ABOVE This angry
pirate
mistakenly
thought we were
checking out
his booty.
FAR RIGHT The
new Tall Tales
mode presents
players with a
narrative path
to follow.us. We fire back, but it all gets a bit heated
so we retreat and sail away to a different
island. Taking a look at the ship’s map, which
displays the location of each rival crew, we
see that we’re not being followed. We arrive
near the island and two of us swim ashore.
The other two crew members manoeuvre the
ship to circle the island, but a storm begins
to brew. We find all of the treasure chests on
the island, but our ship is lost in the storm.
We’re second from last on the leaderboard,
but if we can hand in at least two of these
chests it will bump up our position to at
least third place. We can just about see our
ship through the tempest, so we each grab
a chest and swim for it. We’re running out of
time but miraculously we make it and head
for the cash-in point. By the time we reach it
there’s only one minute left, so grabbing the
two chests, we jump ship to hand them in. We
manage to hand in one of them but the team
that was in last place has managed to jack up
its score, overtaking us. The game ends, and
we tumble hopelessly into last place.
The Arena may focus on PVP, but it’s
still very much part of the Sea Of Thieves
experience. Even though we came last it was
an exhilarating session in which we created
our own story and adventure.Sea shanties
The Tall Tales mode changes things up once
again by giving players a crafted narrative
that they can enjoy with their friends as
part of the shared world. You’ll still come
across everything you would in Adventure
mode, but now there’s more opportunity for
escapades. At the start of our mission to
locate the Shores Of Gold, we followed the
directions found within the Pirate Lord’s
journal and ended up not only fighting with
the Kraken, but we also brushed up against
the Megalodon (which thankfully only seemed
interested in checking us out) and went up
against a Skeleton ship that sunk us. All of
which was on the same journey. We had a
blast solving the puzzles and figuring out how
to reach the different locations, and at everysuch as making solid hits with cannons,
sinking ships, finding treasure and handing in
your booty at cash-in points that are denoted
by ships billowing plumes of red smoke into
the sky. It’s a self-contained mode that
allows people to play in a way that hasn’t
been possible before.
“For me, whenever I play Sea Of Thieves
Adventure, or I watch people play, I just get
lost for hours,” explains Rare studio head
Craig Duncan. “We see our average session
lengths and it’s north of 90 minutes, and we
didn’t really have Sea Of Thieves on demand
in a bite-sized way before. I mean, if you’re
going to play Sea Of Thieves over a weekend,
you’re committing to a multi-hour session.
What I love about Arena is that [it’s] 24
minutes of, ‘I can play a Sea Of Thieves Arena
session, and I can do it in a bite-sized way,
and it has an end and I know what the goals
are.’ That’s something that we haven’t served
up until now that I think is really important.”No quarter
Our first Arena session starts as normal. Each
crew receives a random selection of maps
showing locations of buried treasure (duringone session we were given only one) and
we immediately set sail towards an island
we recognise. But we’re not the only ones,
two other ships are heading in the same
direction and they’re almost already at the
island. We hold back and, predictably, the
two ships begin to fight each other, so we
take the opportunity to slip onto the island
unnoticed. But as we do a third enemy ship
arrives and fires a barrage of cannonballs at“Whenever I play Sea Of Thieves
Adventure, or I watch people play,
I just get lost for hours”
070 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE