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.
I wanted to like the game so badly because it looked like so much fun.
But my brother and I spent 29 minutes getting a treasure just to be steamrolled by a group of three more experienced players that killed us and took our shit.
I get that it’s the point of piracy, but it’s not much fun to spend 20 minutes accomplishing nothing. There’s a reason piracy is illegal in real life.
Maybe this new mode will let me enjoy the world they’ve built a bit more
20 minutes? You are lucky! Me and my friends wasted entire afternoons of gametime because of insanely aggressive and skilled pvp crews. That’s the reason i quit the game, i just cannot handle to waste many hours every time a pvp crew targets me.
The balance is just way off.
If you’re a PvP pirate you’re never really risking anything. You’re probably carrying a few hundred cannonballs (5k gold?), some wood and some food. If you are sunk, you get your ship back fully repaired for free and lose only the cannonballs, wood and food. If you sink someone carrying treasure, you get their entire haul and just have to get to any port to sell it.
If you’re a PvE pirate returning from a quest, you don’t really get your quest rewards until you get back to port with your treasure. If you lose to a PvP pirate all that time questing was for nothing. If you fight a PvP focused pirate and win, all you win is some cannonballs, while you have the potential to lose all your treasure, the result of hours of game time.
Having said that, if you’re a PvP focused pirate, you’re going to be bored a lot. The game world is very empty so you’re going to spend a lot of time sailing around, hoping to find someone to grief. If you fly a reaper flag people can see you on the map and steer clear of you. If you’re a PvE focused pirate, it’s easy to find something to do, so you can have a great time sailing around, having adventures… until you run into a PvP player.
The game should really be changed so that PvP focused players have an easier time finding other players to fight. Meanwhile, people doing PvE content should have something significant to gain if they ever beat a PvP player. If they choose to turn and run, there should be safe harbours where they can unload in peace.
Restricted to High Seas:
- Become Pirate Legend
- Earn rep and gold for Athena’s Fortune and Reaper’s Bones
- Hourglass Faction Battles
- Captain your Own Ship
- Sail as part of a Guild
- Sail as Trading Company Emissary
- Live Events
Safer Seas:
- Progress up to Level 40
- Gold and Rep at reduced rate
- Seasonal Renown at same rate
- All Tall Tales
- Commendations, achievements, cosmetics yadda yadda…
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%.
Also a bit concerned about the “Captain your own ship” bit…
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.
I was absolutely expecting this to be satire.
Honestly the last handful of times I have played the servers have been so dead that it may as well have been solo.
there’s only a certain amount of ships on each instance
Feels like an odd choice for a game that’s balanced for PvPvE imo.
I guess this is them admitting that it wasn’t actually balanced, and that they’re losing players because of the lack of balance.
I hope this doesn’t make it so all the friendly people just play solo and online is nothing but pvpers ☹️
A solo mode in an online-only game? I hope the servers get fucked Payday 3 style (they won’t) so people will stop buying these garbage games.
Finally now all the people that QQ on the forums will be gone. Have your pve mode in a game that was made pvp first.
Welp, that’ll kill the game. Great.
Aww, you won’t be able to bully people who don’t feel like fighting back? You’re gonna be forced to play with other people that actually want to fight? I’m so sowwy 🥺
Lmao get fucked
Actually, the fact that it didn’t have that is the sole reason I never bought it, so it brought it to life for me
And might bring me back
Same here. This news has me fucking excited to play it.
Tried it on gamepass in the past but couldn’t stand the multiplayer component so I stopped playing.
Yeah, got me thinking that the fam and I could do this and have some fun
Me too, 100%. I’m getting this now, and probably a second copy so I can sail with my kid too.
Same here. My wife and I considered it a while back, but we opted against it after seeing how pvp heavy it is.
Honestly, most of the time it’s not PvP heavy, instead it’s dead. I play with some cousins and we’ve had 3 hour sessions where we’ve only occasionally seen other people through the spyglass. When we do encounter other people about half the time they aren’t interested in PvP either.
Having said that, unwelcome PvP at the wrong time can spoil a gaming session. Like, you can be attacked when you’re at the end of a long quest chain and lose hundreds of thousands worth of gold in treasure.
Please the game is already dead. Last time I hopped on (about a year ago?) I got into 3 back-to-back fights with unkillable ships and players due to cheats. Fuck that noise, PvE or nothing.
