'Sea of Thieves' Developer Addresses Cross-Play Concerns

Sea of Thieves players have had some concerns about cross-play changes coming to Rare's game in an upcoming update, so the developer addressed those concerns by reassuring fans that cross-play wasn't being removed.

In the developer update above, Sea of Thieves executive producer Joe Neate spoke about the cross-play changes coming to the game which include the option to make cross-play optional. The change has to do with "The Arena" a PvP-focused feature coming to Sea of Thieves and will allow console players to level the playing field against those on the PC if they want to prefer they play against people using the same input devices.

Following that video update, some players grew worried that this meant the end of Sea of Thieves cross-play that's shared between the Xbox One and Windows PC platforms, but Rare's studio head Craig Duncan said that's not the case. Duncan took to Twitter and said the team will always have goals to do what's best for the players and the community and addressed concerns about how optional cross-play might affect servers. Rare plans on sharing stats at a later date to prove that players need not worry about the populations of the servers and Duncan added that the cross-play option won't be included in February's update.

2/ The crossplay option is not coming in the February update, see Joe’s last dev update for more info, the team is working now on implementation of the option settings & our goal is to have this in & tested prior to The Arena

— Craig Duncan (@Gamerboss) February 3, 2019

4/ Our player population is super healthy on both PC and Xbox & has been since launch. While we don’t tweet usage data reactively, we will figure out how we share more stats on this soon to give context why players don’t need to worry about our live player or platform populations

— Craig Duncan (@Gamerboss) February 3, 2019

Rare and Microsoft originally announced The Arena late in 2018 when it unveiled the competitive game mode that pits crews of pirates against one another. It'll mark a shift from PvE gameplay where players fought off hordes of the undead and mythical creatures that dwell in the ocean, though that core gameplay will of course still be in Sea of Thieves for those who abstain from PvP modes.