Hello, pirates. As some of you may have seen, we released a video today detailing some of the changes we’ve had to make to our upcoming release roadmap. Unfortunately, this includes the difficult decision to push back the launch of Season Ten to Thursday, 19th October 2023.
It’s not a decision we’ve taken lightly, and we share your disappointment that it’s something we’ve needed to do. However, after careful consideration, we firmly believe that it’s the best thing to do for the quality of the release, the sustainability of our development process and the wellbeing of our team.
Those of you who caught the recent episode of our podcast will have heard us discussing the challenges of implementing new systems into a game like Sea of Thieves. These types of foundational releases are challenging to make, as we have to ensure they interact with all the existing systems in the game.
One such challenge has been the Season Ten headline feature, which we’ve already talked about as something that we’ve found tougher than anticipated to pull together – especially to the quality bar we’re striving to meet.
The Impact on Season Nine
We recognise that it’s not just the delay of new content that’s frustrating, but the impact on Season Nine’s length too. It was never our intention to have it last this long, and we understand that many of our players will have already hit Renown level 100 and feel like they’ve explored everything there is to see and do with the features introduced in Season Nine.
We know you’ve come to expect a consistent rhythm of how and when we deliver new gameplay experiences, and Season Ten’s delay means that we’ll be asking you to wait a little while longer to get your hands on a big, brand new feature. However, there’s still a whole lot happening outside the Seasonal rhythm – so we’re hopeful that even without a new Season next month, you’ll still have lots to do.
The Next Few Months
For those of you who missed the news, a trio of Tall Tales for Sea of Thieves: The Legend of Monkey Island will be released over the course of July, August and September – with the first of these new Tales, ‘The Journey to Mêlée Island’, available to dive into right now.
August and September also have a solid line-up of shenanigans, with a Gold & Glory Weekend kicking things off from August 4th-7th. Legends Week will then be returning after its inaugural event last year, with new things to do and earn for both Legends and Legends-to-be. A special Community Weekend with an exciting new flavour is scheduled for September too. We’ll be sharing more about these events in the coming weeks, so please stay tuned for details on what they all entail.
Season Ten and Beyond
Even though moving Season Ten back wasn’t something we were eager to do, the shuffle has opened up an opportunity: it’s meant that we’ve been able to take what was originally targeted as the next Season’s headline content and make it part of Season Ten. The current plan is for this to launch in the second month of Season Ten, which would mean players getting two headliner features in as many months.
So we’re hopeful that while things may feel a little slow at the moment, we’ll be barrelling into the last few months of the year with lots of momentum, giving players the sense of a world re-energised by a packed Season Ten schedule including multiple feature releases, events and experiences.
Your Community Feedback
It’s important for us to stress that we listen to everything you say, and we really do value your feedback. We’re always listening to what our players want, and even if we can’t act on things immediately – game development does take time – there are some really exciting elements to our upcoming roadmap that hit on things that you’ve all been asking for, in some cases for a long while.
When it comes to feedback on hot topics like cheating, hit registration and combat, we also want to reassure you that we’re working hard behind the scenes in those areas. When we have more info to share on these, we will – but we currently have teams dedicated to revisiting and improving these core experiences for our players. Insiders will have recently seen and experienced some of the planned changes, and we continue to take on board their valuable feedback to make these updates the best they can be.
Even when we can sense the frustration from various pockets of players, we know that Sea of Thieves’ community remains the best in gaming. Your enthusiasm, passion and commitment to our game makes us strive for the best – not just in delivering things you’re asking for, but by pushing us to think about ways we can continuously surprise and excite you.
Thank You
Looking back at the highlights of 2023 so far, we’ve loved celebrating our fifth anniversary with you all, setting live more new Adventures, sending you off on The Hoarder’s Hunt and most recently releasing the first Legend of Monkey Island Tall Tale. Moving back the release of Season Ten is not exactly how we wanted to proceed with the year, but it does give us an opportunity to reinforce the Season with more content than originally planned – and we can’t wait to share more with you on what’s in store when the time’s right.
We look forward to carrying plenty of momentum into 2024 with plans that are ambitious and bold, including some important designs on refreshing the Sea of Thieves sandbox. Thank you for sticking with us – we appreciate you endlessly, and we’re committed to rewarding your patience with a bolstered, blockbuster final few months of 2023.