Sea of Thieves is ‘fixing’ Safer Seas by making it… less usable for leveling

Look out, Sea of Thieves has laid out a cunning trap for you! It’s called a developer update for the week, and it’s in video form and just below, featuring a very cozy-looking tavern backdrop. The trap is that you’ll be snared and listen to the whole update, which begins by discussing… traps. It’s trapception.

Now, readers will recall that traps were intended to be new content with Season 14, but that Season was a bit of a buggy mess, which Rare responded to by pulling a significant chunk of the new features out of the game – content like traps, disguises, and crouching.

But now Rare is talking up those stealthy features once again – including disguises and hanging from ledges – now that it’s had more time to test and address critical gameplay issues. The new video also discusses its efforts to deal with ban-evaders, compensation in the form of gold and doubloon bonuses for players, and the team’s plans to update Safer Seas, which was the game’s not-particularly-compelling non-PvP mode.

Rare makes clear that in spite of all the players using Safer Seas as a “chill” experience, it still wants the mode to be an “onboarding” experience for newbies. So it’s removing the gold penalties associated with Safer Seas while also dramatically lowering the level cap (from 40 to 25). So yeah, if you liked playing chill over there, screw you, we guess?

In any case, we still don’t know when exactly the November update is happening. It was meant to be tomorrow, but as of this afternoon, Rare has postponed it with no ETA.

Apologies for the short notice, pirates, but unfortunately, tomorrow’s planned release has been postponed.

We’ll share more details in the coming days, including when players can expect the monthly update to launch.

Thanks for your patience. https://t.co/2HlwElLiDH

— Sea of Thieves (@SeaOfThieves) November 13, 2024