Sea of Thieves kicked off its ninth season in March, which means the time for Season 10’s launch – at least according to the game’s regular schedule of seasonal updates – is approaching. As it turns out, however, developer Rare has announced that the wait for the next season of its online pirate game is going to be a bit longer than expected.
Rare has announced that Sea of Thieves Season 10 has been pushed back to October 19 from its previously-planned August launch. Rare says that “the challenges of implementing new systems” in the game with Season 10, additional months of development became necessary. “These types of foundational releases are challenging to make, as we have to ensure they interact with all the existing systems in the game,” wrote head of community Christina McGrath, who also mentioned that Season 10’s headlining feature is one such example.
The develoer has also acknowledged that this means Season 9 will go on much longer than it was intended to, and a lot of players may already have gotten everything out of it that they possibly could have.
“We recognise that it’s not just the delay of new content that’s frustrating, but the impact on Season Nine’s length too,” McGrath wrote. “It was never our intention to have it last this long, and we understand that many of our players will have already hit Renown level 100 and feel like they’ve explored everything there is to see and do with the features introduced in Season Nine. We know you’ve come to expect a consistent rhythm of how and when we deliver new gameplay experiences, and Season Ten’s delay means that we’ll be asking you to wait a little while longer to get your hands on a big, brand new feature.”
That said, there’s still things for Sea of Thieves players to look forward to in the coming months. Last week, Rare released the first in a series of three free episodes based on Monkey Island, with the remaining two set to release in August and September. Additionally, McGrath has also confirmed that thanks to the additional development time Rare now has for Season 10, a month after its launch, the developer will also be releasing what was previously meant to be Season 11’s headlining new feature.
“Even though moving Season Ten back wasn’t something we were eager to do, the shuffle has opened up an opportunity: it’s meant that we’ve been able to take what was originally targeted as the next Season’s headline content and make it part of Season Ten,” she wrote. “The current plan is for this to launch in the second month of Season Ten, which would mean players getting two headliner features in as many months.
So we’re hopeful that while things may feel a little slow at the moment, we’ll be barrelling into the last few months of the year with lots of momentum, giving players the sense of a world re-energised by a packed Season Ten schedule including multiple feature releases, events and experiences.”
Sea of Thieves is available on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC.