Interview: Sea of Thieves and 'Storytelling Through Service'

gamerant.com:

Sea of Thieves season 6 launches in March, and it'll be bringing with it new features that'll help make 2022 the biggest year yet for the live-service action-adventure game. Rare pulled back the curtain on many of these features in the recent Sea of Thieves 2022 Preview Event, which Game Rant was also able to discuss with creative director Mike Chapman and executive producer Joe Neate.

In this interview, we discussed everything from seasons to Adventures and Mysteries to A Pirate's Life and more. What stood out the most, perhaps, is how Chapman discussed Sea of Thieves' new approach to «storytelling through service» by taking the elements of a live-service game, using them to bring the world to life, and make sure that Sea of Thieves is a continual story, not a start-and-stop ride. The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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GR: Maintaining the seasonal content that we have now and adding all of this new content seems pretty ambitious. So what was the rationale behind taking this and extending it so much?

JN: Well, if we want to make this year our biggest year, then we've obviously got to go all-in, haven't we? Every year so far, Sea of Thieves has been bigger, and when we say bigger, we think in terms of overall player numbers that play each year. So, not like the total kind of 25 million or so we've had play in total over our lifetime. This is the kind of people that play each year, that turn up each year. We've been bigger every single year.

2021 was our biggest year yet. We were 25% bigger in the previous year, and we want to continue that growth. We're always looking at how are the things we've