Sea of Thieves Developers Talk PvP and Battle Royale

With the smashing success of games like Fortnite breaking into the Battle Royale genre, it’s no wonder that many companies are looking to also get a piece of the action. In a recent interview with Game Informer, Sea of Thieves’ design director, Mike Chapman, and Rare’s studio head, Craig Duncan, talked about the addition of new content to the game, as well as the possibility of Battle Royale coming to the game.

After talking on the upcoming content that Rare revealed at E3 this year, the interviewer got straight to the point:

Game Informer: Are you working on a Battle Royale mode?

Duncan: [laughs] You’re the second person to ask that.

Chapman: That’s quite interesting.

Game Informer: I bet I won’t be the last.

Chapman: I think last year we said every sail on the horizon will always be a real player ship. Players started asking for skeleton ships, and we said, “Let’s give it to them.”

Duncan: Players said, “Ship combat is awesome. We’d like to take on a galleon of skeletons,” so we changed that.

Chapman: People also said it would be cool if we expanded the world, so we’ve expanded the world, but we’ve done it, and we made the gameplay fundamentally different in Devil’s Roar for Forsaken Shores. What you’re going to see, as we do the content updates beyond Forsaken Shores – we’re going to do three more this year and beyond with the way we’ve set up our teams to create a steady flow of content. You’ll see a mix of us responding with laser focus to players’ feedback and things that are going to surprise people.

I think there are so many examples of content in the game where we’re like, we always talk about the death mechanics and we turned it into the ghost ship. We put a Sea of Thieves spin on a familiar mechanic with new and interesting takes. We see the battle royale thing, but I think there will be opportunities to do that kind of thing differently. It’s interesting where you can take PvP in the game, but we’d want to put a unique Sea of Thieves spin on it and do something completely surprising.

Duncan: It’s not about taking something that works super well in another game, and going, “Hey, let’s start everyone in a Sea of Thieves map from different points and have you all come together.”

Chapman: Our shared world is unique and the thing we’re most proud of is what you see, is a new I.P. and we wanted to do things differently – it has landed well with players and the feedback we’re getting is, “We love this foundation that you built. I just want to have more of it,” and that’s what we set up the team to do. The fact that we’ve kind of changed the perceptions of multiplayer, and the way we use mechanics in our world? We always want to surprise people. We want to keep doing these kinds of unexpected things that only we can do.

The two also talked about the decision to add NPC ships to the game after many community requests, as well as the feedback that they have taken onboard since the games launch earlier this year. You can read the full interview on Game Informer’s website, here. For more news regarding the Battle Royale genre, check out the upcoming PUBG Global Invitational 2018, here.