The always charming Rare hosted the Community Spirit panel during the E3 Coliseum briefing today. The members of Rare that were present were grand host Adam Park who went on to introduce Executive Producer Joe Neate, Live Campaign Producer, Christina Parker and Design Director Mike Chapman. If you don’t have time to watch the whole panel yourself, we have compiled a nice list of highlights from the panel below. Enjoy!
- Adam eats a banana stem first, peel and all, for the cause of the Great Banana Meme of E3 2017
- Fun facts given about Joe, Christina and Mike includes sharks, tongues and non-relations to John Oliver
- This is the pirate game you have always wanted, captures the spirit of Treasure Island, The Goonies, Pirates of the Caribbean, Black Sails and Monkey Island
- Three key features that sets Sea of Thieves apart from other games are living the pirate life, sharing it with friends, and the before mentioned happening in a shared world
- Very important to get player’s hands on the game as early as possible
- Importance of community engagement and involvement with weekly email updates, hot topic discussions on the forum, videos of upcoming game features, surveys and more
- Before E3, there were about 175,000 Insiders in the Sea of Thieves Insider Programme
- Today there are now roughly 210,000 Insiders
- Currently 75,000 of those Insiders have been invited to play in the Technical Alpha
- Joe Neate confirms that every Insider will be able to play Sea of Thieves before the game is released
- Joe also confirms that there will exclusive in game rewards for Insiders that will carry over to the final game
- Currently crews are seeing other ships about every 15-25 minutes based on a specific draw distance set
- This draw distance and ship encounter time will be altered as more tools are added to the sandbox
- Very accepting, helpful and positive forum which has censored Joe Neate on two separate occasions
- Rare implementing the idea of immortalizing players in the game world of Sea of Thieves with creation of easter eggs and lore around a player’s legendary story
- These memorials of player stories are constantly evolving the game world
- Some examples include:
- Technical Alpha player hallower1980 who was the first player in the Technical Alpha to die has been memorialized forever on The Ferry of the Damned with his name carved into the wood near the door out of the ferry
- Technical Alpha player Fizzy Foxy got 37 kills in one session early in the Technical Alpha. She is memorialized in a tavern with a Most Wanted poster
- Technical Alpha player TheAaronLeigh created a Sea of Thieves coin from scratch and gifted it to Rare. The coin he made with his gamertag are now found on a barrel in the game
- Technical Alpha player guts killed the most skeletons in one session. There is now a pile of skeleton skulls on an island with his name on them
- Players will be able to progress in the game in many different ways. The game is all about your own personal play style and you will be rewarded for any you choose
- Those shiny gold t-shirts the Rare team is wearing this E3 are indeed hard to wash and iron
- Mike confirmed solo sailing will indeed be possible with a smaller ship created for small crews
- Though you can be in a crew by yourself you will still be in the shared world
- On the topic of notoriety, other players will know how famous you are in the game with “titles”. Players will be able to unlock titles that will precede your name. These titles can be applied however you like so if you are indeed very skillful, you could hide this by using a lesser skilled title.
- You can also express your notoriety or lack of by the way you dress
- Joe Neate confirmed at the moment there is a road map of the game to the end of 2019 with the games release date being early 2018
- Christina talks about how planned campaigns and events in Sea of Thieves will challenge the players to interact with the game world and players in ways in which they might not have before
If you do have time to watch the 41 minute panel, we definitely recommend you give it a watch. It is much more fun and interesting getting the information from this very passionate team themselves!