Sea of Thieves developer Rare has broadcast a frank and revealing hour-long discussion about the future of its long-running pirate live-service game, just a week after the studio was hit by layoffs and the cancellation of its long-gestating next project, Everwild.
There was no mention of the layoffs in today's Sea of Thieves Community Direct broadcast, which instead focused squarely on Rare's plans for Sea of Thieves.
These plans include a revamped approach to new seasons, the launch of subscription-funded custom servers, and detail on how the studio will improve the game's overall health and performance. Overall, the message here was that Rare was committed to Sea of Thieves for the forseeable future — with a mention at one point of the team thinking about the next "five years."
On the topic of the game's overall health and performance, production director Drew Stevens shared a frank appraisal of how Rare had previously struggled to ensure the quality of new features.
"We've felt like we're always on the back foot," Stevens said. "With a lot of areas, we felt we're a little bit slow to react. We don't have the necessary resource or team structure to allow us to jump straight back and to start to address some of those things that we're seeing, whether it's around quality control and shipping features at a place that we're just not quite happy with, to game performance, like slowly being in a place where we're adding new features to the game but performance over time is degrading, through to game security.
"I feel like we were too slow to react as cheating started to build in the PC community, and there's a couple of areas around that — even just long-standing bugs, and our ability to go and address that stuff alongside features," Stevens continued.
"I think if I summarise it, it is that almost… we're on the back foot and I want to get us into a place where we've got teams in place, we've got structures in place, we can just be a bit more reactive and then get into a place where we're proactive," Stevens concluded. "[Where] we're actually shipping features and we're knowing the performance of them so we feel more comfortable as a team when we're shipping updates."
Looking to the future, creative director Mike Chapman said Rare's team would focus on being more consistent with new content, while simultaneously ensuring that existing features were not ignored.
Sea of Thieves' team dedicated to game health was growing, Chapman said, and had now been split to ensure there were dedicated staff working on the quality of new features, while others were focused on improving longer-term issues.
Season 17, the game's next big update, will debut a new three-month model for new content. This will begin with an initial month of additions primarily designed to refresh the game's sandbox, before its second month focuses on expanding the game's live events. The season's final month will then serve as a 'call to action' to bring players back for a big world event.
The next season, which has a smuggling focus, will see the arrival of new hideouts, Smugglers' Runs shipping routes, plus fresh smuggler cargo in shipwrecks and skeleton ships. The Reaper's Rowboat also returns – and all of this will come in the season's first month, as part of that desire by Rare to reinvigorate the game's sandbox.
Month two's live event focus will offer up a heist experience at Royal Crest Fortress, before the season concludes with fresh happenings at Skeleton Forts, now with a Reaper focus thanks to the return of Captain Flameheart, and the need to both attack and defend the locations.
This three-month season model will persist, Rare said, and would help ensure seasons stay fresh throughout rather than simply offering one big drop of content at the beginning.
Looking ahead, Rare teased that Season 18 will update the Devil's Roar area and pick up the story of the mysterious Dark Ancients. Fans will encounter the faction as threats and uncover hidden shrines.
The last big announcement today was saved for Custom Seas, Sea of Thieves' plans for custom servers with "switches and toggles" so players can fully curate their experience. Footage of this showed a user spawning ships, overruling crew limits, setting weather conditions and even toggling the kraken.
Another addition here will be the ability to operate a cinematic camera, which will be handy for budding pirate film-makers. Custom Seas will debut in "early 2026," Rare said, and would require a subscription so that work on the feature can be funded and continue long-term.
Other details mentioned today include a decision to lift the NDA attached to Sea of Thieves' early access Insider Program, meaning members will soon be able to openly discuss and even stream work-in-progress features.
There was mention, too, of a mysterious Sea of Thieves sub-team of developers working on long-term oppurtunities for the game, described as a "multi-year vision" to grow the overall scope of the title outside of seasonal updates. More detail on that will come in the next Community Direct, Rare said, which will arrive on a roughly six-monthly schedule. Mark your calendars for early 2026 for more.
Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
