There’s never been a better time to set sail in Sea of Thieves

polygon.com:

After Skull and Bones failed to scratch my pirate itch, I recently returned to an old, familiar friend. Sea of Thieves is sailing into a new year, with a new slate of content planned. Rare has experimented with how to update and enhance the pirate sandbox game since its launch in 2018. The game has also left the Microsoft ecosystem and will be available to PlayStation players in April — which, of course, means there are a lot of new pirates on the high seas for the first time. That’s why now might be the best time to get into Sea of Thieves, even if you’ve never played it before.

Over the last five years, Rare has dabbled with various kinds of updates, including narrative content, time-limited campaigns, and Fortnite-like crossovers with other pirate franchises, like Pirates of the Caribbean and The Curse of Monkey Island. But over 2024, after reducing the barrier to entry for new players, Rare wants to focus on emergent and organic encounters.

“There are a lot of people out there that, I think, are intrigued by Sea of Thieves,” says Mike Chapman, creative director on Sea of Thieves, in a call to Polygon. “They hear the stories of the gameplay from that shared world and unique occurrences, but the one thing holding them back is they don’t have a crew to sail with.”

“The more players you’ve got from different places, the more variety of stories and encounters you’re going to have,” says Joe Neate, executive producer on Sea of Thieves, adds.

Expanding the reach of the game is a good cure for the new player problem — and the recent addition of the Safer Seas mode means that the harsh learning curve is sanded down. It removes the threat of other pirates, allowing someone to pick up the ins and outs of the game without being barraged by a sudden hail of cannonballs.

There’s a delicate balancing act between making Sea of Thieves entirely safe so that players can enjoy the narrative content added to the game, while also retaining the DayZ-like feeling of seeing another