On Sea Of Thieves’ Fifth Anniversary, Rare Says It Still Has A Point To Prove

For players, Sea of Thieves is celebrating its fifth anniversary today, March 20, 2023. But for Rare, it’s been nearly a decade since the team first started working on what would go on to become one of Xbox’s most important IPs of its modern era. Studio head Craig Duncan, creative director Mike Chapman, and lead designer Shelley Preston may not be comfortable putting the game on such a pedestal, but it’s hard to deny Sea of Thieves is a milestone for not just Rare, but Xbox, too.

It helped usher in Xbox Game Pass, which today is central to everything Xbox does. It’s also brought in more than 30 million players across two Xbox generations, cloud, and PC, boasts a community of passionate fans that virtually live in-character as their pirate avatars, and is marketed on things like E3 banners and virtual showcases right in between mascots such as Master Chief, Marcus Fenix, and the latest Forza cover car. Despite the team’s success, it’s only now that those I spoke to have taken a moment to look back on the game’s voyage to date.

“As a studio, we don’t really reflect back that often,” Duncan told me during a meeting with the team. “Everything’s always like, ‘Okay, we’ve done that now, it’s done, what’s next? What’s the thing beyond that? Where do we want to be in a year’s time? Where do we want to be in two years’ time?’ That’s just the mode we’re in.”

It wasn’t until they were making a documentary about the game, revealed today as Voyage of a Lifetime, that the team finally stopped to catch their breath and reflect on what’s been achieved thus far. “It’s actually the first time I think we’d ever really wallowed in those kinds of memories,” Duncan said, “And then seeing that story coming together in the documentary, it’s a weird bunch of emotions. It’s pride. It’s happy memories. It’s like, oh, that was a challenging time, and just everything in between.”

Preston echoed his sentiments: “We’ve been crafting this experience with all the same passion and all the same effort and heart for five years. You don’t very often get the chance to kind of sit and take a moment and look back at everything in entirety.”

Sea of Thieves has become one of the great success stories of Game Pass. It was the first game to launch directly into Game Pass in 2018 as part of Microsoft’s bold new strategy for promoting its first-party games and a subscription service in one package. As the head of the studio, Duncan explained to me what those earliest conversations were like.

“We were kind of well down the journey of Sea of Thieves before the Game Pass conversation was a conversation,” he said, recalling when he was first pitched the idea by head of Xbox Phil Spencer. “It was like, ‘Hey, we’ve got this subscription service. We’re gonna let people build their game catalogs. We’ve got a bunch of back-catalog stuff already, so that’s a really good foundation. But, you know, we liked the idea of new games going into it.”

For Duncan, he was of two minds. On one hand, he called it “bold and brave” and “very much in Rare’s DNA to go do something different.” But he admitted the realist inside of him wanted to better understand how this might affect the game’s launch. “We’d done technical alphas and we’d done closed betas and the open betas. But none of them were at that scale of like, ‘Hey, what if we have a big launch?’–which we did. And what if a bunch of those people that have subscribed to this new subscription service turned up?–which they did,” he said, wearing a demeanor that seemed to recall both the joy and chaos of that time.

Scaling for an unknown quantity of players is tough for any multiplayer game, but it was even harder for Rare as Sea of Thieves became a trial run for Xbox’s fledgling Netflix-like platform. “No matter how much planning you do for scale, until you hit that scale, you don’t really know what’s going to crack and break,” Duncan added.

For a live-service game–though Duncan prefers the term “evolving game”–too many players is a better problem than the alternative, and today he seems to have no such qualms or questions about Game Pass. “It’s been a constant source of new players,” he told me. “[Someone] might come into Game Pass for Forza, but might want to try Sea of Thieves, and maybe that person wouldn’t have tried it without that. But equally, we’re not precious about how people play or when they play. So you get this interesting influx of people playing at different times that suit them in Game Pass [because of] Sea of Thieves being part of the library.”

While Game Pass helped shape Sea of Thieves and vice versa, the initial post-launch months for Rare were a time of both challenge and, ultimately, pride. “It felt like we had a point to prove,” said Chapman, recalling the game’s first year after launch, during which time the major criticism of the game was a question of depth. Some players took to calling it “No Man’s Sea” as a play on Hello Games’ similarly maligned space exploration game No Man’s Sky–something that’s funny to consider in 2023, given how much both games have grown. For Rare, the pitch from the earliest days, before the team even knew it would be a pirate game, was always expressed in a simple phrase: “players creating stories together.”

Chapman said the team listed a number of “wrappers” such a game might take place in, naming things like dinosaurs, werewolves versus vampires, and secret agents as other options at the time, but added that once pirates made the list, everyone in the then-small team considered it a foregone conclusion. “It was like, ‘We said we’re going to do this exercise. Let’s just run through it,’ he said, explaining that the team visualized them all on the wall in the studio. “So no serious thought was ever really put into dinosaurs other than that there aren’t many dinosaur games. That could be cool with a Rare stamp on it. But once pirates existed [on the list], we all kind of knew it was pirates.”

As the project grew beyond small scrums and brainstorms into becoming Rare’s next big project, developers had to think about what would or wouldn’t make the cut at launch, balancing what’s vital with what would be really nice to have, and considering how realistic these different goals might be in each specific instance.

“We knew what Sea of Thieves could be and what the dream of it was,” said Preston. “Then there were the pragmatic realities of what we could do for launch. But you can’t just pick any 20 things from there. It has to be the exact right combination to make people understand what Sea of Thieves is and we agonized a lot over that.”

Chapman recalled defending a particular vision for launch at the time, saying, “We won’t have a community unless we launch a fantastic version of Sea of Thieves at the start.”

Chapman said the team listed a number of “wrappers” such a game might take place in, naming things like dinosaurs, werewolves versus vampires, and secret agents as other options at the time, but added that once pirates made the list, everyone in the then-small team considered it a foregone conclusion.

In March 2018, Sea of Thieves didn’t yet have so many of the things people now love it for. The Megalodon wouldn’t arrive until later that summer, skeleton ships–which the team once said would never exist–arrived a few months later after the team was moved by fan feedback, and today it has received more updates big and small than one could easily count. But back then, players either appreciated it for its true sandbox nature or they were turned away by the game’s deliberately flat progression system, which saw players collecting not incrementally improved swords and guns, but tales to tell back at the tavern and dressings for their buccaneer or ship that would exist as visual guides to the adventures they’ve been on.

“Sea of Thieves, contrary to a lot of games, thrives not on the depth of a small amount of mechanics, it thrives on lots of breadth,” Chapman said. “It thrives on lots of smaller mechanics, but you need a critical mass of them to get them to combine in different ways in the sandbox […] We spent that entire first year heads-down, trying to renew and fulfill that vision of Sea of Thieves being this story generator pirate experience. So [the game’s first] anniversary was quite a cathartic moment,” he said referring to the game’s massive update that introduced, among many other things, the first 10 Tall Tales missions that today make up the game’s lengthy story mode.

The game’s North Star for nearly a decade has been “players creating stories together,” and that was a vision that the team believed in even when no one else in games was really doing it or still has yet to, oddly enough. That core of the game has remained intact even after five years of updates, and for all the talk of Donkey Kong, GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, and other major milestones in the studio’s illustrious history, Duncan said this unique approach has helped Rare achieve heights unlike anything it’s ever done.

“It’s bigger than anything Rare’s ever made by far, by any measure,” he told me. “It’s not recency bias. I love Rare’s legacy. We’re incredibly lucky as a studio that we have fans of multiple eras that grew up with different Rare games that mean something to all of them. But Sea of Thieves is [in] a different stratosphere,” he said, explaining not just the unprecedented reach of the game, but also the way it’s spun into a community that’s helped Rare improve and change the game over time.

“We [told ourselves], ‘We’re going to develop alongside the community, we’re going to bring the community in, we want the community to kind of help shape the game.’ Like that all sounded really exciting, it sounded great, but none of us really knew what that would actually look like because we hadn’t done any of it before,” Preston added. “And I think for me, it’s exceeded even my best ideas of what that could be like.”

That approach has helped reshape the game in ways big, small, and sometimes unquantifiable. Today, Sea of Thieves looks much different than it did in 2018, and long gone are the days when players questioned what there is to do. Based on my experience playing and speaking to other players over the years, it’s more often the case that players funnel into their favorite parts of the game and may not even entertain the idea of entire sections of the massive shared world experience, because now there are so many different kinds of play sessions to have.

Fulfilling the “ultimate pirate fantasy,” as the team likes to call it, looks different for each person. For some, it may be the Pirates of the Caribbean crossover that keeps them at sea. For others, it’s the game’s feisty PvP ship battles, the 30-hour story mode, or unlocking all the game’s commendations and the rewards they accompany. For others still, like it often is for me, it’s the simple pleasure of raising anchor, dropping sails, and finding the next story when it arrives at the bow of one’s ship–never really knowing what it might be until it gets there. Rare set out to give players a vehicle with which they could tell their own stories. It was unconventional at the time and remains so even today, nine years after the initial concept was discussed within the studio and five years since the game launched.

Now, facing this milestone, the team is finally looking back on where it’s come from, even as the journey feels like it has so many more nautical miles to go. “We’ve got to our fifth anniversary, and the game is everything that we hoped and dreamed it would be,” Preston said, “but we’ve still got so many hopes and dreams to come.”

For more on our interview with Rare for Sea of Thieves’ fifth anniversary, read what the devs had to say about some of the community’s most asked-about features.