Sea of Thieves Development Is Easier for Rare
Rare’s way of looking at the Sea of Thieves development cycle is a bit different. For all of the stories you hear about constant all-nighters and the creative war zone that happens in the video game industry, what they describe is the opposite.
“As a creative, as long as you can put bread on the table and go home and afford to feed the family, then you just want as many people playing your games as possible,” said Ted Timmins. “We want to be a successful service, and that is driven by the amount of people playing our game. It’s an interesting kind of project, really, because historically, I’ve worked on singleplayer games where you release them, you do a bit of DLC maybe, but that’s it.”
It’s true that this is a different project for Rare. Much of their legacy on the SNES and Nintendo 64 is singleplayer games, with the exception of Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark. But those were multiplayer games from when the industry was far different than it is now,
And because of the scale of the game, making changes is now more of an automatic, inclusive process.
“That’s the hardest thing [in a traditional game],” said Timmins. “You literally sit in a room and argue for six hours sometimes, and you’ll go home shattered. Whereas for us, it’s like, ‘yeah, we can deliver that. We’ll make that a proper update, and it will be amazing.’ And instead of a six hour conversation, it’s a six minute one, and then you can all get back to working afterwards. So it’s a much more healthy, really lovely atmosphere at Rare at the moment. We’re not crunching- when you’re building a service, you can’t afford to burn the team out, because the team has to last.”
It’s an interesting perspective, and highlights another possible reason that so many developers are going for live, ongoing services as opposed to traditional games.
Sea of Thieves is set to launch later this month on the Xbox One and PC.