Despite having very little and highly repetitive content for a shared world adventure title, Rare’s Sea of Thieves has been a big hit. The developer has been looking to improve the experience for players though and one measure it’s take is to introduce private crews in the near future.
In a recent blog post, executive producer Joe Neate said that the implementation of private crews is due to players misusing the brig “for various reasons”. A ship’s brig in Sea of Thieves can be used to effectively lock up a player in your squad. This can be done to punish griefing and general obnoxious behaviour.
However, according to Neate, “The most common of these we have seen are to hold a slot, either because they want to play as a private crew or because they want to play with people with mics/people speaking the same language.”
To that end, the development team is working on letting players decide if their ship should be “open to others being matchmade with them, or closed so that it’s invite-only.” If you decide to sail a galleon as a smaller crew or populate a sloop with your three man squad, then that choice will be yours.
Of course, Neate also noted that there isn’t much control for players on who they want to play with, like deciding to be matched with players who have mics or speak the same language.
“The key preferences we see are to play with other players using a mic, or to find people speaking the same language. We are working on automatically matchmaking by microphone status. The game already detects if you have a microphone plugged in, and matchmaking will now prioritise matching you via your mic status…We will be adding the option to filter by language for matchmaking so players can find other players who speak the same language to crew up with.”
The blog post also talks about the various changes that have been made to address ship respawns, spawn-killing and whatnot. What are your thoughts on Sea of Thieves thus far? Let us know in the comments.