Next week, Sea of Thieves is getting the Vaults of the Ancients content update, introducing new Gold Hoarders quests and pettable dogs, among other additions. Sea of Thieves has received continual updates since its somewhat rocky launch, helping it to garner an enormous audience of 15 million players.
The latest boost of popularity has been brought by the anticipated release of Sea of Thieves on Steam. The users of Valve’s digital service, however, were left outside of the game’s cross-play ecosystem, which is uniting fans on Xbox and Windows 10. Luckily, the Steam version of the game will be kept up-to-date to match the release schedule of new content - and there’s actually plenty of new stuff coming next week.
In a new video update, Sea of Thieves developer Rare offered a taste of what’s about to be added to the game. At Gamescom 2020, the studio showed a glimpse of some of Sea of Thieves' new features, and now the time has come to be slightly more specific regarding upcoming content. The update is called Vaults of the Ancients, and it will release on September 9th, as revealed in the video. It includes the first look at a new voyage for the Gold Hoarders, as well the Mysterious Notes that players will soon start to encounter. According to the in-game lore, Gold Hoarders decided to put their riches inside cave vaults scattered across the world of Sea of Thieves. Obviously, these treasure caves are at risk, and players will go on a quest to retrieve keys required to open enticing gold depositories. While the initial goal of the quest is to return the keys to Gold Hoarders, players can keep them for themselves and raid the vaults like the cunning pirates they are.
Some lesser additions are also planned, such as pettable dogs and Mysterious Notes that will basically act as a subtle way of interaction between the devs and players. These notes will be automatically given out to pirates at the beginning of each session, containing all the important information about any new events happening in Sea of Thieves. While new content is undeniably exciting, especially for a live-service game, there are some quality-of-life features also coming to the adventurous sandbox title alongside the Vaults of the Ancients update. These include a so-called Slimline island banner, which basically keeps characters’ ammo and health displayed at all times instead of hiding them in certain situations. Additionally, there’s now an option to disable this element of HUD completely.
Sea of Thieves is an immensely enjoyable pirate life simulator right now, offering players a lot of fun. Initially, though, the game felt a little bit shallow due to the lack of content and the inability to engage members of the community in the long term. Luckily, those early days of content drought are long over, and Rare keeps updating the game on a regular basis, which has helped Sea of Thieves grow into an incredibly inventive title.
Sea of Thieves is available now on Xbox One and PC.
Source: Rare/YouTube