Sea of Thieves Preview Teases 2022 Content and Removal of One Mode

The Sea of Thieves creators shared another preview this week of what's to come in the game's future with this latest preview looking ahead to what's planned for 2022. Mike Chapman, the creative director working on Sea of Thieves, and others gave a broad, lengthy overview of new features such as "Adventures," "Mysteries," and other Sea of Thieves additions coming throughout this year. The addition of these features will come alongside the removal of another, however, with the 2022 preview confirming that the game's Arena mode will be retired for good within the next couple of months.

Rare's video below featuring Chapman and more provides a 22-minute look at the 2022 content coming to Sea of Thieves. In that video, we hear of the new Adventures and Mysteries that'll be released within the game's seasonal format. Adventures are meant to be "time-limited experiences like our previous Events," the creators said, with a finale Adventure planned for each season that'll last for a couple of weeks. The first Adventure to release is "Shrouded Islands" which will launch on February 17th. 

Mysteries, by comparison, will task players with picking apart riddles to work towards the solutions "of a larger narrative." These will stick around for longer than Adventures do, but how quickly Mysteries move will be determined by how quick the community is to unravel them.

Among discussions of other 2022 features planned, the Sea of Thieves team confirmed the removal of the Arena mode that was initially added years ago. Rare said that just 2 percent of Sea of Thieves players continually engaged with the mode, and because of that, it's no longer viable to keep support for the Arena running.

"We launched The Arena with high hopes back in 2019 as part of the Anniversary Update, but as just 2% of our player base have regularly engaged with this dedicated competitive mode, it's finally become untenable to keep providing technical updates and QA for both The Arena and Adventure modes," the update said. "To build a future for Sea of Thieves, we have to dedicate our resources to the areas of the game in which most of our players are invested."

The Arena mode will remain playable until March 10th at which point it'll be shut down. Details on how its removal will play out and what'll happen regarding the customizations it offers will be released at a later date.