Rare working on bringing fire to Sea of Thieves
Rare has mastered the art of creating water, and now it looks like Sea of Thieves will receive another element: fire.
Live streams are tough. They’re even tougher when you have things you can’t talk about which you really, really want to talk about. Rare coder James Thomas likely feels this in his very soul after letting slip that the team is working on bringing fire to the watery world of Sea of Thieves.
During Rare’s weekly Sea of Thieves’ stream, where team members get to interact with their community, James Thomas let slip the info. Senior Designer Andrew Preston immediately picked up on the faux pas, looking off-camera to Executive Producer Joe Neate to confirm whether the addition of fire had in fact been confirmed. It hadn’t.
The slip, and ensuing hilarity, can be seen at 1:04:11 in the video below:
While no specifics were revealed, the fact that the team is working on fire is certainly exciting. Rare has mastered all things related to water, so it only makes sense for the team to try their hand at firebending. It’s certainly going to add a new element to the gameplay.
How fire will be woven into the fabric of Sea of Thieves is anyone’s guess. It could be a new type of cursed cannonball, damaging and burning ships on impact. It might be in the form of Molotov cocktails to turn a portion of land dangerous for a moment. Fire may even be used to damage sails to slow down would-be pursuers. Could burning food set the ship on fire?
It’s anyone’s guess how fire will be brought to Sea of Thieves, and considering it hasn’t been officially announced, we may be waiting a long time to see it implemented – or it could be scrapped entirely.
This makes for the second piece of information that James has let slip ahead of schedule. In another stream at the end of January, he revealed that parrots were one of the pets the team was working on.
Six months later, he’s back giving players more insight into other unannounced features being developed. I look forward to James’ next appearance on the weekly stream in February of next year where he inevitably reveals another crucial piece of information.
Rare has managed to be incredibly forthcoming with their community, even allowing people to sign up to the Insider Program to access early builds and features. However, there will always be the need to hold some cards back. Features are thrown around, tested, and scrapped entirely during the game development process. Let the community in on things too early, and it is possible some will presume ideas are features guaranteed to make it into the game. This can lead to a lot of anger, a sense of entitlement, and mistrust when ideas are scrapped.
In saying all this, the team at Rare have an excellent community in Sea of Thieves. The player base has been extremely understanding when it comes to game development, and there’s a real sense of love and admiration for the team at Rare. In fact, the players are actively asking for microtransactions as a means of supporting Rare in more ways.
Players will have their wishes granted when pets, and other forms of cosmetics, are added to the game in the near future. The workings of this are already present with the Pirate Emporium, a currently inactive shop on the main menu of Sea of Thieves.
Beyond the community, even the team at Rare are taking this accidental reveal on the chin. Some of the developers have taken to Twitter to give James a good roasting.
— Joe “Three Sheets” Neate (@JoeNeate1) August 20, 2019
— Drew Stevens (@S0nicbob) August 20, 2019
The reveal of fire being in development for Sea of Thieves is certainly exciting, though the “how, when, and if” of its implementation is another matter altogether. Now if James can just reveal banjos, that would be great.
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Shacknews
replySam Chandler posted a new article, Rare working on bringing fire to Sea of Thieves
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Free Halo-themed ship if you log in soon. FYI GamePass peeps who care about free in-game shit you'll never use! https://www.pcgamer.com/sea-of-thieves-gets-a-free-halo-inspired-spartan-ship-set-but-you-have-to-be-quick/
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We wrote about that!
https://www.shacknews.com/article/113540/get-halo-spartan-ship-set-free-in-sea-of-thieves-this-week
It will go nicely with my sails, hull, and figurehead.
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