An ex-RARE developer has shared some starling Sea of Thieves behind the scene details. The ex-developer wrote on Reddit that RARE was aware during playtesting that Sea of Thieves is boring and swallow.
A Reddit user who goes by the name “Beddall” claims he has worked on Sea of Thieves for a couple years, and that for all this time Rare knew – because developers themselves told the execs back in the days – that the game was going to feel a bit empty in terms of content.
Interestingly, Beddall says the devs had playtested each week for around 45 minutes/1 hours and that, after a few times spent with the game, many of them found excuses not to go and play the game because it quickly got boring.
On top of that, Beddall also claims that Sea of Thieves released a bit incomplete or with a highly reduced scope, with things like the anchor that had been worked on and planned to be customizable as any other part of the ship, but later was removed altogether from the title.
“I worked on this game for over 2 years. A lot of internal people voiced their concerns that the game was insanely repetitive and shallow. This was about a year ago before I left. I guess nothing has changed. I’ve been waiting a year for this day and the shit storm that would hit once everyone realised they had been sold half a game,” he said on Reddit.
“After each organised playtest session we were encouraged to give feedback on the experience. we would play for around 45 minutes to an hour each time. perhaps once a week. after the first few sessions, people in our barn ( Rare is split into 4 wings of offices they call Barns) were finding any excuse not to play… because we weren’t bug hunting and such, but expected to play the game as an average player would it just got very boring very quickly. admittedly, the first few sessions were hilarious… but the experience wore thin very quickly. I always thought that the initial Unity prototype that was developed alongside the unreal version at the beginning was more fun.”
An interesting thing to notice is that, according to Beddall, even after so many years spent in the development process, lots of devs had a tough time when trying to descript what the game was and what they were doing.
Something many feel the same way about even now that the game has shipped on Xbox One and Windows 10. Of course, we can’t confirm this Beddall really is a Rare developer, but what he says definitely looks realistic after all.
