Thoughts from the Sea of Thieves PC Design Lead

I’ve been a lifelong Rare fan, so I felt very privileged to recently come aboard (don’t worry, we’re not short on pirate puns!) to work as the PC Design Lead for Sea of Thieves. Being a First Person Adventure game, Sea of Thieves immediately feels right at home on the PC. When you combine this with a fantastical world full of 24/7 player-driven stories, it gives us a great opportunity to take full advantage of what a platform like Xbox Live offers to us as world builders and game developers, and allows us to create an experience catered for the needs of each platform.

Sure, I could sit here and recount to you stories like that time I fell from the crow’s nest into the sea and watched my crew sail into the distance, or the time I got so drunk I was referred to as the “new worst ship-mate on the team” (thanks, Gregg!), but these stories don’t exclusively cover the Windows 10 version of the game and yet that’s exactly the point. Your hardware choice shouldn’t be a barrier. The team made some great decisions early on in development to adopt Unreal Engine 4 which natively supports the PC, and also made the choice to develop the Windows 10 version of Sea of Thieves in parallel with the Xbox One version from the beginning.  This ensured our ambitions for both platforms were the same, and that we could deliver a consistent and awesome pirate adventure to fans.

We want the stories players tell to be the same, we want the experience to be the same, and we want you to enjoy the game on whichever Xbox platform you prefer to play games on (which could be on Windows 10 or Xbox One!). With Xbox Play Anywhere, we’re giving our fans the freedom to play their games wherever they want. When you own a digital copy of Sea of Thieves, it’s yours to play on both Xbox One and Windows 10.

To me though the best part about the way that Sea of Thieves is being created by the team is how we’re building the game with the community. There is no community more vocal than the PC fan base and whilst we have a great idea of the needs of a PC gamer (unlocked frame-rate, anyone?) we can’t wait to hear the kind of extra levels of detail you want to see in your PC game. Sea of Thieves on Windows 10 allows us to reach as many gamers as possible, including those who have never experienced a Rare game before. It’s going to be a wild ride for us as our first PC game and we’re excited to share more details with you on the horizon (don’t say I didn’t warn you about the puns!).