Sea of Thieves is a uniquely co-operative multiplayer experience1 set in a shared world that combines the thrill of adventuring together with friends with the unpredictability of emergent play and unexpected threats – both from other players and the world itself.

Be the pirates you want to be, share adventures with friends and set your own rules, roles and goals in a world where every sail on the horizon is another crew of players with unknown intent.

Explore, fight and live the pirate life together in this uniquely fresh and fun multiplayer game. Choose your voyage and decide how you’ll approach adventures in a world where every sail on the horizon is another crew of players with unknown intent.

Rare shared details of what is to come in Sea of Thieves in 2022, with Creative Director Mike Chapman and others from across the team exploring how players can expect the game to evolve over the next 12 months.

In addition, Rare has provided an early look at Season 6 for Sea of Thieves, which will be kicking off starting in March. 

High-level overview: 

• Seasons: Major quarterly content updates that bring new tools, systems and features to the game alongside a reset of seasonal progression and a new Plunder Pass. 
• Adventures: Adventures are Sea of Thieves’ new narrative-driven live events that offer new immersive and cinematic experiences each month. Each Adventure will be a chapter in an ambitious new overarching narrative for the game. At key points of the story, the actions of the community will determine how the story unfolds and the impact this has on the world. Season 6 will see the first Adventure arrive in Sea of Thieves: Shrouded Islands.
• Mysteries: Mysteries are a new way of storytelling in Sea of Thieves, blending in-game side quests with elements of an ARG. Players will be invited to solve headline-grabbing mysteries by solving clues found both inside and outside of the game. Each Mystery will unfold over a sustained period, with new clues being made available as the community progresses. 

Going on an Adventure

With Seasonal updates still forming the skeleton for Sea of Thieves, one of our main goals for 2022 is to flesh out our pirate world and make it feel more dynamic. Stories, whether they’re the ones we tell or those that our players create themselves, are at the very heart of Sea of Thieves, so we want to inspire new tales of derring-do and comradery.

Enter Adventures and Mysteries: these story-focused events are designed to complement Seasons, providing regular narrative-driven content for players to dig into alongside the other gameplay features brought in by our Seasonal content drops. Adventures are time-limited, arriving on a roughly monthly schedule and running for 2-3 weeks, with each one forming a chapter within an overarching narrative. Accompanying cinematics will help set up the story, and a finale Adventure will cap off each narrative arc.

The first Adventure, ‘Shrouded Islands’, is currently set for release on February 17th. Set your pocket watches now!

Mysteries will run alongside Adventures and remain part of the world for longer, relying on the community to solve clues and riddles both inside and outside the game to move the story forward. These will play their own part in making the world of Sea of Thieves feel richer than ever before, and while the subjects of these Mysteries could be anything, we can tell you that the first one will see players attempting to solve a murder…

A Fortuitous Arrival

Seasons will continue to bring in new features and content, along with new Seasonal rewards, Pirate Emporium stock and optional Plunder Passes to boost the rewards you receive on the climb to level 100. Kicking off in March, Season Six will be headlined by a new combat and exploration experience: Sea Forts.

Six Sea Forts will appear around the world, drawn through from the Sea of the Damned and protected by patrolling Phantoms. You’ll battle through these ghostly foes and collect keys to fully explore the Sea Fort, eventually taking down its toughest defenders and claiming the loot within the treasury. The Sea Forts are also intertwined with the action that unfolds during our first set of Adventures, so stay tuned to discover more about these new locations manifesting on the Sea of Thieves.

In the latter half of Season Six, we want to introduce something that’s long been requested by the community: new content for Pirate Legends! This is planned to take the form of a new, Legend-exclusive Voyage packed with story beats and a series of challenges that change each time you set sail. We don’t want to reveal too much of what you’ll be doing just yet, but expect to explore new locations and seek treasure with special maps…

A Farewell to Arms

Along with this exciting new content, we as a team are working hard to implement feedback on some of the community’s hot button topics, devoting as many resources as we can to improve features that matter most to the players. However, shifting the focus fully onto making Adventure mode the best it can be means that we do have to make difficult decisions elsewhere. So, after lengthy internal discussions, we have made the tough call to close down Sea of Thieves’ Arena mode within the next few months.

With the scope of Sea of Thieves growing larger and larger, the huge task of maintaining QA and bug fixes for both Adventure and Arena modes has become something we can no longer justify. We’re proud of what we achieved with Arena, but ultimately it wasn’t as successful as we had hoped, and a bespoke competitive mode with few dedicated players is hard to align with our future vision for Sea of Thieves. We want to offer heartfelt thanks to the hardcore Arena communities for their creativity and passion during Arena’s run of nearly three years, and you can find a news post covering this decision in more detail over on the Sea of Thieves website.

Of course, Rare still have many more secrets and surprises hidden away in the cargo hold, but hope this first look at what’s coming has sharpened your appetites for the year ahead. Rest assured things are not slowing down on the seas...

Key Features:

• A unique co-op experience that combines the thrill of adventuring together with friends with the unpredictability of a shared landscape and its threats, both from other players and the world itself.
• Designed around players working together with shared goals and rewards, where you’ll go on epic voyages in search of legendary artefacts and buried treasure, but in a world where every sail on the horizon is another crew. What flag are they flying, and what do they want?
• Crew up with your friends and be the pirates you want, choosing your own roles and goals. Explore the world, take on quests, or seek out conflict. It’s your crew against the world, and how you deal with other crews is entirely up to you.
• Invites players into a beautiful world with a distinctive art style, ripe for exploration and with mythical creatures lurking on islands and under the inviting surface of the sea…
• Offers an experience that will evolve over time, landing in players’ hands early and growing thanks to community insights and feedback. New ways to play will be unveiled as the world expands and evolves.

Sea of Thieves is now available for Xbox One and PC as an Xbox Play Anywhere title, and also supports cross-play.