Hey, kids, did you know that players feel more like a community when they’re working together rather than constantly fighting one another? Of course you did, you’ve paid attention to more than two decades of MMOs teaching this exact lesson. But it appears that Rare was absent during those days of design school. A recent interview on the post-launch environment for Sea of Thieves reveals that the game’s team more or less completely changed the plan for the game once it became clear that, gasp, communities form when people work together:
We looked at the game just after launch and thought: players want to enjoy the fantasy of broadsiding other ships, so it makes sense for AI to take the brunt of that: if you’re giving people the creative outlet of attacking a common foe, it’s going to reduce the wish for dominance over other players.
Of course, for fans of the game who wanted more variety in things to do, more variety in combat, and more fun ways to interact other than constant PvP struggles, these are all good pieces of news and there’s reason to be happy about it. The full interview is a fascinating look at a team completely ripping up a plan for the game and starting a completely new roadmap. But if you’ve been playing MMOs for (again) two decades, a lot of it will sound… very familiar.
On the content side of things, the devs just posted the latest update video below.
