Sea of Thieves, the new Xbox One and Windows 10 game coming from Rare this year, seems to be a sort of ‘return to form’ kind of deal for Rare. The game looks to be charming, fun to play, and channeling the same kind of spirit that made Rare so beloved in the first place.
It is also the first time that Rare is making a PC version for one of its games, and it looks like it’s taking the job rather seriously. “We’re building Sea of Thieves on Windows 10 in parallel with the Xbox One version. It’s important that players on all platforms are in sync, which has the added benefit of being able to support great features like Xbox Play Anywhere,” Rare said of the upcoming game’s PC port in a recent newsletter (via WCCFTech). This means the more traditional “port” approach of bringing games to PC simply wouldn’t work for us. Whenever we’re working on a game feature, Lead Designer Mike Chapman and I discuss how the feature will work across both platforms… This means that players who take advantage of playing across Xbox One and PC will have a consistent experience, which is very important to us.
“We also have 24 different devices in our own testing labs, 12 laptops and 12 PCs, which cover a wide range of specs from low-end machines all the way up to the overclocked 4K monsters. They’re all equipped with different keyboards, mice and monitors, with my personal favourite being the beautiful 21:9 curved monitor (144Hz!), so that we have a good spread of inputs… each machine is important in its own way, as we know that the minimum spec is crucial for us being able to invite more people in to share the world with us, the medium spec will reflect the most common setup in the wild… And the 4K setups are just, well, awesome. One thing that unites all of these players is their expectation around stability, so we’ll keep working hard as we’ve set this as our number-one goal.”
So it sounds like Rare is certainly taking the PC version of the game pretty seriously. The last few PC ports of Xbox games by Microsoft have turned out to be pretty good- let’s hope Sea of Thieves is keeping in line with the trend started by Forza Horizon 3 and Gears of War 4, as opposed to being more reminiscent of Quantum Break‘s atrocious PC version.
