Sea of Thieves wants you to get all emotional with new Adventures and Mysteries

Sea of Thieves will get two major new features in 2022 that will change how we play the game: Adventures and Mysteries.

Rare shared a lot of information about Sea of Thieves’ plans in 2022, as well as a preview of season 6 in a video preview (opens in new tab).

Adventures are live, cinematic events that tell stories and usually last around two weeks. Each adventure is a chapter of a larger story. Each season hosts a “Special Adventure” that brings the threads together before moving on to the next season. Director Mike Chapman states that how the community reacts will affect the outcome of the Adventures and ultimately the game’s future.

These story events were created to increase the emotional connection between players, NPCs and NPCs as they sail around the globe. Chris Davies, senior designer, stated that the goal was to “appeal to players’ hearts”, get them to feel connected to these places and get them to care more about these characters.

Executive producer Joe Neate says that Mysteries are stories that players will need to find together. There are clues both inside and outside of the game. Mysteries will be unfolded over longer periods than Adventures, depending on how well players solve them. It sounds like Mysteries will take longer to unravel if we act like drunken pirates. But if we are smart, they may unfold a bit faster.

Davies claims that Rare was inspired by ghost stories and murder mysteries as well as whodunnits in movies, TV and books when it was creating Sea of Thieves’ Mysteries. The first mystery will see players solving the murder of a Sea of Thieves celebrity.

Together, Adventures and Mysteries will form the story of Sea of Thieves’ seasons. This will fundamentally change the way that new content is created and released. Shrouded Islands is the first Adventure and will go live on February 17.

Sea of Thieves Season 6 was also available to us as a preview. Its headline feature, Sea Forts, is also available. You’ll be able plunder and pillage six Sea Forts throughout the oceans when the feature goes live. But you should come prepared as each one is guarded and crawling with ghosts. These aren’t random dungeons, they’re tied into the first set Adventures and the larger narrative at large. They’ll be worth it for more than the loot.

Rare today announced that it is ending the Arena mode. It claims it is more trouble than it is worth. Rare used Arena’s voice chat to communicate with enemy crews last year, possibly in context of toxicity.

“With Sea of Thieves expanding in scope, the enormous task of maintaining QA/bug fixes for both Adventure mode and Arena mode has become something that we cannot anymore justify,” says a written update (opens in new tab) which was included today’s preview event. “We are proud of the achievements of Arena, but it was not as successful as we had hoped. A bespoke competitive mode with few players is difficult to align with our future vision of Sea of Thieves.