E3 2015: Sea of Thieves Announced
By Boston Blake 26 August 2015
In traditional E3 fashion, Microsoft brought numerous game developers on stage to share and discuss their upcoming games on Xbox One. One of those developers, Rare, revealed a new set of classic Rare games coming in a new collection called Rare Replay.
The developer also revealed a new game coming to Xbox One called Sea of Thieves; a new shared open-world pirate game. While Rare only provided a small sample of the game during the event, it’s definitely enough to spark excitement in pirate and shared-world game fans.
Sea of Thieves looks to be the latest in the plethora of new and upcoming shared-world games. The shared world concept is still fairly new for console gamers, and seems to pull together the best of role playing games and massive multiplayer online games into a full online world that gives players the opportunity to interact with each other, work together, and fight one another in an epic world.
While the Sea of Thieves trailer was short, it did provide a few interesting details about the upcoming title. Players will explore an open world that includes big and small islands, ships to sail aboard, and people to interact with.
For those who are excited about sailing the open seas, there looks to be plenty of hostile waters, as fellow players will attack and board players’ ships in an effort to plunder and thieve their goods. There will also be plenty of opportunities to fight AI enemies throughout the world.
Considering the fact that Sea of Thieves will be a shared open world, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the game offer players opportunities to build abodes and other buildings, and work together with friends and strangers to create and protect entire villages. Additionally, considering the game is focused on pirates, and pirates need ships, it’s very likely players will need to purchase a boat either alone or with others in order to set sail. There may also be ways for players to gather materials to build or upgrade those ships, making them more capable pirates and thieves.
While this is all speculation, the short preview trailer hints at each of these and more for Sea of Thieves. It also hints at the use of megaservers to bring together dozens of players at once in the vast open worlds. Megaservers have become increasingly popular for large open-world multiplayer games that require massive power to handle the plethora of gamers playing and activities happening at any moment.
We’ll keep an eye out to see if Rare shares additional information about Sea of Thieves during E3, and any other details about the Xbox One title coming after the conference.
What do you think about Rare’s new shared world game, Sea of Thieves? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
