Sea of Thieves is set to add one of its most significant updates yet: solo play.
Ever since Rare’s multiplayer-focused pirate adventure game launched in 2018, the developers have faced questions about the addition of solo play. Now, it’s finally coming as part of Season 10 in December. Finally, you won’t have to worry about rival pirates stealing your hard-earned treasure!
In a post on Xbox Wire, creative director Mike Chapman explained the decision. “Just as we hope that the Skull of Siren Song will encourage competitive play, we recognize that for some players, a quieter, more independent experience can be preferable,” Chapman said.
“That’s why, in December, Season 10’s third major feature will introduce an entirely new game mode that grants players the ability to sail the Sea of Thieves alone or with a crew of friends, within their own private game session.”
Solo play comes as part of the Safer Seas feature. It’s intended to offer a “gentler” introduction to Sea of Thieves for new players, as well as a quieter map for existing players who want to play their own solo adventures.
Restricted to High Seas:
Safer Seas:
Can anyone give a rough estimate of how much game content is in Safer Seas? Either a percentage of the full game, or number of hours? Also a bit concerned about the “Captain your own ship” bit…
Lame. They couldn’t just go for optional PvE servers, they have to lock most of the content in PvP servers. Guess I’m still not playing it
Yeah they’re going to do the absolute bare minimum they can to bring in pve players without actually giving them what they want as if this game isn’t dead af
The sad thing for us is that we always wanted to have a private server, not a solo mode. I want to mess around with my friends with multiple boats. I don’t care about playing in a galleon, let me play 4 solo sloops with my friends!
I have about 600 hours in SOT so I can answer this.
So honestly that’s a TON of progression without risk, but it’ll be slow going. Emissaries allow you to increase your rewards for a particular faction (reapers, hoarders, merchants, order of souls) so you can’t get those bonuses.
You need to be a pirate legend to captian a ship, and you need three of the primary factions at level 50 to become a pirate legend. Literally no difference beyond achievements and cosmetics. Captaincy just let’s you “own” the ship that spawns in, and essentially designates a player as “leader” whereas in normal play its ad hoc on who does what. And a captained ship just has a name and extra cosmetics anyway.
Can’t earn rep for reapers which kinda sucks, but makes sense. It’s the pvp faction. But many players do pve reapers as well.
I’d say safer seas covers about 75%.
My guess is they mean that if you’re doing the Safer Seas stuff, you get a standard ship and you can customize how it looks (sails, cannons, etc.) from the NPCs in the harbour but you don’t get to name the ship, and any customizations you do aren’t saved for the next time.
If you do the High Seas, you can buy a ship, name it, and unlock lots of customizations (more than standard ones) which are saved with the ship, so they’re there next time you log in and select that ship.
I don’t know about the other current major advantage of a captained ship, which is currently being able to unload all your treasure and sell it extremely quickly. Without that you need to dock, then manually run all the skulls to the skull guys, all the trade goods to the trade guys, all the treasure to the treasure guys, etc.
Kinda surprised safe mode has commendations… Sounds like getting the gold curse just got a lot easier.
The challenge was never in the pvp. It was stomaching each of the tall tales that many fucking times.