Cross-platform play for Xbox One and PC users for Sea of Thieves has been confirmed by developer Rare.
Rare’s PC design lead, Ted Timmins, and executive producer Joe Neate took to the stage yesterday during Microsoft’s Gamescom show to confirm that PC players will be able to play alongside Xbox One and Xbox One X players when the game launches next year.
In addition to talking about Sea of Thieves at Gamescom, Rare also made a post on the game’s official website where they went into more detail about how cross-platform play will work. They noted that one of the challenges with allowing PC and Xbox users to play together was ensuring that it was balanced fairly, especially with regards to PvP and device input. For example, Timmins noted that PC users were 4.5% more efficient at killing skeletons compared to their Xbox counterparts.
“One of the things we’re very aware of is the need for the balancing to be right,” Rare said. “After running some recent tests, we found that PC players were 4.5 per cent more efficient at killing skeletons than Xbox players, and this feels close enough that it’s something we’ll continue to monitor.”
He continued, “However, PvP between platforms, or more importantly device input, is the big focus point for us as a design team, and already we’ve been working closely with the game experience team to change the way the guns work to be better balanced for cross play.”
“We’ve put in a bunch of telemetry around this, and with the change to guns it’s made them feel tonally so much more fitting, as previously they felt more like laser weapons than ancient plundered-and-pillaged gunpowder-driven blunderbusses.”
Sea of Thieves launches on Xbox One and PC in 2018.