A new and more flexible barrel inventory system caught a lot of Sea of Thieves players off guard when it arrived in Patch 1.2.4, and not in a good way. Such is the furor over the handling of this change (as it takes longer for players to stock their ships) that Rare has had to come back and apologize for not giving players more of a heads-up and an explanation over this.
“We certainly didn’t make such a change to the core flow, pace and mechanics of the game lightly, but we should have done a better job of being up front and detailing precisely why we feel it’s important to the future expansion of the game,” Rare said. “We’ve also unfortunately ended up in a situation where the Cursed Crews event and the addition of the Cursed Cannonballs are so closely tied that we ran out of time to react to feedback from our Sea of Thieves Pioneers.”
The studio shared its vision for a slightly more complex inventory system in the game that would (among other things) allow barrels to contain “emergent quests,” more types of food, and more variants of ammunition. Rare is going to work on changes that should help players to interact with barrels more quickly and handle firing cannons with fewer button presses.
Today we’ve investigated the current game issues and have made progress in rolling out some fixes. We’ll have more updates on Monday. Completed work means players will experience less game crashes. We’re working hard, making progress, thank you for your patience.
— Sea of Thieves (@SeaOfThieves) August 31, 2018
