Sea of Thieves made another showing at E3 this year and, once again, left me without a release date or any hope in my heart. Why? Why must you do this to me Rare? Don’t you know that I am just one of many, many, many, many gamers out there who have been fiending for a proper open world pirate game. Seriously. I’m still booting up Sid Meier’s Pirates! And that game is 30-years-old at this point. So what’s up with the Sea of Thieves release date? Do we know anything?
We know it got delayed, unfortunately. Previous release windows had the game slated for a 2017 release but the Xbox E3 Briefing confirmed it will be early 2018 now. A recent dev blog went into detail on the work being done on the PC version, and the Sea of Thieves site is full of frequent updates and feature reveals so it's not as though Rare is keeping us in the dark. But the more the share the harder it gets to wait.
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Today’s gameplay was a perfect example. Rare showcased a treasure hunt involving four different pirates who did everything from follow a riddle map to a spot in a cave (down to a distance of “11 paces”) to diving for sunken chests while dodging hungry sharks to launching themselves out of cannons onto the deck of an attack pirate ship. It was a diverse range of action, all of it part of a procedurally generated open world that promises to deliver wide open spaces for exploration, combat and shanties. Please let there be shanties.
I managed to do a hands-on at E3 last year and, while I liked parts of what I experienced, I got the overwhelming sense that so much was left unanswered there was no way of knowing what the final product would be. After today’s trailer that’s still the feeling I have. The world looked deep and full of detail, and the vibe was straight pirate all the way down to the grog jokes. But I want to know more. Fortunately, Microsoft and Rare will almost certainly have some playable form of Sea of Thieves on hand for everyone to try this week.
If you can’t be on hand at E3 to try Sea of Thieves , here’s an update on the streaming schedule for the week courtesy of the Sea of Thieves official site :
We'll also be streaming from our E3 booth in several midweek sessions, using Mixer (formerly Beam) to co-stream four crew members at once! We're even planning simultaneous play sessions for everyone in the Xbox One Technical Alpha – so players at E3 can cross cutlasses and exchange cannon fire with other players from across the world. At the moment we have daily sessions lined up for Tuesday 13th to Thursday 15th June, with times to be confirmed. Check the Sea of Thieves social channels for all the latest news on this and anything else E3-related.
Are you excited for Sea of Thieves? Are you so ready for the game to be here you’re ready to pop like a barnacle in a microwave? Let us know in the comments!
