Sea Of Thieves – Microsoft-endorsed piracy

GameCentral speak to Rare about their big comeback, and the dangers of promoting an ambitious new game in a post-No Man’s Sky world.

Of all the new games we’ve seen and previewed this year, we think Sea Of Thieves has had the most consistently enthusiastic developers. You can certainly understand that they’d be happy to be working on Rare’s first ‘proper’ game since emerging from the ghetto of Kinect-only titles, but there’s more to it than just that. The excitement they have for the game, and the whole pirate theme, is clearly not manufactured, and it’s hard not to share their enthusiasm as soon as they start talking about it.



Unfortunately the playable demo at Gamescom last month was essentially identical to the one at E3, when we first played the game and spoke to Rare about it. We’d swear the waves on the sea were looking better than before, but other than that everything seemed the same. Although that didn’t stop us from having another go anyway, as we crewed a pirate ship with three other journos and did our best to loot and plunder the seven seas – or at least as much of it as could be traversed in a 20-minute demo.

But speaking to lead designer Mike Chapman and executive producer Joe Neate we learnt that part of their enthusiasm is due to the fact that back at Rare they get to play a far more involved version of the game, as they test and implement new features ahead of a forthcoming closed beta.


They explain all this in a standard hands-off demonstration behind closed doors, where they talk about the dangers of treasure chest ownership (they’re useless to you until you can get them back to port and bank them, making you such a target for other pirates that ditching them at sea is often the best way to get rid of pursuing rivals) and what happens when you die (you end up in a ghost ship that works like the waiting room in Beetlejuice).

After hearing all this spiel though we came back later for a proper interview, where they revealed more about their plans for island quests, melee combat, and primate simulation…

Formats: Xbox One and PC

Publisher: Microsoft Studios

Developer: Rare

Release Date: 2017

GC: I was struck by something you said earlier, about knowing intuitively how all the game’s systems work. The reverse of that is surely that everyone also immediately has a long list of things they expect to see in the game. I was making notes while you were talking: parrots, monkey butlers, ramming, cutlasses, mermaids…

JN: [laughs] Monkey butlers?

GC: Doesn’t everyone ask for that? Surely you must have a whiteboard somewhere with the words ‘monkey butlers’ written on it?

JN: [laughs] There is a whiteboard… There’s a post-it note with ‘pets’. I believe monkey emotes are going to be the most popular thing in our game.

MC: You saw the cinematic trailer at E3? We purposefully chose to put things in that that we definitely want to have in the game, nautical legends like krakens and mermaids. All the characters in those scenes were there because we want to have things like that in the game at some point. I think if you think about pirates – especially the world that we’re buildings, which is fantasy pirates and not dry, boring pirates – You’ve got all these images in your mind of quests for legendary treasures, wildlife on islands, ghost pirates, mermaids, being on a ghost ship… all these kind of pirate tropes.



But we also want to make sure the game is accessible, that the way you interact with the world is very intuitive. If you want to raise the anchor you go and push a peg on the capstan. The fact that the capstan has more than one peg kind of implies more people can grab it at the same time. If more people grab they can interact with it faster, much like you’d expect on a real ship. So when we had the competition winners over to Rare… you saw that trailer at E3 as well?

GC: The one with the YouTubers?

JN: They weren’t YouTubers, they were real fans! There were six competition winners and six fans we invited.

MC: So that was the first time anyone from outside Rare really played it. We were watching a feed of them playing it for the first time. We didn’t tell them anything. We just shut them in these booths, with no tutorials, no hand-holding, and they crewed the ship straight away. And within five minutes they were out there sailing.

And we could see them going through the thought process of how do you get the ship moving? There’s a thing that raises the anchor. We’re still not moving? Okay, lower the sails. Oh, there’s some wind. Let me adjust the sails and we can go faster. How do you steer the ship? I’ll grab the wheel, and you go down and explore below.


Intuitively you work it out fairly quickly, but it doesn’t mean the game is shallow. A great example of that is what we’re seeing on the show floor, is that you can lock the wheel left or right and then you can drop the anchor and imagine the ship lurching around because the wheel is off-centre. Imagine everyone interacting together, assigning roles, ‘You grab the sails! You grab the anchor!’ Then wheeling the ship around and hitting them with a broadside. All these cool tactics used to have mastery over the environment.

Sea Of Thieves – a nice place for a shipwreck

GC: I’ve played it two or three times now and you’re right. We even sunk a ship in the last go. Or rather a ship sunk that at one point we had fired at.

JN: [laughs] Did you sink?

GC: Err… yes. But after them!

Both: [laughs]

GC: So what’s the next step here? Considering the demo at Gamescom is basically the same as at E3.

JN: We’re not talking about anything specific now, but the closed beta is our focus. That’s what we’re driving towards at the moment.

GC: The worry I have is that something with this scope is always subject to the same sort of dangers as consumed No Man’s Sky. Not least, it raises the simple question of what do you actually do in Sea Of Thieves?

JN: I’m surprised you’re the first person to make that point.

GC: So am I!

JN: I know, honesty. We’ve been checking ourselves, seeing if we’re talking too much or something in our demos.


GC: It’s 6pm now, and not one person has asked what you actually do in your game?

JN: [laughs] That prototype video you saw at E3, that was thrown together in about four months, and we’ve had people working on that since then for about another 18 months. And that’s a small team, while we kind of build this and get all of that core technology in place. Making sure we have the ability to release regularly, with everything running off servers properly, and everything that makes it look and sound great. And then we’re happy to iterate.

So we’ve got this massive smorgasbord of things, most of the things you’ve probably got written on your list, in terms of potential things that we can put into the game. It’s very much about having this massive backlog, and instead of it being in a design document, instead of it just being a Post-It on a wall, we’ve actually kind of got a living, breathing design document that’s ugly as sin but plays great.

GC: You’re talking about the prototype video I saw at E3, with Phil Spencer and Kudo playing? [Alas, it hasn’t been released to the public – GC]

JN: Yes! It’s then a case of asking which one of these features do we want to move across, into the game? So we have a lot of confidence about the theoretical things we talk about here. Especially around quests and around treasures.

MC: The video you saw with Phil Spencer and Kudo, that’s how we test out the game. We’ve experienced all these features and now we need to test them at scale, when you’ve got lots of players playing together.

GC: But I’m afraid we live in cynical times, and especially after No Man’s Sky… I think people are going to be less willing to take it on trust that features developers talk about during previews will actually end up in the final game in any kind of timely fashion.

JN: That’s fair enough. But just as an example: ship damage. In here you can take damage on the top deck, the middle deck, and that’s about it. But we’ve got tons more potential damage features. There’s lots of other ways your ship can get damaged, right? And it’s up to us to ask: do we want to bring in more ship damage, and get more into that area, or do we want to focus more on quests or get more into the creatures in the world, or pets – like monkeys and cats and dogs?

And it’s just a question of the order we bring these things into our world and how we grow it and expand it. But we’ve got so many options… We also want to start tweaking and changing things based on what people do when they get hold of the game. But even then, we already feel great about our vision because we can play a lot of it already, just in rudimentary form.

So I think we’re in quite a unique situation. Because I always feel that if we’d come in here, making all of these outlandish claims about our game without having the confidence that we can do them, that they’re actually fun… You don’t want to just sell a dream that has no basis in reality.

It’s like when we talk about the ghost ship. The ghost ship is great because we’ve played it repeatedly and we’ve iterated on it. It’s something we feel okay talking about because we’ve got it and we’ve played it. And that gives me the confidence to talk strongly and passionately about where we’re taking this game.

GC: Does this imply that Sea Of Thieves is going to start in a form of early access? That it’ll be constantly updated and it may be months and years before some of these features come online?

JN: It will be a constantly evolving and growing game. What we want to do is go out in stages. So when we’re ready to go into the beta, we’ll announce it. We’ll get people signing up to it, and what’s important to us is we get the right type of people. We’ll put a barrier in place. We’ll have a questionnaire that asks what kind of player are you? Do you engage in PvP? Do you love getting involved with the development?

But we’ll also ask about motivations. We don’t just want people that go around killing other players, but people that love socialising and exploring. Again, a big mix of motivations. But we’ll also talk about what the next goal is beyond the beta. Because we want to say, ‘Hey, here’s the beta’. But we also want to set expectations about where we’re going, what’s the next stage. And that’s when we’ll be ready to talk about that kind of thing.

GC: That sounds great, but I’m not sure you’ve really answered the question of what you actually do in the game. How close will it be to the experience of these demos?

JN: There will be more of our core loop. In terms of quests you can go on, like treasure hunts. The video with Kudo and Phil at E3 showed a bit more of that kind of core loop. Going on an adventure together, going on quests, getting that treasures chest, being able to get it out of the sand, getting it back to the ship, getting it back to the port where you can bank it. All that time it’s at risk in the world.

And that adds so much emergent gameplay to the world. But there needs to be for the type of players that love to explore. Those who want to go off the beaten track, there need to be emergent opportunities for them to find interesting things to do. Maybe they find a message in a bottle floating in the sea or washed up against an island? That then gives them something to go and take on.

But it’s starting with that core, and it means that by having that one kind of simple questing to start with you can really grow that thread as we move forward. Different types of things, different ways to play. We can then start looking at different size ships, because we’ve got the one core ship in there that’s about the social aspect. But then when do we bring in that single-player ship to give a really different feel to the experience?

We’ve got a roadmap for how we grow all those things, but it’s about getting the core building blocks in place and then we just grow. But we have to do it with real players, because the further we go without them the less information and the less data we have to make the right decisions.

Sea Of Thieves – join the crew

GC: Including if they don’t like something?

JN: Of course, or if they use something in really different ways that we weren’t expected.

MC: That’s the really fascinating part, where we’re building up the world and the different quests but they don’t end up being used in the way we imagine. Although we’ve got our vision of how we think players are going to interact and what we think they’re going to do, at the moment we’ve got no way of testing that to scale. Is the game going to be split evenly between explorers and people who like combat? Are players creating emergent gameplay that we didn’t foresee at all? How will more experienced players try to take advantage of all the different systems?

GC: I’ll tell you exactly what they’ll do, it’ll be whatever the thing is that creates the most violence for the smallest effort. So I’m guessing they’ll be hanging around the port shooting newbies as they set off and hoping to get the others with treasure as they limp home to cash their treasure.

JN: [laughs] You really have a low opinion of players and their motivations. I remember your first question at E3 was like that. [laughs]

GC: Gamers gonna game.

Both: [laughs]

MC: We’ve thought long and hard about the way the world is laid out. The fact that there isn’t really any fast travel in the game. The fact that you can see that port as a silhouette in the distance and know that there are ships there. Because the fact that I can’t teleport means I can’t surprise you. The only way I can surprise you is if you let your guard down or you’re not watching out.

The magic of it all is being out there on the open waves and you’ve got that port and you’ve got to figure out a strategy for getting there. Well, there is a ship there and they look dangerous, but that’s okay because I know there’s another place more to the south-east, so we’re gonna head that way.

GC: Is the world procedurally generated?

JN: No, no, no, no.

MC: No.

GC: No?

MC: [laughs] It’s all hand-crafted. There’s small islands, medium-sized islands that you can quest on… everything has a purpose and use that’s conveyed with character and charm. They can be a joy to explore, a feast for the eyes and ears, in that unique Rare way.

GC: I was going to make a crack about googly eyes there, but I do love your enthusiasm about the game.

MC: [laughs] So, for example, we have an island where it’s kind of like a cave and you can fit your whole ship in there.

GC: I trust it’s going to look like the one from The Goonies?

MC: I’m a big fan, I’m trying to get as many references in as possible. [laughs] We put that archway in there because players might use it. They might sail their ship in there and drop off some chests where no one can find them. That’s what can happen, but of course we don’t know what the players will actually do.

Also, imagine how we layer the world. So, when you first start out you’re using the world map to navigate and later on when you have more experience you might not need the world map anymore, because you have a feel for where places like ports are. Your knowledge of the world grows until it becomes a real place for you, that you live and breathe. And that’s the romance of being a pirate.

JN: And also, that knowledge unlocks different quest types as well, that we’ve got prototypes for and again we’ve played, and we feel great talking about as potential for the future. Because there are very Goonies-esque maps that you find, that to a new player are going to mean nothing. But to those that have been around you might recognise something in the background, and that will take you to one spot and then you work out the next clue and then you hold it up and a magical chest miraculously appears before you because you’ve managed to line these two things up. And that all comes from having a crafted world and the knowledge players get and the joy of the…

(He’s suddenly cut off as we all notice the ship in the demo become the victim of a drive-by shooting, apparently by someone still playing the game on the show floor.)

GC: So how busy is the game world going to be. Will I be sailing out there and not see any other ships for several minutes or are there going to be dozens on the horizon at all times?

MC: Great question. Again, the design of the world is set-up specifically so that you always have some breathing room. We want to make sure you’ve always got time to talk with each other and to meet people. But one time you might be up there on some island, collecting treasure, and not see anyone. But you always know there’s that chance, just beyond the horizon, that you might run into more players.

Or maybe you might meet them on the ghost ship. There might be players there you haven’t met yet. You die, you go to the ghost ship, you might meet someone who you haven’t met yet but realise they were out there with you experiencing the same things, and then maybe you decide to meet later when you come back.

GC: I do like the idea of that Beetlejuice kind of purgatory.

MC: The awkward conversations are great, because they always start with, ‘So, how did you die?’ And then you both start to tell your stories and what you’ll do differently next time.

JN: Our voice chat is proximity based, which means within a crew you can always hear each other. But whenever you get close to other things in the world you’ll start to be able to hear them too. And so there are times when you go on an island and you suddenly hear a voice that you don’t recognise, and you think, ‘Hold on, there must be someone else here!’ And when you get to the top of the hill and look over the side there’s a ship moored in the bay and a bunch of people running around.

MC: You ask yourself, is it a trap? Are they hiding below decks? Are they actually on the island and we haven’t spotted them yet? Shall we try to steal their ship? And… wasn’t that that scene from Master & Commander?

JN: Yeah.

MC: As we were playing we recognised these scenes you’ve experienced in films start to come to life emergently. Like, where you’ve got someone on your tail and you steer into a small crack in the reefs…

JN: I remember doing exactly that, through a bunch of sandbanks in our prototype. Do you remember? We were weaving through, and then we spun around and you guys were following us but you had nowhere to go because it was all sandbank. And then it was just barrage, barrage, barrage. But it was so good because you thought about it and you led someone through there and it’s all exactly what you’d be doing if you were on a ship in a pirate world.

GC: I remember a bit like that in Hornblower, I think it was.

JN: [laughs] I’ve been watching Black Sails, that’s been my thing. Halfway through the third season, there was a bit where they’re being chased and their ship wasn’t quite as fast or strong. But there was a massive storm, and they were like, ‘What are we going to do? Are we going to surrender?’ And they knew they’d probably get hanged if they did, so they decided to just plough through the storm.

So obviously the guys that were chasing them thought, ‘Well, I’m not going through there!’ But when you were watching they were doing all the stuff you’d intuitively expect, like tying themselves to the deck while the captain was still steering the wheel. But before they went below deck they made sure they raised all the sails so they wouldn’t get damaged in the wind.

And we’ve prototyped all kinds of damage for storms. And it’s been really interesting to watch those shows and think, ‘Oh, maybe we could try that, maybe we could try this’. Inspirations comes from all places, but it definitely comes from all that media. Because you definitely want those moments.

Sea Of Thieves – instead of stats you get to customise your cabin

GC: Master & Commander is definitely my favourite nautical film.

JN: Yes, it’s a terrific film.

GC: So how complex do you intend the ship combat to get? What about the thing where they would shoot flails at the sails to rip holes in them?

JN: Oh, I didn’t know about that one. But we’ve got a big Excel document full of ship combat tactics. [laughs]

GC: And then what about using guns and sword-fighting?

JN: The main player expectations like that are all 100% going to be in the game, especially in terms of hand-to-hand fighting and cutlasses.

MC: It wouldn’t be a pirate game without that.

JN: And if you look at the frozen moments in time cinematic trailer that we did… everything in there is our vision for the final game. And in that you’ll see players clashing with swords and shooting with muskets. So all of that stuff is coming in, we’re prototyping… We’ve already got a blunderbuss working and we just didn’t put it in for this build because it made it too combat focused, with that set of features.

But when you get the quests in, which we’re working on now, that’s when the blunderbuss will come in. Because when you’ve got something you need to protect personally, when you’re carrying it around, and when you also want to take it off other people. That’s when the combat becomes important and we want to make sure that works as you’d expect.

GC: But is that the sort of thing that’s going to be in the game straight away or in two years’ time?

JN: Well, that’s the meat. That’s why we always keep steering back to our closed beta as our next goal. They can protect themselves they can go on those quests together. And it’s that core loop of then being able to earn that treasure and take it back to port and bank it. Those are the core kind of elements for me, but there are also rewards for exploration. Or things for players to do as they explore that world. Because at the moment you just can amble around here but there’s not much there. There’s not any resources to gather, there’s no wood to chop down…

MC: But already I can have an experience with other players that is very positive. I can go on quests appropriate to the world of Sea Of Thieves. The fact that I can get a reward from them creates that secret sauce of the game that makes it feel like the pirate adventure you always imagined. And the fact that I can take that reward, and dealing with it creates a whole other set of challenges, keeps you engaged. Those are the core ingredients that make the game what it is.

JN: But what we can’t do is let the game feel unfinished. And what I’d say to anyone is that anything we deliver to players will be of that same level of quality, because that’s our responsibility and that’s what we believe. So you’ll never have a feeling of the game feeling unfinished or buggy or broken. It’s 100% not that.

As a studio we’re practicing what is called continuous delivery. It’s quite well known in a lot of a manufacturing processes, and apps and that side of things. Which is basically being able to regularly deliver the game. So it means we run a bunch of automated tests, and so whenever people submit code into the game, or anything, we run a test to make sure that nothing breaks. And so we’ve constantly got a build that we can review. It means that we’re constantly keeping it at that level.

So as opposed to a normal game where you’re driving towards any kind of release, you throw loads of s*** in, you get a big bug count and then you try and fix it and things get cut out – because you haven’t got enough time to fix them. And it’s just chaos and hate. I think our bug count is always under a hundred at any time. Whereas you get to 1,500 or 2,000 bugs on a normal game.

So we’re doing more work upfront to save us pain in the long run. And it means we can keep a level of quality and we can delivery regularly, and ensure we give a reason to return. All of that we’ve been working on from the start as much as the game experience itself.

Because we’ve looked at all sorts of games that do go into betas early, or early access or whatever, and what we think they get right and maybe not so right.

GC: And just to finish with a few quick questions: are there AI-controlled enemies in the game?

JN: Not in terms of ships or pirates. Any pirate or ship you see are actual players. In terms of dangers in the world… that is on our list. But again, you start and then grow and evolve the different kinds of dangers that you see. Both in the sea and on islands.

GC: And what about a role-playing system? Is there levelling up and that sort of thing?

MC: We do have some… going back to pirate movies and pirate literature, we try to keep it all part of the romance. The ship is almost an extension of your own character. So as you play you can upgrade and customise the ship and so that becomes a point of conversation between players. So it will be obvious to everyone how experienced a player you are just by looking at your ship.

GC: But there are no stats or numbers?

JN: No, because it’s not about becoming a level 12 cannon.

GC: But will there be anything in the game that will cause people to complain about grinding?

MC: Other games, of the kind you’re probably thinking of, they’re usually kind of stat-based. And not only that but they’re stats that no one else can see, because they’re somewhere in the menu and you know them but nobody else does.

In our game, when someone has a heavily customised ship you know they worked to get that. If someone has a hat with an unusual feather in it, or trinkets in their hair, or a peg leg, that becomes a point of conversation. ‘Where did you get that?’ ‘Oh, I got that from doing that quest…‘ It shows your progression but it’s also a social thing.

GC: Okay, well I better get going. But thanks very much for taking the time to chat.

JN: No problem, dude.

GC: Just get to work on those monkey butlers. I want to be sitting in my hammock giving them orders.

Both: [laughs]

GC: Actually, that’d be great a boss battle…

MC: This is the kind of conversation that’s going on in our studio all the time. It’s gonna great.

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