For Sea of Thieves fans, it seems like Captaincy has always been right on the horizon, getting closer but still gone.
“It’s one of those Sea of Thieves features that was always meant to be, that was always going to happen,” creative director Mike Chapman tells me. I just mentioned that I first heard about a possible Captaincy update shortly after Sea of Thieves launched in 2018. “I mean, you say Year 1. We were talking about it even in our first prototype many years ago , many years, as in, we just want to do this. It’s just a matter of time before we can.”
Four years after the game’s release, Rare is finally about to get Captaincy out the door.
The long-gestating update finally arrives this week, introducing a host of new features. Among them is the ability to buy, customize and name your own ship. This ship will be saved and the game will have it ready every time you log in. Chapman sees this as another step in the game’s mission to create a more perfect pirate sandbox.
“Like the pirate troops we’re trying to draw inspiration from, the ships are a reflection of the captains who sail them and the crews who sail them,” he says. “We always wanted the ship to be a reflection of who you are and how you play.”
“Your boat is your home; it’s the heart of the game,” says lead designer Shelley Preston.
The benefits of the job
Captaincy disrupts several fundamental pillars of the Sea of Thieves experience. Previously, pirates would select a ship from the game’s main menu and spawn on one of seven advanced islands. Crews would scavenge the island to augment their meager initial supplies and visit the carpentry shop to hand-dress their ship with their preferred livery, sails and cannons. These tasks, this burst of manual work, became a pre-session ritual. Leaving port without taking the time to do these things would always come back to bite you. Once finished, the crews could leave to make their fortunes.
Anyone who has grown weary of these rituals will be pleased to know that Captaincy has its perks.
Captains, those players who own their own ship, will now find their personal ship waiting for them upon login. Your cosmetics will already be in place, thanks to a new system that allows persistent settings between sessions. The shipowner, which previously only offered ship cosmetics, now offers several new services. Captains don’t need to scavenge for supplies like a humble bilge rat. Their elevated position allows them to purchase supplies from the woodwork, including cannons, projectiles such as fire and stun grenades, fruit, meat, and worms for fishing. They don’t even have to load these supplies onto the ship; the shipowner will immediately load them onto the ship.
Captains also have access to Sovereigns, a new faction that settles in each outpost. Sovereigns represent a new entry point for pirates looking to unload their loot. They live in a gorgeously decorated tower above each outpost and will only deal with captains. All salable loot in the game can be turned into Sovereigns, and its buildings include tools like dock-mounted elevators and harpoons to unload your ship much faster.
In this way, Captaincy streamlines the Sea of Thieves experience. No more island exits for supplies (unless you really need them). No more splitting up loot and taking it down the dock to the right vendor, one by one. Instead of creating a class war in the waves, it gives newer players something to aim for and creates a new progression loop. Buying a ship costs hundreds of thousands of gold. Surprisingly, it doesn’t take that long to build up a ship’s gold value. A shrewd brigantine crew can rack up more than enough in a single session without too much trouble.
Check the manifest
However, not all aspects of the journey initiation ritual will change. For example, you can take your ship from one server to another, but you’ll have to leave your supplies behind and start over. This did not surprise me; Sea of Thieves already worked like this before Captaincy. What surprised me was that Rare would consider letting Captains keep supplies between sessions. While the Captaincy is supposed to create a sense of continuity between sessions, Preston says supplies presented a dilemma. The concern, he says, was that if allowed to keep their supplies, players could stockpile them to the point where they would become completely unbeatable.
“It was something we thought about! We wanted to try it, but in the end it was just balance considerations,” says Preston. “Although the captains are these VIPs, they should not be out of balance with the other players in the sandbox. And we still have new players! They are in sloops alone, it is the first time; we don’t want them facing an army.”
Purchasable supply crates are available from the merchant’s merchant at each dock in the Outpost. However, as a special gift just for captains, supplies have now been moved to carpentry, with a couple of qualifications. First of all, due to their power in combat, the pole felling chain shots and status effect curse balls are not for sale and have yet to be found in the wild. Food crates filled with items that players can use to heal themselves have been split into two; one is full of fruit, and the other is full of meat. Food crates were previously a single crate with a payload of 50 bananas, the lowest performing health item in the game. The fruit box now contains a mix of fruits from bananas to the highly prized pineapple. Meat Crates have a selection of high-yielding health items, but will be raw when added to your stores. Each piece must be cooked in the ship’s stove before it can be used effectively (unless you want your pirate to spend a few minutes with a violent disease).
A screenshot of the revised carpentry screen catches my eye: a box of worms used to catch fish is more expensive than the box of meat. He would have considered the meat to be much more valuable. When I mention this, Chapman and Preston are baffled. Clearly, the price of gold from the recent Deep Dive trailer isn’t final.
And you’ll know us by the trail of empty storage boxes
Another long-awaited change: ship names. Choosing a name for your ship is the first step in forging its legend. Your ship’s name will be emblazoned on a customizable plaque above each ship’s captain’s quarters. It also hangs on the outer back of the helmet. Longtime Xbox Live users questioned whether ship names should be unique, that once a name was locked, it was off limits forever. Chapman and Preston are happy to report that this is not the case.
“You can have multiples of the same name, like our pet name,” says Preston. “We wanted to give players as much creative freedom as possible, and there’s nothing worse than when you have this awesome name and then you have to put a 2 at the end.”
“An asterisk,” laughs Chapman. “Imagine if Jack Sparrow had to put an asterisk on the Black Pearl. ‘BlackPearl_1’. That would be rubbish, wouldn’t it?”
While we were chatting, Preston mentioned a change to the game can. When viewing a captained ship from a distance, a new overlay will appear with basic information: the ship’s name, rank, and its captain’s Gamertag. This change had caused an uproar among Sea of Thieves partners and its community of content creators. The group of creators of Sea of Thieves and those who watch them are quite contained. As a result, many creators are already struggling to be recognized server-to-server. For example, BoxyFresh, one of the most popular Sea of Thieves creators, is recognized on almost every server he joins. Without expanded in-game privacy controls, they say, this shift to spying could have dire ramifications for content creators. Trolls and stream snipers could use it to identify creators all over the map and make their lives hell.
Preston indicates that the existing replay controls, namely the ability to hardcode all player names on a creator’s screen, have been extended to submit names. However, neither Chapman nor Preston confirmed whether this would apply outwardly to anyone spying on a creator’s ship.
Let’s go on an adventure
Being a sandbox game, Sea of Thieves can leave some players paralyzed by indecision. What to do first? where to go What to focus on? Rare wants to give captains a great deal of control over the length and breadth of any voyage they embark on and the effect they will have on your ship. This is where the new Captain’s Voyages and Milestones come into play. Captain’s Voyages can be purchased from the shipbuilder and come in different flavors. Short duration single island quests will take you on a 30 minute journey. There are extensive, multi-stage missions that will transport you for hours on end.
Your actions: The actions you take, the missions you complete, the things you commit to in Sea of Thieves, mark the milestones of your captaincy. These unlock cosmetics that you can use to decorate your ship, but they also contribute to the Captain’s Log, a little black book found on your quest table. The captain’s log shows your ship’s history through stats and numbers, but can be customized to show specific information (like a counter of the last time you sank or your total number of enemy ships destroyed). Any member of your crew and pirates from other crews who can board your ship can view the log. In case of sinking, the captain’s log will float among the other loot. It can then be taken to the Reaper’s hideout and sold.
The other side of Milestones is building your ship’s legend. Milestones are awarded under five flags: The Gold Seeker, The Voyager, The Emissary, The Hunter and The Feared. The Milestone banner that most reflects your playstyle, the…