I watched the Sea of Thieves documentary, Voyage of a Lifetime, and while I didn’t pull a huge amount out of it, there were some interesting tid bits I thought were worth talking about.
The hour-long documentary, which was posted to the official Sea of Thieves YouTube channel this morning, celebrates the fifth anniversary of the game’s launch. It’s a documentary about the game itself, its community, and the people that made the game. It’s also a marketing puff piece that doesn’t really dig into the genuine hardships of the game’s production — a NoClip or People Make Games joint this is not.
However, it does illuminate a few moments in the game’s history that are worth talking about.
Xbox heads didn’t know what Rare was working on until they played it
The Sea of Thieves documentary adds clarity to a clip of the game’s earliest build that has become a fan favourite. Rare began work on Sea of Thieves after shipping Kinect Sports Rivals for the Xbox One. It worked on the game for an extended period in relative secrecy, without interference from Xbox brass, time the team used to build its first major prototype in Unity. When the time came to finally show Xbox what it had been working on, Rare created an extremely dopey video presentation that featured the staff dressed in pirate garb to paint a picture of the game. At the conclusion of the video, Rare told the assembled Xbox leadership, including CEO Phil Spencer and Microsoft Corporate Vice President Kudo Tsunoda, they would now play the game. The famous footage of Spencer and Tsunoda hooting and hollering while they played the game’s early prototype follows.
It was validation of what Rare had already sensed — that the game came alive when played with friends. Even in this early state, it’s possible to see the game that Sea of Thieves would become, and the clip is made all the sweeter when you know that Spencer and Tsunoda had no idea what they’d be playing when they arrived Rare’s Twycross offices that day. The footage is also full of features that either didn’t make it into the game — Xbox’s longtime marketing lead Aaron Greenberg throws a cooked chicken leg as a weapon, something that can’t be done today. Industry Solutions CVP and CTO Lorraine Bardeen hides in a barrel — the barrel hide would become a widely-loved emote in the current version of Sea of Thieves, but in the prototype, players could simply walk up to a barrel and hide in it. Executive producer Joe Neate concludes the segment saying that though he’d planned to continue the pitch after the gameplay session, he failed to get a word in edgewise because the assembled leadership couldn’t stop talking about their adventures on the sea.
Rare didn’t settle on the name Sea of Thieves until later in development
Though the name Sea of Thieves was thrown around early in the game’s development, Rare didn’t settle on the name until much later, and only after it was spitballing other names that Rare understood it had already found its winner. The documentary includes some great archival footage of staff throwing names around. Among the titles that don’t make the cut: No Treasure For The Dead, Romancing the Sea and Romancing the Kraken, Pirate’s Code, Mutiny, and, interestingly, Skull And Bones, a title that would later go to another pirate game. When no name can be settled on, they turn the process of creating one into a game itself, writing keywords onto folded post-it notes and using the luck of the draw to come up with a good name. Some of the names that came out of this process were honestly pretty good, like Massive Ocean, Distant Hat. But, in the back of everyone’s mind, they kept returning to the name Sea of Thieves, which seemed to encapsulate the whole of what the game was trying to communicate.
Rare had a whole CG trailer ready to debut at E3 2015 and pulled it for gameplay at the last minute
Sea of Thieves‘ reveal trailer at E3 2015 is another fan favourite, a trailer full of gameplay that surprised everyone who saw it. It was a trailer that told the viewer that Rare was working on something totally different to any game it had ever made before. But that trailer wasn’t Rare’s original choice. In fact, Rare had commissioned and created a full CG reveal trailer that looked really cool, but it didn’t successfully communicate what the game was about and what it was trying to do. Rare would eventually shelve that trailer in favour of quickly creating the gameplay demo that would appear at E3 that year. Head of creator engagement Jon McFarlane would walk through the short scripted level, trying to hit his marks and get the timings right.
Pirate fever took over the studio during production
One of the best parts of the Sea of Thieves documentary focuses on life and culture at a major studio where everyone has the same special interest on their minds. While Sea of Thieves was in production, Rare began the process of adding piratey decorations to its offices in Twycross. This quickly got out of hand. Staff were wearing costumes. Statues were being created for various foyers. People were buying prop swords and putting their hands up to do goofy pirate voice overs. £200 (or roughly $AU370) was spent on chocolate gold coins from eBay, and a misfiling of the expenses triggered a global fraud investigation within Microsoft to uncover the identity of the chocolate coin swindler.
The game changed engines from Unity to Unreal mid-stream
Ask a developer for their thoughts on moving a project-in-progress from one game engine to another is broadly considered to be a fast-track to having them laugh in your face. But that’s exactly what Rare did — it took a game of Sea of Thieves‘ size and complexity from the Unity engine and rebuilt it, from the ground up, in Unreal, an engine it knew far less about.
There are developers reading this who are shaking their heads in disbelief.
But the shift to Unreal wasn’t just for that engine’s much-prettier visuals. Though it had allowed Rare to create a prototype that was feature-rich, there were problems of scale that couldn’t be solved by Unity’s engine at the time. Things like the size of the game world and the number of players the game could serve before things started going wrong had to be addressed, and Unreal was an engine better prepared to help Rare handle these issues. When the team first saw their engineers’ first attempts at Sea of Thieves‘ famously beautiful ocean waves and swell modelling, they were blown away by it. The second they put a galleon on the waves, however, the boat was tossed around, reacting to every little lump and bump beneath it as the game’s buoyancy models argued with the physics of the ocean. The solution was to force the game’s engine to display its beautiful, sometimes choppy surf, but allow the boat to travel through it on a more gentle sine-wave. This recreated the smooth and enjoyable sailing the team had built in the prototype.
You didn’t always use mermaids to get back to your ship
While players these days are well aware that a friendly mermaid will appear in the water if you fall off your ship, ready to transport you back on deck, this wasn’t always the case. One early idea involved what lead designer Andrew Preston called “rescue ships,” ships that would arrive out of the water to pick up players that had fallen overboard. These ships would burst through the waves in the way that skeleton ships do now, except they were there to help, not shoot you with infinite status effect cursed cannonballs. The problem with a rescue ship, particularly if you were trying to mount a sneaky mid-naval board, was that they gave your position away entirely. The mermaids came about shortly afterward.
The idea of the game’s famous treasure maps came from Pirates of the Caribbean
On their honeymoon to Disneyland, Rare’s husband and wife design team, Andrew and Shelley Preston noticed that the Pirates of the Caribbean ride included a real-world mini-game that had guests following clues on a treasure map that led to different places in the park. That concept was borrowed and reworked for Sea of Thieves, leading to the creation of its now famous (and occasionally frustrating) treasure and riddle maps. Disney clearly didn’t mind Rare copying its homework, working with the developer years later on its wildly popular A Pirate’s Life expansion that crossed over with the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
One extremely determined fan has asked for an owl pet every day for years
One dedicated member of the Sea of Thieves community, who goes by Owlet, has been posting daily messages to Rare on their Twitter for years. The request is always the same: You know what would be cool? Owl pets. Why an owl? Owlet thinks owls are cool and would like to have one on their ship. Owlet’s messages began while Rare was already, though secretly, at work on bringing player pets to the game. Its first wave of pets would include monkeys and, yes, birds, though none of the birds were owls. Rare has good news for Owlet, and owl fans everywhere: because of their dedicated daily requests, Owlet has succeeded in getting owls into the game. In a forthcoming update, players will be able to buy themselves a pet owl from the pirate emporium.
Nice one, Owlet.
The documentary, Sea of Thieves: Voyage of a Lifetime, is streaming now on YouTube. You can read more about it on the Xbox Wire, or just play Sea of Thieves yourself on Game Pass.
Leave a Reply