Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Sea of Thieves update: How 'The Hungering Deep' extends game's piratical universe

Rare studio head Craig Duncan on how the sea-faring game will develop

Andrew Griffin
Tuesday 29 May 2018 16:59 BST
Comments

It was first glimpsed in small teasers: eerie silhouettes under the water, two beady eyes peering out of the darkness.

When it arrived, it was both a sea monster named the megalodon and an important update: the first of a run of new content for Sea of Thieves, the collaborative and online pirate game.

The content update – named The Hungry Deep – brings the terrifying new creature as well as a whole host of more aesthetic changes to the game. And it is also a demonstration of what its developers hope to do with it, changing the game as players go to ensure that the world remains mysterious and interesting.

"This marks our first opportunity to do what we always said we would do – evolve Sea of Thieves and our content in quite an evocative way," says Craig Duncan, head of developers Rare. "We want to bring things into Sea of Thieves with a sense of lore and mystery."

The new update is just the beginning. Developers have already announced that two more updates will be coming this year, and there is likely to be more beyond that; the team is split up into a number of different groups, each working on their own content updates, and when the ones behind The Hungry Deep are finished they will move onto the next new one, with other teams following them.

But as a beginning it is very much in keeping with the rest of the game. It combines the terrifying power of sea monsters with the hilarious behaviour of the drunken pirates out to tame them.

The update brings with it a host of new items: a speaking trumpet, which can be used to talk more loudly and communicate with other ships; a drum, building on the "critical" role that music plays in the game and the new content; a flag, which can be hoisted to communicate with other ships; and other aesthetic changes like tattoos for players.

The upgrades are more than just fun updates and additional features for the game – though they are no doubt fun – but also change the way the game works. By using the right flag, for instance, pirates can show they want to take part in the new story; by having the tattoos, players can show that they have played it, and are part of those stories themselves.

And they are created in a spirit that has come to define Sea of Thieves: a commitment to flexibility, and allowing players to live out their piratical fantasies as they see fit. All of them have various uses according to how people might be playing – something that is embodied throughout the game, which has been gradually broadening out the possibilities of what players can do, making it easy to imagine that the game could be something like a platform for a wide variety of sea-faring experiences.

That wide variety of experiences could come with a downside, if it excludes players who are not caught up on the full lore that comes with it. The game hopes to avoid that by making sure that progression through the game isn't an exclusive or difficult process, just a pleasing one that players want to get involved with.

"I think what's wonderful about Sea of Thieves and the approach of the team is that it's adding existing ingredients into the sandbox we've already got," he says. "We were very, very deliberate about not putting barriers up.

"If you're a brand new player today you can absolutely go and do the hungering deep with a group of players as your first thing, and you'll have your rewards as part of the hungering deep. But that's not going to stop you engaging with everything else in the game."

And an important sense the updates to the game are really only intended to help you find the true surprises within the game – other players, and their stories, says Duncan.

"The lore, the narrative, the trading companies are all these guided goals to facilitate players coming together in really interesting ways," he says. "All the super interesting stories to come out of Sea of Thieves are really the people you played with, the pirates you encountered."

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in