As our Executive Producer, @JoeNineTee said in An Important Question for Joe and Gang, we’ve been talking about how best to respond to some of the big questions that we see on the forums. Fair to say, personal combat is an area that has lots of outstanding questions around how we’re planning to approach this in terms of the variety of weaponry and how this will feel to p
We’ve also gone a step further compared to most other experiences that have aim down sights, in that the default position when carrying a gun around is not held in an aiming stance from the hip. Instead, guns that are not being actively aimed have their barrels pointing upwards or close to the player’s body. The reason for this is that players have to take a specific action to aim the gun (and be seen to aim the gun), which makes it much clearer to determine the intent of other players: if you see them aiming at you, you know they are trying to line up a shot. Conversely, if you come across another crew in the world who seems more friendly and their guns are raised, the situation can feel less hostile. Ordinarily, in a typical shooter, even with aim down sights, the gun is held outwards and from the hip and other players automatically look more dea
This isn’t the first time that Rare has talked about cross-play for Sea of Thieves , however. Earlier this year, when Rare first activated the closed alpha on PC, the team decided to try out cross-play just to see how it felt. Executive Producer Joe Neate called the experience “magical,” explaining that it led him to question why any game would split player bases. But questions about balance and fairness prevented Rare from making it official straight away, however the more the studio considered cross-play, the more it realized there was no good reason not to include
Interestingly, Rare didn’t have anything else to say about how Sea of Thieves would be monetised after its launch next year. All Mayles could offer in that regard was a broad design philosophy that hints towards a content release plan similar to that of Destiny or other long-term investments like The Divisi
This might seem nitpicky given Nintendo’s excellent and concise presentation during E3 2017, but the set-up for this one had already been done and all the company needed to do was announce it. The Switch is already gaining a reputation as the home for Wii U games that were ignored because of that console’s technical failures, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has already proven that those remakes can be extremely lucrative for Nintendo as well. Nintendo could have probably flashed the Metroid Prime 4 announcement on screen, followed with the announcement of a Super Smash Bros. Deluxe for the Switch, and called it a successful E3 2
What do you think about Sea of Thieves not being free-to-play? Is it fair for developers to still take this approach to multiplayer content, or has the era of paid multiplayer business models started to fade away? Let us know in the comments be
One of the hottest games coming out of Microsoft’s E3 2016 presentation has to be Rare’s open-world pirate adventure game Sea of Thieves . The multiplayer-focused title awed audiences with its gameplay demonstration, revealing a deep and nuanced engine that lets gamers occupy roles as important as a ship’s captain and as seemingly trivial as the drunken accordion player. It’s not much of a stretch to say that fans of pirates and co-operative gameplay have been utterly entranced by what Sea of Thieves has put on offer so
An example of this is the fact that we don’t have a UI crosshair for both cannons and guns. Players use the weapons themselves to aim. Crosshairs tend to imply a level of precision and a type of aiming that just doesn’t feel appropriate for pirate weaponry. When you use the gun barrel itself to aim without the absolute certainty of a crosshair, you tend to find that players are a little more considered with their shots. Of course, landing a hit this way feels even more satisfying,
Sea of Thieves is an Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive with no currently announced release window, though it is part of Microsoft’s Play Anywhere program . Expect more information on Sea of Thieves story guide|https://seaofthievesfans.com/ of Thieves in the months to c
Delivering sword combat for a network game, especially as part of a first person experience, is particularly challenging. We’re busy prototyping sword combat to get it into exactly the right place before we add it to a build that some lucky players in the Insider Programme will get a chance to play and provide feedback on. We’ve tried a few different approaches and we’re getting closer to a solution we feel happy with. We know where it needs it sit in terms of the overall approach to combat, but we’re still keen resolve some remaining issues before its ready for a larger audience. As always, there will be much more to share in the fut
When you think about pirate encounters from books or movies, you tend to think of dynamic encounters in which the crews start by selecting the right tool for the job, but then change their weaponry as the situation changes. We think about this scenario our game using the example of two ships meeting on the sea. In this example, the first thing that is likely to happen is for cannon balls to be exchanged when the ships come into range. Depending on how the crews decide to position the ships, this may lead to the ships getting close enough for players to use personal arms, such as flintlock pistols and the blunderbuss. With our approach to aim down sights, you’d see the some of the rival crew taking aim with their guns as the crews exchange shots between decks, while some players still continue to fire with the cannons. Following this, in the event of one of the crews boarding the other ship, they might then get the opportunity to get a single shot off while standing on the enemy deck, before then being forced into a reload…which is where swords come
