Sea of Thieves to get custom and private servers
While most live-service games push back on the idea of custom servers, there have been success cases in the past. Fallout 76 for instance has a very popular private server option. Now, Rare is bringing custom server functionality to Sea of Thieves, allowing sailors to spin up a new server with the ability to make changes to in-game behaviour to best fit your group.
Rare Studios is showing off exactly how to handle the ‘winding down’ phase of a live service game with Sea of Thieves. In a new announcement, Rare revealed its plans to allow players to host their own custom servers, a move that comes at the perfect time, as new content development begins to wind down to put more resources towards other projects.
In a Community Direct hosted this week, Rare confirmed that Sea of Thieves will soon get a ‘Custom Seas’ mode. This will essentially be a custom server browser, allowing you to join hosted servers with custom settings.
This move will also address one of the biggest complaints newcomers have when jumping into Sea of Thieves for the first time. The game is not exactly friendly for solo players, as there is always the risk of running into a squad of blood-thirsty pirates. With the addition of custom servers, solo players can jump into their own private world or start up a server for a group of friends, doing away with the trials and tribulations of random matchmaking.
Fallout 76 has a similar system in place, but with far less control over the world. In Sea of Thieves, custom servers will be able to make changes to squad size, allowing for massive 16-player pirate crews. You can also adjust weather behaviour, spawn in extra items and more.
Unfortunately, Custom Seas will rely on its own server hosting technology, so while players will be able to start up their own servers, they won’t be able to run it off of their own hardware, you’ll have to pay Rare for one of their servers instead. Pricing for that has not yet been announced.
KitGuru Says: Custom Seas sounds great but I do wish we could have the option to host servers on our own hardware. It is something I certainly took for granted back in my early days of Counter-Strike Source and Garry’s Mod, and it is something sorely missing from the multiplayer gaming market nowadays.
