One evening many months ago, Mike Chapman, the creative director of the co-op pirate adventure game Sea of Thieves, sat down to play the game with producer Joe Neate. This wasn’t just a standard playtest – joining them online would be a crew of players they’d never taken to the ocean with before. It was a team from Sony Interactive Entertainment. The plan to bring the Xbox exclusive to PS5 had just been hatched; now it was time to get into the detail. “We were educating them about the game, talking through what was special about it,” says Neate. “It was so surreal,” chips in Chapman. “Trying to find treasure on an island with a group from a different platform holder …”
The PS5 launch is scheduled for 30 April, and pre-orders are now open, but it’s only the latest stage in the evolution of this fascinating game. Launched on 20 March 2018, it was the most ambitious project in the long history of veteran British studio Rare. Billed as a cooperative pirate adventure, Sea of Thieves gave players access to a vast multiplayer world of oceanic exploration, buried treasure and ship-to-ship battles. The design philosophy behind the game was simple, yet extremely risky: tools not rules. Players would be given everything they needed to set out on their own pirate adventures – even musical instruments and gallons of virtual grog – but there would be no overarching narrative, no skill trees, no complex character progression systems. The stories would come from the players themselves, as they built their crews and fought other buccaneers for fame and fortune.
