Explore a vast open world in the ultimate pirate adventure game. Sea of Thieves is an online, multiplayer pirate sandbox game where players form crews and sail ships together on the mystical waters of the Sea of Thieves. Players will find skeleton fortresses to conquer, shipwrecks to plunder and ancient ruins to explore, and must battle against skeleton fleets, sea monsters, and, scariest of all, other pirates!
Working under direction from Rare, from 2024 I worked as part of a codevelopment team creating seasonal content and events for the game. Seasonal content would consist of a number of features or content usually organised around a unifying theme. I worked on a number of Seasons, including:
Season 14 - Pirates of Mischief
Season 14's theme was "Pirates of Mischief", and it's content was focused on empowering players to be sneaky!
In order to create this result, we focused our efforts on providing some new sneaky features to the game.
Crouching - including multiple stealth features
The Blowpipe - a new, stealthy weapon with lots of useful dart types to load and fire
The Grapple Gun - Climb, board and grab loot like never before.
Sneaky Disguises - Jump in a treasure chest or barrel and sneak around!
Traps - discourage those pesky boarders with these loadable bear traps.
Merfruit - Prepare and consume this magical fruit to help you hide from other crews
Up until this season, players couldn't crouch! Besides adding the ability for players to bend their knees, there was a lot more to this simple sounding addition.
Sea of Thieves' enemy AI has always had a rudimentary sense of perception, which made a great foundation for building a serious stealth and detection system. Enemies in Sea of thieves typically come in 3 main types:
- Crew - These are common, easy to defeat enemies
- Captains - Tougher, smarter and with more abilities than crew
- Lords - These are boss battle type characters, with unique abilities and large health pools
Using one of the Skeleton Forts (a common combat area) as a test level, I began exploring different perceptions setups for the different character archetypes. We wanted to ensure that players could sneak up on and take advantage of Crew level enemies, but Captains and Lords would provide greater challenge.
To create this dynamic we set up an advanced perception system for detecting crouching players, where we could specify:
- Visual Range - The distance at which an enemy can spot a hostile.
- Angle of Field of Vision - The angle away from straight ahead that the AI can spot a hostile.
- Time to detect - The amount of time a player can be crouched inside an AIs field of view before being detected.
- Audio detection - The range at which the AI can detect a sound made by a player.
This gave us a really dynamic set of rules where players could meaningfully use their stealth skills to gain combat advantages on enemies, with meaningful difficulty steps when facing harder enemy types.
One of the main giveaways that another player is close to you is that their nameplate, featuring their username and any equipped titles, will appear above their head with white writing. Along with the reduced visual profile that comes with a crouching posture, players name plates are hidden when crouching, granting them effective protection from being spotted in a lot of situations!
Working as a Senior Designer, I worked on Season 14: Pirates of Mischief, adding a stealth mechanic to the game, as well as several darts for the new blowpipe. I also worked to prepare existing areas of the game for the new grapple gun, ensuring players couldn't break existing content with this powerful new traversal tool.
The season was very well received by players, who enjoyed new ways to engage with the games AI enemies as well as each other.
Season 18
As a Lead Designer I lead a team of designers creating Season 18: Return to the Devil's Roar. In this season players were directed to the volcano ridden eastern most area of the Sea of Thieves, and given the opportunity to battle with the ancient Eternal Guard, explore underground chambers full of treasure, compete against an entire server of players for a huge loot pile at Molten Sands Fortress and besiege the impressive Ashen Garrisons, huge fortified structures as filled with Sea of Thieves lore as they are with cursed treasure. I'm extremely proud of my first season as a lead designer, and players have described the Eternal Guard's combat as the best boss fight in the game!
