Before Rare dropped the expansion Hungering Deep, sea-faring adventurers in Sea of Thieves would pretty much be hostile to anything they saw. The expansion was a step away from the vanilla game, forcing players to co-operate to complete quests.
The change surprised some fans – and it seems that Rare are keen on keeping this momentum. In a lengthy interview with GameSpot, executive producer Joe Neate revealed some of the studio’s plans for the future:
“We sat down as soon as the launch craziness ended, like the first week or so, we managed to get on top of any scale and stability issues that we had. And then we literally sat in a room for about a week with loads of post-it notes. Mike, the design team, and everyone else were going through all of the forums, looking at all the feedback. Broadly, the response from the community was that this game is great, we love what you’re doing, but give us more things to do. Yeah, threats in the world, all of that stuff. And then we just started deciding which order did we want to grow this in based on feedback, based on what we want to see.”
One of the things we are about to encounter is skeleton ships with AI behind the helm sailing around in the world. Neate explains how this is made to encourage the pirates to be a little more trusting towards each other:
“Skeleton ships was one of the biggest things actually because for years now we’ve been saying to our community every sail on the horizon is another player and explaining why we didn’t wanna do AI ships because we wanted every encounter to be emergent. But we’ve seen that…well, there’s a few things that feed into it in terms of players’ love for ship combat, and we love to drive different interactions between players. So ship combat is cool between players, but like in Hungering Deep, we love to see different crews team up and then go take down stuff together.”
Thoughts? Let us know in comments below.
