It’s been a good five years for the swash-buckling pirate adventures inside Sea of Thieves, with the game evolving in grand ways since it was first released. Now, as the developers at Rare look at the past five years, they’ve confirmed that this live-service game is intended to go on for another five years at least.
In a recent blog post celebrating the fifth-year anniversary, writer Joe Skrebels sat down with members of the team to discuss the impact of the game and the future moving forward. In one of the final parts of the interview, creative director Mike Chapman confirmed an additional five years of content: “I think 10 years of Sea of Thieves will feel like a long time – but also, we’ll blink and be there.”
Apart from this news, the blog also contains information about the origins of SoT, including how the idea all originated from the party game Werewolf, which is basically the IRL version of Among Us. Due to this, the original idea for this new title from Rare was going to be a spy game, with the main focus of the developer being to create a sense of freedom.
What Rare liked about pirates and pushed them in that direction is that pirates have pre-determined roles and tropes. It already makes sense for a group of pirates to travel together openly in the world, completing objectives and feeling free to explore as they want. Two developers named Andy and Shelley Preston created a prototype at a Game Jam they worked on for a month before pitching it to Rare’s higher-ups.
The married couple was then hired by Rare to work on the game and the rest is history. They followed the idea of allowing players to create their own stories inside this new open pirate world. From there, they created the game fans will play for at least a decade.
