Rare’s Sea of Thieves is one of the bigger titles to release this year and is perhaps the Xbox One exclusive that will break the dry spell that’s been experienced in the past several months. Time will tell because despite some relatively good reactions to the closed beta, players have expressed their concerns. That’s not taking into account the issues that were present when it came to accessing the beta.
However, one positive direction that Rare seems to be taking is omitting loot boxes altogether. Design director Mike Chapman told PC Gamer that, “What I will confirm is there are no microtransactions for launch. At all. Based on us continuing to build this game, we’ll probably consider some form of microtransaction. What we will say is there will never be loot crates in Sea of Thieves.”
While the game is aiming to have a “new take” on cosmetic microtransactions which suit the overall tone of the game without splitting the player base, the team is pretty adamant about keeping loot boxes out. “There’ll never be a form of gambling in Sea of Thieves, of any description,” said Chapman. He also added that pay-to-win mechanics were “completely out of the question.” So you shouldn’t expect anything that will give you any kind of advantage against other players being acquired with real money.
When it comes to microtransactions, Chapman says it’s about finding things that “bring value” to players. “We’ll try and do new and interesting things with it. So it won’t just be like, ‘oh, they’ve slapped microtransactions in the game, how interesting’. No, what’s a Sea of Thieves way of doing it? What’s going to bring value to our players? I think that’s the way we’ll do it.”
Sea of Thieves is out on March 20th for Xbox One and Windows 10 PC. Are you looking forward to it? Let us know below.
