By MATT KAMEN From Wired

Emergent gameplay, epic quests, and fixing toxic player behaviour – WIRED goes behind the scenes on Rare’s biggest game in years

Deep in the green idylls of rural Leicestershire, one of the UK’s most important game studios is about to set sail on its most ambitious – and riskiest – voyage in a generation. A console generation, that is.

The studio is Rare, and the challenging proposition facing the Twycross-based company – once a Nintendo stalwart, but under Microsoft’s stewardship since 2002 – is its upcoming massively multiplayer online pirate adventure, Sea of Thieves. It’s a daunting undertaking for the team: a shared world inspired by what design director Mike Chapman calls “every pirate fantasy you’ve ever loved, from Treasure Island to Pirates of the Caribbean”, with an emphasis on emergent storytelling, non-linear player progression, and a dizzying array of gameplay systems and features that could easily overwhelm.

Yet it’s also something of a return to form for Rare. Once known for the likes of GoldenEye and Banjo-Kazooie, recent years have seen the studio focused instead on the Kinect Sports series and, slightly earlier, surreal life sim Viva Piñata. Players need to go back to, arguably, 2005’s Kameo: Elements of Power on Xbox 360 to find Rare’s last turn at an action-adventure title. Having been removed from the genre for the better part of a decade, can the nautical would-be epic put the wind back in Rare’s sails?

Jolly Rogers
The early signs are promising. A recent closed beta launched with some teething troubles – a server mismatch meant people trying to load the beta client were briefly ‘seen’ as trying to play the full game, generating “too early” error messages – but went on to become the most-streamed game on Twitch, and YouTube is now awash with thousands of hours of pirate journeys. The community, slowly growing since the game’s reveal back in 2015, has responded well, with the early access generating plenty of discussion about the game world.

Perhaps most impressively, players have been engaging with Rare’s core mission for Sea of Thieves – to create an online, multiplayer world where people are positive and friendly. It may seem antithetical to how the very internet itself works, but people are pretty much behaving themselves.

“We like to call ourselves ‘the friendliest multiplayer game ever made’,” says Ted Timmins, PC design lead at Rare. “We actually went to our community and said we wanted a pirate code in this game: ‘Be a pirate, but don’t be a dick’. The community came up with articles of behaviour, from ‘don’t be racist, don’t be homophobic’, through to ‘be a good crewmate’ and ‘don’t troll your own crew’. It’s great that we’ve got that at the start, just as a seed of how you should act in Sea of Thieves.”

While you can report or mute abusive players – or, as Timmins advises, both as a first measure – Rare has also put in some interesting measures to govern unsporting behaviour.

“You do have players whose sole goal is to ruin the game for everybody else. They do exist, and they will be playing Sea of Thieves unfortunately – there’s nothing we can do about that,” says Chapman. “What we can do is address how we handle them.”

“Traditionally, the way this has been approached in the past is to have a vote to kick [an abusive player],” Chapman continues. “Our belief was that [if] you end up back on the main screen with a message that basically says ‘you’ve been kicked for being a troll’, for people who behave that way, it’s actually the ultimate reward. It’s saying ‘well done, you’ve ruined someone’s game, get out’. If you’re a troll, that feels fantastic. Then they go back in and do it again. Our focus was to shift the power from the trolls to their victims.”

The result is the brig system. Rather than a vote to kick, players vote to put misbehaving crew mates in the brig – a cage on a windowless lower deck, where the punished player can’t even see the ocean, but can still hear everything the other players are doing. The only way that troll can get out is to apologise for their behaviour, and convince you to open the door. Other than winning back the trust of their teammates, the only way out of the brig is to rage quit themselves.

“That psychologically shifts the power to the troll’s victims,” Chapman says, “because you’re forcing the troll to quit the game to escape. That puts them on the back foot – they’re having to manually leave the game or be locked in this deliberately boring prison.”

There’s positive reinforcement for good behaviour, too.

“This is a game where we prioritise things like grog, and musical instruments, and throwing buckets of sick from too much grog over each other, and all these silly ideas, because we believe that if we’re to make you laugh together, you’re more likely to bond together, ” says Chapman. “You’re more likely to build up that rapport and have a fun time.”

Combined, it all makes for a far more enjoyable multiplayer experience.

Taking to the seas
The last time I played Sea of Thieves, at E3 2017, it did not go well. Mismatched with a crew that didn’t even want to get out of the first bay, there was decidedly little pirating to be done.

Playing the game at Rare’s headquarters, in a four-person crew that actually worked together, gave a much better impression of the game. Sea of Thieves thrives when playing as a team, and for the bigger galleons, it’s all but mandatory. If you have one person to steer, another to adjust the sails, another keeping watch, and finally someone to patch the ship up in the event of attacks or environmental damage, you can make your way across the seven seas in good time.

Having a crew at your back helps on land too, where most of the quests take place. Sea of Thieves has something of a guild system, where representatives from three factions give out quests when you’re docked at safe havens. These might be simple fetch quests, treasure hunts, or bounties on undead pirate lords, reanimated in some distant corner of the world through their sheer greed.

Combat is varied, with a selection of weapons from cutlasses to pistols, and even single-shot sniper rifles which, relatively true to the setting, are hilariously inaccurate but powerful if you land a shot. Battles reward teamwork, especially if you find your crew swarmed with skeletons after you’ve found some treasure, and it becomes a desperate frenzy to get it back to your ship.

While you can level up your reputation with each guild by finishing missions, allowing you to buy tougher and more prestigious missions, an interesting twist is that you don’t need to. Any player you travel with in the game can propose a mission they’ve earned themselves, meaning a high-level player can drop a rare quest with high rewards, and everyone gets to go on it. As long as you can survive the journey – which is down more to skill than it is by boosting stats or grinding for gear – you share equally in the rewards.

Pleasantly, while Sea of Thiev1es is a vast game and rewards playing in groups, it’s not impenetrable to individual players. Solo boats are available should you want to finish off a quest when friends aren’t around, while a ‘salute’ system lets you instantly team up with like-minded players you meet along the way.

The game really does come alive with more players though, especially with the emphasis on environmental and emergent storytelling. The world is dynamic and ever changing – as my crew learned on its fourth quest, when we ran aground on shallow rocks, almost sinking the ship, or when we got into a skirmish with another team of players and nearly lost all our quest rewards. Treasure in Sea of Thieves is never really yours until you’ve returned it to a guild, meaning you can put in the legwork on a quest, only to be boarded on your way back, have your goods stolen, and your robbers earn the glory. It’s hellish if it happens to you, but it all makes for great stories to tell your friends.

During the studio visit, Rare also revealed the existence of larger threats, such as monstrous Kraken that can emerge from the depths and attack entire fleets of ships, or devastating storms that roil the seas and capsize boats, threatening to sink all the booty you’ve accrued. There are Skeleton Forts, nightmare citadels of damned pirates that require multiple crews to survive – Sea of Thieves answer to raids in World of Warcraft, almost – and for the pirates who build their legends across the world, even a secret lair to discover. The possibilities for random but player-driven experiences really do seem endless

Pay the Pirate
When Sea of Thieves arrives on March 20, it will also be the first Xbox One title to join Microsoft’s subscription-based Game Pass service at launch. As with anything that’s never been done before, it carries a certain amount of risk – will people use it as a glorified demo? Will players be as invested in the game if they don’t make a conscious decision to buy it? Does it risk reducing the product to the same level as a film you’d skim past on Netflix, add to your watchlist, then forget?

For all the questions, as far as executive producer Joe Neate is concerned, Sea of Thieves debuting as the day one star of Game Pass is all positive. “We like new things. It gives our players choice and it gives us an avenue for new players that maybe we wouldn’t have,” Neate says.

“There’s going to be people in Game Pass who maybe don’t play multiplayer, and this is a chance for them to try it. This is a chance for them to go ‘I’ve not really fancied this game, but I’ll give it a go’, and we know that we’ve got a really different, unique experience,” he continues. “It gives us a steady flow of new players, as there’s always going to be people subscribing to Game Pass. If we’re going to be one of the top played games there, that’s awesome. For a games-as-service like this, having a steady flow of players and active monthly user base is great for us.”

Sea of Thieves being included on Game Pass may also help monetise the title. While it has all the hallmarks of an MMO, there’s no monthly fee as with Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV. Its persistent world will still require constant maintenance though, not to mention growth and expansion. Under a conventional sales model, players pay once when they buy the game, but its presence on Game Pass provides another revenue stream – not direct subscriptions, but at least a further trickle as people use the service to test or even fully play the game.

“Success for us will be measured in a variety of ways, one is revenue, another is Game Pass subscriptions,” says Neate. “How many people are playing Sea of Thieves within Game Pass? Are people coming to Game Pass just to play Sea of Thieves? We’ll be able to detect that, or if you subscribe just to play Sea of Thieves. Also, how many people are creating content on [Microsoft’s game streaming service] Mixer and videos, all of those are platform indicators of health.”

Further down the line though, players can expect to see microtransactions coming to the game. This won’t take the form of paid expansions or game-changing DLC, but instead more fanciful add-ons.

“Anything we want to add, like major new gameplay features, we have no intent of charging for that stuff – we never want to separate players, so once you’re in, you’re in,” Neate says. “We do have to think about revenue for the long term though, [so] we want to add the ability for players to spend money in-game if they choose to, but it was really important to us when we thought about this to ask ‘what is right for a game like Sea of Thieves?’.”

“Because our game is uniquely fun and social, we want to ensure that we’re doing fun and social things in this area too. We thought long and hard about this and so for example, one of the first things we would add would be pets,” Neate adds.

He stresses that any microtransactions added to the game will not equate to loot crates though, adding “it’s really important that if you spend money in Sea of Thieves that you always know what you’re going to get.”

Details are still to be finalised, but pets could include monkeys, cats, and, of course, parrots, and they may function as objects, allowing your fellow crew members to interact with them. Expect many, many monkeys to be thrown overboard – “that’s funny, you’d be like ‘oh, that was my monkey!’ but it’d come back and it’d be fine.”

A Rare treat
Sea of Thieves is a game that has dominated Rare’s focus in recent years, reflected in the pirate skeleton greeting vistors in the entrance lobby, the character decals that plaster the walls, the mock Caribbean tavern where the team films its community broadcasts. Only a few statues of Battletoads or Conker stood in lonely corridors or meeting rooms serve as reminder of the studio’s legacy. If a game this big, requiring such singular attention, didn’t pan out, it could spell the end of the team.

Yet just eight months since I last crossed paths with the game, Sea of Thieves now feels like a much more polished, seasoned title with a far clearer idea of what it actually wants to be. What’s more, Rare may have even corrected for abusive player behaviour, with punishment and reward systems I’m fascinated to see in action in the live game – hopefully, it’ll lead to a more enjoyable online gaming experience, and possibly serve as a roadmap for other developers to tackle toxic players.

Most importantly though, the world Rare has created here is genuinely fun to inhabit. Going all in on this voyage was a risky prospect, but it’s looking like the studio has found gold. After what feels like an eternity, Rare is back.

IMAGES:

There are tonnes of customisation options in Sea of Thieves, allowing you to build your perfect pirate. Rare / Microsoft Game Studios

Players start with Rare’s ‘infinite pirate generator’, which crafts countless characters to set sail with Rare / Microsoft Game Studios

Secrets such as the location – and purpose – of this spectral pirate lair litter the high seas Rare / Microsoft Game Studios

Quests can be shared amongst crews, allowing experienced players to take newbies on fabled voyages. Rare / Microsoft Game Studios

Factions such as the merchants will give out quests, but you’ll need to build reputation with them to access more prestigious ones. Rare / Microsoft Game Studios

One of the, err, delightful characters you’ll meet on the Sea of Thieves. Rare / Microsoft Game Studios

For more on this story go to: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/sea-of-thieves-rare-xbox-one-microsoft