Today Rare held their Sea of Thieves 2022 Preview Event. In this mini-showcase – which lasted 20 minutes – the Twycross development studio revealed their 2022 plans for Sea of Thieves. Last year Rare introduced seasons to Sea of Thieves, which meant the game was updated in a 3 months cadence. Some updates were larger than others, such as the A Pirate’s Life update back in June 2021.
Now, Rare is changing their approach to revealing content. The team has revealed their overall plans for 2022, which includes Season Six, Seven, Eight and Nine. Each season will include three new adventures which will make the Sea of Thieves world more dynamic. Every month a new time-limited narrative driven adventure will release with accompanying cinematics. In the video below you can see the cinematic trailer for the first Sea of Thieves Adventure: Shrouded Islands.
Shrouded Islands is set to release on February 17th.
Alongside Adventures, Sea of Thieves will also have mysteries. These mysteries are filled with riddles and clues both inside and outside the game world. In the first Mystery set out in Sea of Thieves players are going to attempt solving a murder of a famous Sea of Thieves character.
Besides this content, the first Season of 2022 – Season Six – will include the addition of Sea Forts. These are like the skeleton forts which have been part of the game for almost four years now, but are smaller in scale and challenge. You’ll be fighting Phantoms who haunt these forts from the Sea of The Damned.
Closing down Arena
Rare has made the decision to close down the Arena mode. Within the next few months the PvP mode will close down, as only 2 percent of all playtime in Sea of Thieves happened in this mode.
”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” – Joe Neate
Not surprised about Arena. Turns out the “PvP-players” were not looking for good fights after all… It’s all about ganking people who are not interested in fighting.
Arena never worked well enough. It was buggy, the load times were enormous and you more often than not had to deal with leavers or AFK crewmembers.
I know every Sea of Thieves threads ends up in a PvE v PvP debate, which is fine. But I disagree that Arena failed because the PvP players preferred playing against easy targets in Adventure.
If it would have been popular they would have fixed it. It is definitely the prospect of ruining someones game that gets most of the “pvp-players” going in my experience. Why else would they be opposed to PvE-servers? They could play on PvP-servers with people also interested in PvP, but nooo that is not good, why?
PvE is a terrible idea, generally posed by people who don’t play the game or people who got sunk once OH NO. Dragging passive people out of Adventure will increase the overall heat of servers and ruin the balance. Why would you create imbalance in the mix of people when it’s a game seeing continued success?
It’s a PvP game, it’s time people got over that after all these years.
Sure, it has nothing to with the PvP-servers suddenly being filled with only people who are actually looking for a fight and we can’t have that! haha so very transparent.
I’m also unsure what people are doing to find so much negative interaction with other players. It’s probably perception more than reality, because in my experience that happens so rarely compared to friendly or completely passive player interactions.
