Ahoy, maties! Boot yer Xbox up, the Cursed Sails expansion be live!
Okay, that’s enough of that, it’s not International Talk Like a Pirate Day (yes that is a real thing) until September 19th. However, it is International Cursed Sails Expansion Is Now Live Day (no, that’s not a real thing).
Cursed Sails is the second of the three major updates that Rare announced for Sea of Thieves back in April, following on from The Hungering Deep. Like it’s predecessor, it is completely free and available to all players.
The new expansion introduces the threat of Skeleton ships, giving you the threat of enemies on the waves as well as land. The enemy ships will carry loot as well as Skeletons, so sink that ship and claim the bounty! Cursed Sails also offers a time-limited campaign that will take place over the next three weeks.
Along with this content, Cursed Sails will add the Brigantine ship which gives players the option of running as a three man crew with a boat fit for the purpose rather than just having to under-man the meant-for-four-pirates Galleon. Also, crews can now for Alliances and team up with other crews; doing so will the crews within an Alliance show up on each others maps and loot will be split between the two, don’t worry though, you can still stab your allies in the back and take all of the loot for yourself. You are a Pirate after all!
With all of this comes the slightly surprising news that Sea of Thieves has just surpassed five million players since launch. Sea of Thieves had a very strong launch after being highly anticipated; the game had 2 million players within the first month of release and Microsoft proudly boasted that it had become the “fastest-selling first-party new IP of this generation”. Soon though, cracks began to appear. As fun and special as the game could be at times, a severe lack of content and heavily repetitive fetch quests and lacklustre content and exploration led to mixed reviews and a frustrated and dwindling player base, and when the news came that half of the games players had accessed the game through the Xbox Game Pass free trial, many believed that the writing was on the wall for Sea of Thieves.
With the free content updates and support that the game has had since launch and the news that the player count has just surpassed five million, it would appear that Sea of Thieves may just be fighting back against the assumption that the game was ultimately a failure and that the player base was vanishing.
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