Gar! Listen up ye filthy landlubber! No longer will you have to sail the seven seas as a lonesome pirate, as Rare are allowing players to invite up to three of their friends to download and play Sea of Thieves for free for a week.
This offer runs from today (Wednesday 6th February) for exactly one week, ending on Wednesday 13th February. During that time, existing players who purchased the game either physically, digitally, OR are playing through the Xbox Game Pass will be able to grab three free referral codes from the Sea of Thieves website and dish them out to friends of their choosing. These chosen few will then be able to redeem the code to download and play the game for the course of the free trial, and if they enjoy their voyages so much that they want to purchase the full game then they will be awarded a 35% discount on either PC or Xbox One until Wednesday 27th February.
To coincide with this “Friends Play Free” promotion, Rare have also introduced special time-limited Mercenary Voyages to the game, which feature “a lucrative spree through the regions of the Sea of Thieves, trying out the tasks that all three Trading Companies have to offer”. Players will need to talk to Duke in any tavern to grab a Mercenary Voyage, tasking players with tracking down the treasure of a notorious Rum Runner. Rare says that these voyages offer “handsome rewards” as well as the potential to snag some “dapper Mercenary cosmetics”. By design, these Mercenary Voyages are specifically designed to ease new players into the game and give them a bit of a tour of the whole experience.
This comes at a time when Sea of Thieves is experiencing a bit of a resurgence with players—and Twitch viewers—following its lackluster, somewhat empty launch back in March of last year. The game has had numerous content updates and four big expansions since then, and a fifth expansion titled The Arena will arrive some time soon, adding structured PvP to the game. Me and my friends loved Sea of Thieves when we first jumped in at launch, but we were soon disappointed with the severe lack of content that the game suffered from. It’s a game that is full of the warm charm that is so common in Rare games, and with more and more content being added to the game and more and more players interested in playing it or watching it on Twitch, the pirate adventure could still have a bright future ahead of it.
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