where Rare is coming from with the simplified combat once we find ourselves swashbuckling up and down a staircase with another player, metal clanging against metal. It’s more about capturing the fantasy of the thing than its grimy reality, the cheerful candour of it all like having swordfights with sticks in the garden when you were kids. This sense of physicality permeates Sea Of
Thieves, encouraging in you a creative, freeform approach. Deciding your crew’s next task involves assembling in the captain’s quarters of a ship, placing a symbolic item on the table, and then sticking a knife beside the most tempting-looking prospect to cast your vote. Glowing skulls signify high-level bounty hunts, while a fancy gilded scroll indicates there’s particularly valuable treasure to be won.
“I’M AFRAID THE ANIMALS HAVE TO DIE; THERE HAS TO BE A SENSE OF CONSEQUENCES FOR YOUR ACTIONS”
Once we decide on our next venture, quickly turning up chest after chest after solving riddles and battling a skeleton captain, the benefits of Rare’s studied commitment to Sea Of Thieves’ physical world quickly become apparent. We spend a good while discussing where to hide the treasures we’ve accumulated. Most people, we’ve noticed, place them in the captain’s quarters of a ship: we insist on hiding them in various places, lest a band of marauding players find all our nest-eggs in one basket. Chests must be safely delivered to an NPC at an outpost to yield their spoils, whereupon every crew member receives the same amount of doubloons (redeemed for cosmetics and weapons, and unable to be stolen). But getting one there is often more challenging than digging it up in the first place. The Chest Of Sorrows we find, for instance, sobs so passionately that it threatens to sink our ship with floods of tears. After a few minutes of frantic bailing, however, the crackpot plans begin to form. Soon enough, crewmate Neate is hanging patiently off one of the ship’s ladders, the bawling chest strapped to his back like a cantankerous infant in a baby carrier as its tears drain into the sea. It is a moment of great and ridiculous triumph – of difficulty overcome not by skill, but by creativity and coordination.
This approach has taken much iteration on the part of the design team. “We used to have it so when you took chests back to the ship, the moment you reached the top of the ladder, it would cash the chest to the ship,” Chapman says. A treasure hold on the bottom deck displayed the amount of coins you had collected, which felt satisfying, and other pirates could still fight their way below deck and steal from it – but the chest was no longer a physical object. “The moment we ripped that out, the game became better,” Chapman says. “Now, the chest is just a chest. It gets back to the ship and nothing happens, but then you’ve got all that gameplay that was gone before.”
In fact, it turns out that our bid for The Chest Of Sorrows was probably fairly uneventful, in the grand scheme of pirate life. There are currently three main kinds of voyage in Sea Of Thieves, each presided over
by its own trading company. Our treasure hunt was assigned – and rewarded – by The Gold Hoarders, a faction obsessed with plunder and profit. For those looking for a combat challenge, The Order Of Souls provides bounty-hunting opportunities. But the most logistically difficult – and, by extension, riotously funny – will likely be the trade-related tasks given out by The Merchants’ Alliance. Whether they’re seeking a number of gunpowder kegs or a clutch of exotic animals, journeys carrying your precious cargo will be volatile. Perhaps you’ll have to sacrifice an explosive barrel to prevent a pursuing ship blowing up, or worse, stealing the rest for their own gain. Meanwhile, you’d better make sure you keep on top of fixing holes in the hull if you store your chickens on the lower deck, lest they drown before you can get them home; pigs will need regular feeding; and snakes can be charmed with a tune from your accordion to reduce the danger of your crewmates being poisoned (although if you’re really savvy, you’ll want to position them around your rarest chests to deter thieves).
“All of the trading companies have been built with a different player motivation in mind,” Timmins says. “You’ve got the player who wants to kill stuff: right, The Order of Souls is perfect for you. You’ve got the person who wants to explore: that’s The Gold Hoarders, they will totally get you exploring. And then for collectors, or those who are more social, then it’s like, here’s all the animals.” We can certainly imagine players refusing to cash in a rare chicken because your crew has grown a little too attached to it. “This sounds a bit sadistic, but I knew we were onto a winner when the team had a very passionate reaction to, ‘Right, this week we’re working on animations for animals’,” Chapman says. “They were like, ‘Wait, the animals die?’ I’m afraid they have to die, because there has to be a sense of consequences for your actions, but that’s the last thing you’re going to want – you’re going to want your animals to live.” Well, quite. We have a sudden, horrible vision of an opponent holding a gun to the head of our beloved pet, Colonel Sanders: “Give us all your cash, or the chicken gets it.” Take it. Take it all.