Available while stock lasts.
PAX East kicks off later this week on March 23 and if you’re heading into the event, there’ll be a chance to score some “cool collectible lapel pins” when you check in with your My Nintendo account.
Up for grabs is a Splatoon 3 pin as well as Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom pin. Here’s a look at both:
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Rare and Microsoft are celebrating the fifth anniversary of Sea of Thieves, but the developers are also looking out toward the horizon for the next five years of the live service pirate adventure.
In an article on Xbox Wire, Xbox revealed that the Sea of Thieves team at Rare recently sat down to plot out the next five years of the game.
“I think 10 years of Sea of Thieves will feel like a long time – but also, we’ll blink and be there,” creative director Mike Chapman said. “And I still think we’ll have unfinished business when we get to that point.”
The Sea of Thieves team is apparently discussing ideas for smuggling mechanics, rewards for protecting other players from griefers, and a mechanic for “painting” screenshots. The development team’s mantra is “Players Creating Stories Together”, and this wide vision has the team feeling like they’ll never run out of ideas, as long as players are there to experience them.
There are some other interesting stories in Xbox Wire’s celebration of Sea of Thieves. The developers revealed that the original pitch for Sea of Thieves starred secret agents instead of pirates, and that they “ripped up our roadmap” after launch and changed the approach to the game’s content updates.
Sea of Thieves has seen tons of content updates since its initial launch in 2018. From collaborations with franchises like Pirates of the Carribean and Borderlands, to last year’s randomized three-part quest, there have been plenty of seafaring adventures for players to sink their teeth into.
We re-reviewed Sea of Thieves in 2020, calling it “a pirate fantasy sandbox with an enormous amount of things to do, made unpredictable and exciting by the addition of other players.” The game also made our list of the ten best co-op games.
Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN covering video game and entertainment news. He has over six years of experience in the gaming industry with bylines at IGN, Nintendo Wire, Switch Player Magazine, and Lifewire. Find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.
27th March approaches.
We’ve updated this list with a handful of NIS America-published games in Europe, which includes Persona Q and some of the Etrian Odyssey games. Enjoy!
We’re one week away from the end of the Wii U and 3DS eShops. On 27th March, Nintendo is pulling down the shutters on both digital storefronts for good, meaning that you won’t be able to buy any more games on the two platforms.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
GDC 2023 is here, and this year we’ve got a special treat for everyone! Starting today and running until March 27, 2023, a dozen demos are available to play as part of the ID@Xbox GDC Online Demo Event. We encourage you to continue to check them out all week before they disappear. Oh yeah, and don’t forget you can provide feedback to the developers, too!
All the demos are available Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S and show how varied the ID@Xbox line-up is – from a multiplayer horror FPS to a live action mystery, there’s something for everyone included. Keep in mind that most of these demos are an early look at gameplay and may not represent the full game at their release, including the availability in each country as developers continue to update and refine their title ahead of launch.
If you’re searching for the games on console, visit the Microsoft Store on Xbox, select the Search button, type “Demo,” press Enter, then select Demos to find these games. Alternatively, you can click on any of their title links below in the post to be taken to their respective game pages.
If you are checking out GDC in-person, you can find these demos at the ID@Xbox Sponsored Kiosk in the IGF Pavilion (Booth: N2431) at the Moscone North Hall. The IGF Pavilion is open Wednesday, March 22 through Friday, March 24.
Below is the diverse list of games that will be available to try!
ArcRunner (TrickJump Games)
Reset an AI gone rogue as you traverse the space station, The Arc, in this beautiful Cyberpunk-styled action-roguelite set in the far future! Start each run as an augmented, cloned human and save The Arc from destruction!
Backbeat (Ichigoichie)
A truly creative strategic puzzle game. Manipulate four threads of time to guide your band through perilous predicaments. Manage squad resources to maximize your score. Experience a homage to 1990s ensemble dramedies. Customize your music with audio effect pedals and playing styles.
BattleCakes (Volcano Bean)
Indulge in a delicious adventure as you choose to battle or befriend your enemies to save the day your way! Personalize your cupcake hero and meet charming friends along the way. Leave the world better off than you found it in this turn-based RPG.
Booom-Slang! (Skermunkel)
The villainous Conductor Chaos challenges you to become the next star player of Booom-Slang! You will need to master a myriad of single-player and multiplayer modes to make it to the top. Mashing together stylized low-poly art with zany FMV sequences, get ready for top-down, twin-stick shooting, catastrophic chimera madness!
Boxville (Triomatica Games)
Boxville is an adventure puzzle game about speechless cans living in the city of boxes and drawing doodles on cardboard to tell their stories. Boxville is good for either playing alone, allowing you to dive into the atmosphere and challenge your brain with sophisticated logic puzzles and riddles, or playing with a friend or family member to share unique audio-visual experiences and solve the puzzles together.
Evil Wizard (Rubber Duck)
Evil Wizard is a humor-filled action RPG that puts you in the shoes of a former Final Boss. Rise from defeat, rediscover long lost powers, and fight to reclaim your castle from an army of so-called heroes. Evil Wizard has also won the GDC Best in Play 2023 accolade.
Fall of Porcupine (BUNTSPECHT.GAM)
New jobs can be tense – especially when you’re about to become a doctor! Join Finley on an original narrative adventure as you take your first steps in a new and exciting world. Together, experience the last days of summer before a change of seasons stirs up the sleepy town of Porcupine.
Fractal Space (Haze Games)
Live the memorable experience of a first-person, story-driven adventure and puzzle game. Avoid traps, use your jetpack and taser gun to think your way through zero gravity puzzles in a mysterious space station. In the end, what are you really trying to escape?
Sker Ritual (Wales Interactive)
The round-based co-op survival FPS and spin-off to the award-winning British horror game, Maid of Sker. Play solo or with up to four players to survive the supernatural onslaught of the Quiet Ones. Face hordes of new and familiar enemies, supercharged elites with unique supernatural powers, upgradeable steam-punk weapons, interchangeable spine-chilling masks, and mysterious story objectives.
Soulvars (Ginolabo)
Burn your soul! Soulvars is a pixel art turn-based deckbuilding RPG where your party of Soulbearers face off against invading Dominators in dynamic high-speed battles.
The Isle Tide Hotel (Interflix Media/Wales Interactive)
An absent father must rescue his teenage daughter from an eclectic cult before their final night at the Isle Tide Hotel. Players investigate the strange events that unfold to save Eleanor Malone in this live-action interactive mystery game, where every decision affects the story.
The Library of Babel (Tanuki Studio)
Join Ludovik in a 2D Stealth Platformer and Graphic Adventure set 20,000 years after the extinction of humanity, as he explores the jungles of a futuristic Babylon to discover the secret behind the Library of Babel’s sudden lockdown and the mysteries behind their mythical creators.
Head over to your console and start enjoying these super rad game demos on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S! And yes, we’d love to hear what you think. Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, Discord, Twitch, and YouTube. And make sure to stay tuned to Xbox Wire to read more about ID@Xbox games throughout the year. learn more about what Team Xbox has planned during GDC.
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Hi everyone, I’m Phil Crifo, Tchia’s game director and co-founder of Awaceb. We are so excited that tomorrow Tchia launches to the world, and it’s the culmination of an incredible 5-year adventure for a tiny team making a big game.
As we’re nearing the release, we wanted to give you a final look at how we expanded on the sandbox open-world formula. If you’re new to Tchia, no doubt the below overview will bring you up to speed before you dive in the game on PS4 and PS5.
To prepare you for the adventure that lies ahead, we also wanted to give you a few early-game tips. And so here are some of the top five items & features that you will be using in the game’s opening hours
Tchia’s trusty slingshot was gifted to her by her father, Joxu. It’s the very first tool you’ll receive in the game, and it will come in handy to aim at trees and knock down coconuts or bananas to consume and restore your energy. It’s also a useful weapon to wield against the Maano – the fabric-made creatures that have abducted Tchia’s father – to buy some time as you’re trying to find flammable items to get rid of them once and for all.
You can also test your aiming skills in shooting range challenges, where reaching the top score will get you a golden trophy. Those will prove very useful for other activities.
The slingshot also leverages some of the unique PS5 features, such as the adaptive triggers, where you’ll feel the weight of the sling at the tips of your fingers. And if you feel like becoming an expert sharpshooter, you can activate the motion sensor for a more accurate aim. Give it a go, it’s accessible to toggle on or off in the menu.
One of Tchia’s most unique features is the Ukulele. You can harness the powers of this magical instrument with just a few strums. It’s fully playable, customizable, and also a game-changer.
Gifted to Tchia by Joxu’s best friend Tre, the ukulele can be used for a whole host of things. Through unlockable magical tunes called Soul Melodies, Tchia can affect the world around her, make new items or animals appear to give her the edge in exploration and combat. The ukulele also comes into play at some heart-warming story moments in the game, where you can play along to scripted songs.
When resting at a camp, you can also style up your Ukulele to suit you, with many options to customize it to your own personal taste.
For those who want to jam a little more freely, Tchia’s ukulele is fully playable, and you can experiment with an entire musical scale. Whether you want to play chords or a single string, bend notes, pluck or tweak your way to musical greatness – the choice is yours to play whatever you want! We are very excited to see what you do with this feature.
From the early days of developing Tchia, we always intended to make a game that felt like a toy-box. We designed Soul-jumping with that in mind. Soul-jumping is one of Tchia’s inherent powers and you’ll use this to take control of almost any item or animal you can find in the archipelago.
As we’ve already covered the Soul-jumping mechanics in detail in our latest video:
Here are some new animals you may not have seen yet that you can use to your advantage.
Birds overall offer one of the strongest traversal advantages in the game. This is also why they will eat your soul-meter quickly! Use their super accessible controls to fly over cliffs and get to your destination in a flash. And if you’re cheeky, you can use “R2” to dump a nasty surprise on unsuspecting inhabitants. Cows also allow you to do the same, but be careful, as their dung is a bit unstable due to the use of Soul-jumping and they tend to … explode!
Of all sea creatures you can possess in Tchia, dolphins are probably your fastest option… They can rush through the ocean if you sprint, and you can even do cool flips and other stunts when jumping out of the water. Fish are the best way to travel underwater and won’t be using the stamina you consume to hold your breath, giving you time to quickly scout your surroundings for valuable chests & pearls.
Most land animals have digging abilities, which can prove very valuable when looking for trinkets or other hidden surprises. They are also much faster than Tchia on foot should you need to cover a large area more quickly. Though cats can’t dig, they do have another special ability that we’ll let you discover for yourselves! We’re very proud of the sound effect we’ve prepared when you trigger their ability 😉
Crabs are slow and don’t cover as much ground as the other animals, but they surely pack a pinch! Use their powerful pincers to snap locks off chests and get easier access to them!
Trinkets and pearls are collectibles that you can find throughout the archipelago and play a critical role in the coutume – a Caledonian ceremony performed as a gesture of appreciation and respect for someone. Whenever you need to do offerings, or buy additional cosmetics, trinkets and pearls are almost always involved.
You will find a lot of them throughout your journey, and you can identify their locations by activating shouting spots, that will reveal more activities and collectibles around you.
Once you’ve collected enough of them, make your way to the nearest town or dock and see what kind of outfits or boat customization items you can unlock by spending them.
As you travel across the archipelago, you will meet many inhabitants who will help you on your journey. This is the case of Louise, a young girl from the village of Weliwele, that will give you a camera and ask you to take loads of pictures.
Tchia is all about finding joy in the little things, and the camera system makes no exception. It was created to emulate the super rewarding process of shooting on film. Select your lens, your film roll, and even set up a tripod with a self-timer to take a cool pose. As you’re shooting on film, you’ll have to find a place where you can develop your pictures and enjoy the surprise of finding out how accomplished a photographer you are.
This was a last look at Tchia before it releases tomorrow, and we’re so grateful to everyone that has been with us throughout the development of our game. At the heart of Tchia is accessibility, and this is a philosophy that runs through the game in many ways.
All activities and challenges have been set up so that performance is always optional, and you don’t need skills to progress in the story. Should you get stuck, you will always have the possibility to skip a gameplay segment so that you can discover what lies next with ease. Plus, if you really want to, you can start your journey at any point in the story via the chapter selection menu, available right at the beginning of your adventure.
Tchia is a vibrant and colourful game inspired by New Caledonian culture. It’s a poetic coming of age story, but it also includes scenes that are not suitable for children. Therefore, if you want to play with your little ones, we recommend that you activate the “family mode”, that will automatically make some of the more violent or graphic scenes in the game suitable for the whole family.
We can’t wait for you to dive into Tchia! And remember, if you’d like to customize Tchia & her boat to the colours of the other Kepler Interactive games, you can purchase the Oléti Edition (or the Kepler Customization Pack) that includes outfits, ukulele & boat customization items from the games Sifu, Scorn, Flintlock & Cat Quest.
Oléti!
The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game is the third title in a series from publisher Ravensburger, the previous two entries featuring The Wizard of Oz and The Princess Bride. These are all unique tabletop games where unfolding storybooks are used as the foundation to retell iconic narratives from film and literature. While the previous two releases have been entertaining and effective, The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book pushes the format strongly forward with a sense of maturity and accomplishment.
This is a wonderful combination of charm and lightweight gameplay that finds its groove when played across a diverse age range. It’s perfect for a family as both adults and children can sink into the story and fully grasp the structure and mechanisms. The main attraction is the book itself. Each set of pages is a new chapter in the familiar J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy. It’s a hard and sturdy manual, reminiscent of children’s board books in material. The illustrations are vibrant and the graphic design is excellent, easily accomplishing a sense of immersion through the synthesis of presentation and systems.
All of the expected beats are here. From the hobbits departure from the Shire to the forming of the Fellowship, through Moria and the gates of Helm’s Deep, and finally at the mouth of Mount Doom. Each of the eight chapters utilizes a small number of special rules and objectives that sit atop a very concise core ruleset. All of the action takes place on the pages of the book, which form a unique board tailored to the current story chapter.
The flow of play feels somewhat similar to cooperative mainstream strategy games such as Pandemic and Horrified. All of the players share control of the protagonists, moving characters such as Frodo or Gandalf about the map while managing a small hand of cards. You spend various sets of cards to accomplish goals and progress the narrative. For instance, in the very first chapter you must move all four hobbits to Bree and then discard a card with an eye of Sauron symbol, and two with feet symbols.
It’s very simple overall, requiring a bit of player discussion and cooperation to organize the sequence of actions across each of your turns. The challenge arises through the plot deck. This functions as a timer and provides an injection of chapter-specific random events. In the Shire example, many of the plot effects trigger black rider patrols. This jams up your pathways, blocking movement across the board and possibly capturing hobbits that were left exposed.
Across all of the narrative chapters there’s a very basic tradeoff between conservative progress while building up the perfect hand of cards, versus aggressive maneuvering to push towards the objectives immediately. The best strategic approach is somewhere in between, picking the right moments to risk loss without being reckless.
One of the best elements of tension is a track that represents the ring bearer’s growing corruption. This comes into play when you play special ring cards as wild options or for a chapter-specific effect — but each such use progresses a token down the corruption track. This track remains for all eight chapters, sitting sinisterly above the book and providing a watchful eye and ever present temptation. If the ring token ever arrives at the end of the track, the players lose the whole campaign and the journey ends in despair. Using the ring cards is the most interesting decision in the game, and it nicely captures the themes of the trilogy.
The strongest moments are present in the creative interactive storytelling. Those familiar with Tolkien’s books or Peter Jackson’s films will recognize each vignette immediately. This captures the joy in reliving the property and interacting with the most powerful scenes. You will fight the cave troll, ride atop Ents, and hopefully cast the ring into the Crack of Doom. And each challenge is an interesting puzzle of sorts as you work out the best approach to fulfilling your destiny.
There’s nothing outright innovative about this as a board game design, but it’s a clever distillation of the many narrative heavy campaign games currently dominating the board game market. It captures some of the spark of huge crowdfunding titles like Gloomhaven or Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood, utilizing narrative and story to drive a linked session of games. But it accomplishes this with an approachable ruleset that nearly anyone can immediately understand.
It is important to realize that this is aimed at families as well as a younger audience. I felt the most joy working through the game with my nine-year-old, the adventure book facilitating a few evenings of shared storytelling and bonding. The strategic demands are not overly complex and it will not provide the rich gameplay hobbyists tend to seek out in adult game groups, but it accomplishes everything it intends and is worthy.
It’s also evident that this is the current peak of this adventure book format. The scenarios are unique page to page, featuring a stronger sense of variety and creativity than both previous iterations on the system. The unexpected mechanical twists instill a sense of mystery as you want to keep going and experience the next chapter to see what’s in store. During play, I’d often be wondering how the future story beats would play out, curious how they’d capture the death of Boromir or the danger of Shelob’s Lair. Without fail, those iconic moments would manifest with a solid sense of thrill.
Above all, this product really understands its audience. The whole book can be played in only a few hours, each chapter lasting about 20 minutes. You can stop playing between chapters and pack it up or leave the game setup awaiting your next session. The variety and pull of content is real, keeping participants engaged for the entirety of the adventure and begging for attentive minds. It’s a clever and well designed game that captures a wide scope with little fuss. It’s simply a success.
The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game is available exclusively at Target.
Developer Supermassive Games has released a statement acknowledging “graphical issues” that players have experienced following the launch of The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR on PlayStation VR2 earlier this month.
“Since the launch of Switchback VR Yesterday, we have seen and heard the feedback that some players are experiencing graphical issues in the game,” read a tweet from Supermassive Games.
“The Switchback VR Team have been investigating the issues raised as a matter of urgency. So far, a potential cause of the reported blurring has been identified, along with other issues still undergoing testing and reproduction.”
An Update about Switchback VR. pic.twitter.com/cP2J0JvuqG
— Supermassive Games (@SuperMGames) March 17, 2023
The developers are encouraging players to report any bugs that they experience through its Zendesk Portal.
Switchback VR is an on-rails shooter set in the horror infused universe of Supermassive Games’ The Dark Pictures Anthology, which features villains from titles including The Devil in Me and The Man of Medan.
The developers sought to harness the updated hardware of the PlayStation VR2 by making use of its haptic feedback system, 3D audio, and eye-tracking capabilities. One such feature made enemies more likely to strike and move when the headset detected that the player had blinked, or looked away.
In our review IGN gave The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR a 6/10, summarizing that the virtual reality game was “a fun arcade shooter”, but that it’s “short length, a weak story, and lack of scares hold it back”.
Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and video gaming news for IGN. He has over eight years experience of covering breaking developments in multiple scientific fields and absolutely no time for your shenanigans. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer
Read moreTime flies, hm?
In decades to come, folks around the world will be telling their children and their grandchildren exactly what happened during those first few months of 2020. It was a time of great stress and uncertainty as the Covid-19 pandemic rapidly upended the lives of millions of people, with governments announcing nationwide lockdowns, businesses shutting down left, right, and centre, and the public forming orderly queues just to get into their local grocery store.
For those who play video games, there’s one title in particular (well, two if you include DOOM Eternal) that dominated the conversation during 2020 and will be mentioned in reverance years from now thanks to its profoundly positive impact during such grim times, and that’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
If you listen to enough developers talk about how they made their games, you’ll hear a phrase pop up repeatedly. It will sound something like this: every game that reaches release is a minor miracle. The act of creating a game, particularly a modern AAA game, is a turbulent process – the industry is full of stories about an early idea that undergoes huge transformations: genres change, settings shift, mechanics are invented and dropped. Many projects stop here, unable to fulfil their promise. Of those that make it through, many games – possibly most – will be released as something fundamentally different to how they were imagined in the first place.
Sea of Thieves does not share that story. Go back and read early interviews with the team at Rare, and you’ll realize this very quickly. Its developers were openly discussing features that would come to the game, years before they were playable, or sometimes even in development – not all of them even made it to the launch version, but almost every single one would eventually reach its pristine waters.
Celebrating its fifth anniversary today, Sea of Thieves is a very different and (excuse the pun) rarer kind of miracle. It’s a project that set up its core vision from the very beginning and – through a wild prototyping phase, a full shift in game engine, the choppy waters of launch, and its enormous growth since – never lost sight of the unique game it wanted to be. I had the chance to visit Rare ahead of the anniversary, and spoke to six people who were a part of the project from the very beginning, talking through how they made this miracle happen, the challenges they faced, and how, despite almost 10 years of development, Sea of Thieves only continues to grow.
The original talk wasn’t about an open-world adventure game about pirates. It was a very different game about spies.
In 2013, in a meeting room set at the heart of Rare’s leafy, countryside campus, a small group of minds set out to decide what was next for the studio. After three Kinect Sports games, there was a desire to try something new, something radical. The fruits of that conversation are playable right now in the form of Sea of Thieves, a success story for Rare that changed how the studio makes games, how it thinks about new ones, and even the company motto. But on that day, the talk wasn’t about an open-world adventure game about pirates. It was a very different game about spies.
“The earliest germ of an idea came out of us playing a party game called Werewolf, which is all about subterfuge,” says Creative Director Mike Chapman. “It’s about a game that showcases soft skills: verbal communication, social dynamics, player psychology. We were thinking: Is there a game that could showcase things like that?
“And we actually started with, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if it was about secret agents?’ Wouldn’t it be cool if I’m there completing my mission with you, but then you get a voice over the intercom saying, ‘Drop him.’ And you’ve got players tearing each other apart.”
The key idea here was about freedom, the ability to not just complete missions the game sets you, but set your own personal missions in a world with other players. The team came up with a mantra to encapsulate this: “Players Creating Stories Together.”
A month into the process, the team decided that the theme of spies wasn’t quite right, and didn’t offer the range of experiences Rare were looking for – but that Players Creating Stories Together very much did. So they went back to the literal drawing board. They toyed with various settings: games about dinosaurs, vampires, and more. But one idea stuck fast:
“What we liked about pirates is that the roles are defined,” explains Studio Head Craig Duncan. “The term ‘crew’ is already a small group of people going on adventure together. You could almost take the principles of the game we were thinking about and go, ‘Well, yeah, there’s no roles and goals – pirates play by their own rules, governed by their own sense of adventure.’ That can be motivated by wealth, or the spirit of the sea. So once we locked pirates in it was like, ‘That’s it. That works.’ And then you start all the hard work.”
It’s at this point, in early 2014, that Sea of Thieves was truly born. Four years ahead of launch, the team already had the driving force that makes up the entire game we know today – a game that offered a sea-blue slate to write your own stories on, and one that would evolve with the players over time, feeding new ideas into the mix as it grew. Now they just needed to find some designers to make it.
Thankfully, a solution was about to literally walk through their door. Around the same time, Rare had organized a game jam, and now-husband and wife design team Andy and Shelley Preston had assembled a group to work on a prototype they called Dead By Dawn.
Andy explains the concept: “It was a multiplayer experience where you had two teams within a map, and it was basically ‘build in the day, survive at night. But it had Sea of Thieves’ physicality, players running around together cooperating, using physical props to work together.”
A three-day jam saw Andy and Shelley’s little team get so wrapped up in their idea that they broke the rules and dedicated a month to the project, turning a tiny idea into a fully playable demo through relentless prototyping. Eventually, they decided to pitch it to Rare’s higher-ups – who happened be the people behind those early Sea of Thieves talks.
Andy grins as he recalls how well it went over: “[Producer Joe Neate] instantly said to [Creative Director Gregg Mayles], ‘See, this is what we should be doing, we should be building something. We shouldn’t be theorizing over paper one-sheets, we should actually be trying to build an experience together.”
Dead By Dawn was deemed a little too far outside of Rare’s normal output – but the way it had been made was exactly what the team behind the new pirate project had been looking for. Not long later, Andy and Shelley were called up to a boardroom, and told what they would work on next, with a familiar mantra at its heart:
“I can remember them standing in front of a whiteboard,” recalls Shelley. “It basically just said: ‘Players creating stories, sailing a pirate ship together.’ Everyone was really creatively open to what that could be like, and there was no real set remit. We just kind of jumped into a prototype and started creating.”
“Everyone was really creatively open to what that could be like, and there was no real set remit. We just kind of jumped into a prototype and started creating.”
If you’ve watched Rare’s new documentary, you’ve seen the prototype. Created in the Unity engine, it was scrappy, ugly but, crucially, easy to work with. The team was able to come up with new ideas, and have them playable within the same day. It meant that Sea of Thieves emerged from the design depths incredibly quickly.
The game’s approach to ships – turning traditional gaming vehicles into something more like a level design players could move around through co-operation – came first. Then came the idea for a practically UI-less experience, asking players to interact with the world around them, not just follow a directional marker. Physical treasure, weather effects, and more emerged at high speed. The foundations of Sea of Thieves were set from the very beginning.
Andy and Shelley came up with a design principle for all of this: “Tools Not Rules”, the idea that everything presented to the player could be used more or less freely. You didn’t walk to a glowing marker on a mini-map to earn some coins – you consulted an actual map, rigged your ship, used a compass, scoured an island for clues, dug up the treasure, and returned it to an outpost. But along the way, you might accidentally head to the wrong island, find a different map, meet another set of players, and have an entirely different experience – an entirely different story.
The team was able to create a game so quickly that they became convinced they were onto something unique. In fact, they were so convinced by their ideas, they took another unusual step: they kept it a total secret, even from Xbox’s most senior leadership:
“The executives knew there was something,” Duncan explains. “But it was like, ‘Hey, we’ll let you know when we when we’re ready to let you know.’ And of course, when you do that, you create some veil of secrecy, which means people want to know more. And then it’s about how you play that to your advantage.”
Six months into prototyping, they finally revealed the game to their bosses, with Head of Xbox Phil Spencer and Creative Director Kudo Tsunoda asked to fly to Rare to finally find out what the team had been up to. But instead of simply watching a PowerPoint presentation, a controller was eventually put in their hands. Appropriately for the game in question, Rare didn’t want to just tell them a story – they wanted them to make their own inside the prototype.
You can watch a clip of that first ever playthrough below:
The executives played a version of Sea of Thieves that, visuals aside, was strikingly similar to the core of what you can play today. After that, they were shown an in-engine art diorama to see what it would look like – another facet of the game that stayed remarkably consistent from the earliest days of the project.
This isn’t the way games are normally revealed to executives – and it worked beautifully. Instead of talking about the business aspects of the game, the new players swapped stories about what had happened in their playtest. Spencer had played by the rules, and set out to find treasure with his crew. Tsunoda, on the other hand, betrayed his crew, stole their treasure and then jumped overboard to swim to another ship, and swung it round to start a battle. Rare hadn’t planned this out, but the tools they’d offered allowed it to happen organically.
The theory was proven out, and Sea of Thieves was formally greenlit.
The team was so convinced by the prototype, they took an unusual step: they kept it a total secret, even from Xbox’s most senior leadership.
After this came the tough part. Sea of Thieves was intended to be made in the separate Unreal engine, so much of the work after this point became not about improving on what the team had, but recreating the Unity version in Unreal. It was a far slower process than they had been used to, forcing them to unite the mechanics, art, online elements, and more, rather than steam ahead on design alone.
In pure mechanical terms, the version of Sea of Thieves that emerged at launch was in some ways less advanced than the prototype it had come from. Some features had to be deprioritized in order to get the game out in time, leading to a version of Sea of Thieves that offered the spirit of what Rare was aiming for, but not at the scale it had planned for. The response was tough, but fair – players liked what they had, but didn’t feel like they were able to do enough with it. Rare changed approach:
“We ripped up our roadmap,” says producer Joe Neate. “As soon as we launched, we were like, ‘Okay, a whole new captaincy system, that’s not what people want right now.’ They want more of the ingredients in this world, right? They don’t want another system to just build on top of the ingredients you’ve got – and so, straightaway, we changed our plans then.”
For a time, development became primarily about responding to players, not building back to the prototype vision. The Megalodon was added to allow for PvE interactions between players. AI ships were added to allow for more combat opportunities without griefing other players. The team began working on the narrative Tall Tales, to give players a goal, without compromising on the more organic story ideas the game world offered.
But, as time went on, the team began to find opportunities to build back what they’d been playing behind closed doors for so long. The prototype, and the clarity of that original idea, was so strong that it became a blueprint for what was to come.
Everyone I speak to on the team has a different answer for exactly when Sea of Thieves matched their original vision for the game, but it’s generally agreed that the one-year Anniversary Update was a watershed moment. A year after launch, the game wasn’t just matching the prototype for mechanics, it was introducing ideas the team never would have thought about in the same way without the influence of its players. This was truly the evolving experience the team had dreamed of, a game and a world that reacted to the people inside it, and a space where players really could create their own stories.
From there, the process of continuing to develop Sea of Thieves has been a mix of building on those original ideas, and adding ones the team never could have foreseen. Ship fires, captaincy, and burying treasure for other players to find came out of the game’s earliest plans. Meanwhile, game-wide votes on the future of the Golden Sands outpost, and the enormous, unexpected Pirate’s Life update – a crossover with Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean – emerged as new opportunities and technical advances popped up.
But key to every one of these additions is that you can categorize them all as new ways for Players to Create Stories Together. No matter how difficult the challenge, or how wild the idea, Sea of Thieves has lived by its own game development code, as steadfastly as its pirates stick to their own.
“I think 10 years of Sea of Thieves will feel like a long time – but also, we’ll blink and be there. And I still think we’ll have unfinished business when we get to that point.”
That unique vision has led to another unusual situation: 5 years in, Sea of Thieves still doesn’t truly have imitators. While it sits within an increasingly busy world of game-as-service titles, there’s nothing quite like this game, from its mechanics, to how it releases new content, to its community.
“There was a time before the game came out when we were kind of looking over our shoulder going, ‘Someone is going to beat us to the punch,’” says Art Director Ryan Stevenson. “And even while we’ve been out, no one else seems to be doing it.”
“It’s not a template is it?”, adds Shelley Preston. “It’s not an easily copyable idea. It’s a reflection of a group of people in a certain time and their creative way of thinking around our take on a pirate game. That’s very unique to us.”
That ability to make a game that’s so unique to Rare that it doesn’t exist already, and continues to be unique, was such a lightbulb moment for the studio that Rare even changed its company motto in order to make more games like it. Head to the bottom of its website, and you’ll read: “We create the kind of games the world doesn’t have.” Sea of Thieves was the starting point for that ideal – and it’s one that’s helping to guide the still-mysterious Everwild, and whatever else the team might cook up in the future.
But Sea of Thieves’ tale is far from a closed book. At five years old, there’s much the team wants to add. In fact, they recently had a meeting to plan out the next five years. I hear about ideas for smuggling mechanics, the option for players to be rewarded for protecting other players from griefers, and even a mechanic for ‘painting’ screenshots that Chapman once told me about, two years before the game had even launched (and you can even see in the gallery of prototype screenshots above).
The beautiful thing about a vision as clear but as horizon-wide as Players Creating Stories Together is that the team feels like they’ll never truly run out of ideas – they’ll keep making new things as long as there are players to enjoy them. Chapman puts that drive to keep creating succinctly:
“I think 10 years of Sea of Thieves will feel like a long time – but also, we’ll blink and be there. And I still think we’ll have unfinished business when we get to that point.”
The Sea of Thieves team are doing plenty more to celebrate the game’s fifth anniversary. Here’s what’s going on for the rest of the month:
Microsoft Studios
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Celebrate five years of Sea of Thieves with this special edition, which includes a copy of the game with all permanent content added since launch, plus a wide-ranging assortment of extra cosmetics and collector’s items. In addition to the 2023 Edition bonus content – Hunter Cutlass, Hunter Pistol, Hunter Compass, Hunter Hat, Hunter Jacket, Hunter Sails and 10,000 gold – this edition of the game comes with a further Deluxe Bundle containing the Black Phoenix Figurehead, Black Phoenix Sails, Crab Dab Emote, Deck Hide Emote and 550 Ancient Coins for use in the Pirate Emporium.
Microsoft Studios
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2023 Edition Out Now
Celebrate five years since Sea of Thieves’ launch with this special edition of the game, which includes a copy of Sea of Thieves itself with all permanent content added since launch, plus a 10,000 gold bonus and a selection of Hunter cosmetics. The Hunter Cutlass, Pistol, Compass, Hat, Jacket and Sails will ensure you cut a formidable figure as you set sail for adventure!
About the Game
Sea of Thieves offers the essential pirate experience, from sailing and fighting to exploring and looting – everything you need to live the pirate life and become a legend in your own right. With no set roles, you have complete freedom to approach the world, and other players, however you choose.
Whether you’re voyaging as a group or sailing solo, you’re bound to encounter other crews in this shared world adventure – but will they be friends or foes, and how will you respond?
A Vast Open World
Explore a vast open world filled with unspoiled islands and underwater kingdoms. Take on quests to hunt for lost loot, forge a reputation with the Trading Companies and battle foes from Phantoms and Ocean Crawlers to Megalodons and the mighty Kraken. Try your hand at fishing, make maps to your own buried treasure or choose from hundreds of other optional goals and side-quests!
Sea of Thieves: A Pirate’s Life
Play the Tall Tales to experience Sea of Thieves’ unique narrative-driven campaigns, and join forces with Captain Jack Sparrow in Sea of Thieves: A Pirate’s Life, an acclaimed original story that brings Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean sailing into Sea of Thieves. These immersive and cinematic quests provide around 30 hours of the ultimate pirate adventure.
A Game That’s Always Growing
With each Season bringing in new game features every three months alongside regular in-game Events and new narrative Adventures, Sea of Thieves is a service-based game that’s still growing and evolving. Check back regularly to see what free content has been newly added, and see how far you can climb through each Season’s 100 levels of Renown to earn special rewards.
Become Legend
On your journey to become a Pirate Legend you’ll amass loot, build a reputation and define a unique personal style with your hard-earned rewards. Adventurer. Explorer. Conqueror. What will your legend be?
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