This month’s Inn-side Story features a chat with Andreas and Natalie from Rare’s visual effects team. Seeing how they pulled real life photo and video captures into the game in a way that retains the Sea of Thieves visual style is fascinating. Check it out, then pay careful attention to the world around you on your next adventure to see their handiwork in action!

Cool stuff from Joe in this one. The last two releases have felt much more robust, and with the amount of content that’s been released into the game since launch, it does make sense to completely remove the intermediary weekly updates where there’s no significant changes being added to the game. Notes of interest: Cargo Runs are out! Joe’s interested to see how stories emerge from Cargo Runs, and also to get a perspective of how Cargo Runs effect Merchant Alliance (tacit admission that Merchants are the least activated voyage type). Forsaken Shores has been a good test of taking…

Not a lot of info in this one, folks. To be honest, it’s nice that the launch of a major new expansion went smoothly and there’s not a lot to cover off. The only notes of interest are: Using Pioneers to get feedback and stability metrics for the launch of Forsaken Shores, which was “pretty uneventful”, was great! Joe loves the rowboat. Rare are looking at difficulty-balancing and feedback from The Devil’s Roar. It’s supposed to be a difficult, perilous place where the rewards are greater. They’ll continue to monitor feedback and telemetry over time. Keep giving feedback! They’re seen…

Things are heating up in Sea of Thieves as this free content update cracks open a volcanic region of the world! Will you risk the wrath of The Devil’s Roar in search of new challenges and the truth behind a terrible tale? Find your way to Forsaken Shores on September 19th.

Notes of interest: Rare have realised that because of their passion for getting content out and into the hands of players, they’ve not been leaving enough time for testing – both new features (eg: barrel system) and validation (bugs). Key issues introduced last week have been fixed. Different types of food & ammunition are coming into the game an expanded inventory system was needed – however it came together late, meaning not enough time to implement feedback from Pioneers. Barrel tweaks this week: you’ll be able to see if a barrel is empty, resource quantity in barrels is increased. Take-all/give-all…

A short montage of the game footage from Inside Xbox, without the Gamescom chatter in the background. Read up about the all the information from the live stream here.

Interesting notes: Skelly ships were first prototyped in ~2014/2015. Performance was a consideration in 2 areas: client performance (your local game app), then as more players and ships were brought into the equation this resulted in server performance issues (latency). Original internal play-testing started at about 10fps 😦 The difficulty was rebalanced quite often during internal feedback sessions. There’s a sneaky rowboat tease about 35 seconds in 😉 I love these behind the scenes looks at how the game is developed. They give an interesting insight into the challenges, constraints and solutions that are handled every time a major game…

Notes: Venom, Snooze and Rigging cursed cannonballs added to the battles this week. Controller sensitivity values have been expanded (probably triggered by this discussion). Update: this change is actually coming in the next Bilge Rat update (week of August 27). Ancient Isles fleet commendation has been fixed – due to this, the Cursed Sails event is being extended by 1 week. Due to feedback on Cursed Sails there will be no time-specific requirements in Forsaken Shores. The first stage of having Skeleton Ships in the world will be having them appear as emergent battles, with an indicator similar to Forts….

As we sail into week two of the Cursed Sails campaign, Executive Producer Joe Neate talks about refinements to the experience and some players’ unique approaches to tackling those fearsome skeleton ships. Some notes: Rare have learned from the timed nature of Cursed Sails and will take that feedback on board for planning future events. This week: New battles with new skelly crews, new cursed cannonballs, varied skeleton ‘forms’. Forts are back! Work continues on re-enabling the Kraken. The Cursed Sails team is now preparing the Skelly Ships’ emergence back into the world beyond the campaign.