Sea Of Thieves Has Big Plans For 2021

While marking the Nov. 18 update for Sea of Thieves, Rare executive producer Joe Neate took to Twitter to reflect on his team's accomplishments in 2020 and promise even bigger additions to the game for 2021. Neate even teased additional Shrouded Ghost content, referring to a rare megalodon whose in-game elusiveness has tantalized Sea of Thieves players for years.

In his tweet, Neate linked to the official November update developer post, where he expanded on his thoughts. Neate highlighted the amount of free content that Rare was able to deliver to gamers, despite the challenges of adjusting to remote work over the course of the year. The team has recently added some significant events and content updates, such as Fate of the Damned and Vault of the Ancients, and while the Nov. 18 update focuses mostly on bug fixes, Neate reiterated that it would pave the way for major additions in 2021. While the developer's post stopped short of providing a proper roadmap of what is in store for Sea of Thieves in the coming year, Neate stated, "Sea of Thieves isn't slowing down any time soon."

The open-world pirate game has faced a long road to get to the place it is now. When Sea of Thieves launched in 2018, the critical reception was less enthusiastic than Rare had hoped. According to one review from Polygon, the major problem was that the game was only "the foundation for an incredible experience," but it didn't live up to that promise. After a thrilling first couple of hours, monotony set in, as there simply wasn't enough content to fill out the world.

However, Rare stuck with the game, adding regular DLC and slowly increasing the Sea of Thieves' popularity through 2019 and into 2020. Major content additions such as the massive Sea of Thieves anniversary updates and smaller world building aspects such as new pets helped the game further populate its world and retain gamers. Rare's efforts worked, and the game reached a significant milestone of 15 million players in June 2020.

While fans may not know precisely what the team has planned for 2021, Rare has already made some necessary steps to prepare for the future. Sea of Thieves received a performance upgrade to prepare the game for the Xbox Series X|S. On the Series X, Sea of Thieves runs at 60 FPS in full 4K resolution. The Series S version of the game also runs at 60 FPS, but the display is capped at 1080p due to the less expensive console's hardware limitations.