Sea of Thieves marks many firsts for Rare- it is the first multiplayer game they have made. It is the first game they have made using an external engine. It is the first game they have made for PC. But in spite of all of these firsts, Rare still wants Sea of Thieves to look great for you- no matter what hardware or system you are playing it on.
“So for us, it’s like, I’m a big fan of Phil [Spencer’s] vision, which is: we want people to play Sea of Thieves regardless of their device,” Rare’s Craig Duncan said to AusGamers recently. “For us, it’s really about making sure it’s amazing on Xbox One S, making sure it’s amazing on Xbox One X, making sure it’s amazing on PC — whether you’re a high-end PC gamer where things like FOV and all those things that matter, right down to, “Hey, I can run Sea of Thieves on my Surface. So I can go into Redmond — and we’ve been play-testing weekly cross-play as well – and so last time I was in Redmond, I was playing on my Surface, with people playing on their Xbox One back in the UK. ”
I am personally glad to hear them adopting that approach to their game- after all, one of the biggest fear that many had when the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X were first announced was that the lower tier hardware would get worse versions of the game.
Extending that same line of thinking to Sea of Thieves, it is good to see that while Rare is committed to maximizing and leveraging the unique benefits of each piece of hardware it puts its game on, it is also committed to ensuring that all systems get an equivalent experience with its game regardless.
Sea of Thieves launches exclusively on the Xbox One, and on Windows 10 PCs, early next year.