Sea of Thieves has been slowly plugging away at new content for a few months now, and gamers are about to cast off on another adventure at this end of the month. That’s because Rare has just revealed the next batch of new content coming to the open world pirate game.
And just like other content additions in this game, there’s going to be plenty of enemies to blast and booty to plunder. The Arena is coming into the world of Sea of Thieves, and it’s going to be quite the celebration. Why are we celebrating? Because Sea of Thieves has been out for two years, time sure flies.
Now, down to what this new content actually is. It’s actually an entirely new game mode which allows players to experience the visceral combat of Sea of Thieves in a much more condensed form, think of it like a battle royale mode of sorts. The Arena is a completely PvP-driven mode which allows up to five teams of players to battle it out on the high seas for dominance. It’s all about careful positioning and taking the treasure scattered around the map in a very tactical manner. The team with the most silver at the end of the match is the victor.
The team at Rare had a pretty interesting task with designing this new mode, having to streamline the entire experience of PvP in the typical Sea of Thieves’ “adventure mode” into a single setup for The Arena. They’ve done things like redoing the flow of gameplay loops by removing AI and reworking the way death and respawns work to balance the whole thing, it’s pretty cool to see how they managed to do all of this and more. For another level of complexity, ships can now be damaged in new ways, hurting navigation and speed, during combat in the Arena.
We’ve included both the debut trailer for this new game mode, as well as a really insightful behind-the-scenes video, down below. Go check those out if you want to learn more about the Arena. The new mode launches on April 30th, in the meantime you can go to the official site to learn more.
