Sea Of Thieves Anniversary Update Attracts 2 Million New Pirates

It’s been a little over a month since Rare rolled out the massive Sea of Thieves Anniversary Update featuring the new Shores of Gold questline, the highly-awaited PvP Arena, the Hunter’s Call, fishing, Tall Tales, and a bunch of other new features. Since then, 2 million new players have set sail in the sandbox pirate MMO bringing the total up to 8.4 million players since the game launched last year.

It’s been a hard but fruitful year for the guys at Rare and Executive Producer Joe Neate is proud of what they’ve accomplished. Neate, however, along with Design Director Mike Chapman have decided to throttle down on the big updates and focus on regularity instead. The Executive Producer explains in an interview with GameSpot at E3:

“

We've been going at a pace that isn't sustainable

and the team has done an amazing job, but these are the two pillars of our plans going forward: It's cadence and regularity for the players, but it's also making it so that there's flexibility in the plan as to when some things land.

As long as stuff is always going out to players and we've got the regularity, it doesn't matter as much when the bigger, riskier things land from a development perspective. We give ourselves that time. So that's our commitment to our players and our commitment to our team, because we have to do both.”

Neate also adds that pets were supposed to be part of the Anniversary Update but didn’t make the cut because they didn’t quite meet the studio’s quality standards. Unfortunately, there’s no word on when the pet system will actually come out but hopefully it’s just around the corner.