Sea of Thieves’ is making up for lost time with awesome content updates

I sat down with Sea of Thieves Design Director Mike Chapman and Senior Designer Shelley Preston to talk about the direction of their pirate-y sandbox. They had a plan for the sandbox, but like any good Dungeon Master knows, your plans will go up in smoke the moment players get their hands on them. That’s something Mike, Shelley, and the team now know.

“We’re immersing ourselves in Reddit, in the forums, and also business intelligence – giving us data around how people are playing, what feature they’re interacting with – and so we kind of joke there’s almost like a crime scene,” Chapman said.

“Literally the week after we released the game, we tore up the roadmap that we had for the following year’s plan,” he continued.

I’d worry with a statement like that that maybe the team didn’t have a direction, but it’s quite the opposite. The way we play the game and talk about the game has given them a strong, clear path that seems like it works with Sea of Thieves’ core pillars while giving the fans what they need to get the most out of the game.

Case in point is the most recent content update, titled “The Hungering Deep.” The event had players battling a Megalodon shark after tracking it down through a multi-part quest. Players got a new item called the shouting trumpet, a new musical instrument, and the team added a flag system that would allow players to signal to each other what they might be in the game for. The main quest of taking down the shark required at least five players. In a game where parties max out at four players, that meant that anyone who wanted to play the quest had to team up with other parties. By the time I finished the quest, my team included me, two friends and a total stranger, and we picked up two other galleon ships worth of players by the end.

The team saw that ship battles dropped by 50 percent during the course of the campaign while introducing new activities, tools, and toys to encourage social interaction. That’s the blueprint for the content updates moving forward, all of which are set to release at no extra charge.

The next two updates, “Cursed Sails” and “Forsaken Shores” follow that plan in all the right ways.

The first update brings skeleton ships. The team had never planned to bring player-versus-enemy ship play into Sea of Thieves, but they found a social benefit for that stuff.

“A common threat… means that players can have that outlet for firing on the broadside and have that pirate fantasy of getting into battles. Now you’ve got this common threat, so I think it’s gonna be more likely [that people will] play as a team.”

Those skeleton ships, though, aren’t simply AI ships to fight and sink. They’ll be full of loot for players to grab, and they’ll bring cursed cannonballs to the world, a weapon that’s sure to change the way pirates interact with each other on the open seas. These cursed cannonballs will, when they hit an enemy ship, bestow status effects onto the ships and players, Chapman explained.

Cursed cannonballs could lock your rudder into place and force you to sail into a rock. They could add ballast to your ship, forcing some leaks that weren’t yet below sea level to start taking on water. There’s also a grog ball, which instantly makes all the player characters drunk, making their vision blur and controls scramble, or a jig ball that forces everyone into a dance. Here we see tools that players can not only use strategically, but also to create moments of humor. If a grog ball hits my ship, I’m going to have a hard time not cracking up. These cursed cannonballs will enter the world with the skeleton ships, but they’ll propagate from there, integrating into the world after that.

The brigantine ship that joins the game with the update allows teams of three to hop on a ship together without having an empty spot onboard as they do now with the galleon ship, making the game that much more friendly for groups of different sizes.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2018/06/18/sea-of-thieves-interview-content-updates/