During this year’s E3 event, Rare offered a glimpse at its upcoming plans for Sea of Thieves, plans which include two more expansions slated for this year and even more expansions beyond that. Sea of Thieves is the sort of game that thrives on its ability to introduce new content at a steady cadence, and Rare has now said that it ideally wants that cadence to be within the six to eight week range.
Speaking with Kotaku, Sea of Thieves executive producer Joe Neate talked about how the game’s design team (which currently consists of about 150 people) sees a six to eight week development schedule as the ideal timeframe for bringing new content into the game, though he also admitted that sometimes unforeseen challenges come up, adding a few extra weeks onto the final goal in the process.
By Neate’s estimation, Sea of Thieves’ previous expansion, The Hunger Deep, edged closer to the eight-week mark (it’s tricky developing giant shark fights after all). The two upcoming expansions that were teased during E3, Cursed Sails and Forgotten Shores, will be taking a bit longer than eight weeks, but Neate promises that the amount of content they each bring will reflect that added development time.
Neate also hinted that each expansion will have its own tentpole feature, something major that ties everything in the expansion together. For The Hungering Deep, it was the epic battle against The Hungering One (the aforementioned giant shark), for Cursed Sails it will be a new series of skeleton ships, for Forsaken Shores it will be the titular new region that players will get to explore. While Rare ideally wants to maintain the six to eight week schedule, it also wants each expansion to feel meaningful since it knows that major new content updates are what make persistent online games like Sea of Thieves feel so memorable.
Neither the Cursed Sails nor Forsaken Shores expansions have set release dates yet, but the recent E3 tease confirmed that Cursed Sails should be arriving sometime next month, with Forsaken Shores following closely behind in September.