When Rare’s Sea of Thieves releases later this year, the game won’t have any microtransactions of any kind at launch. However, some microtransactions will be added to the game 3 months after its release date, but Rare promises it’s only of the cosmetic kind.
Rare’s executive producer, Joe Neate, revealed this news during an interview with IGN. He said:
“Our focus at launch [is] on a great game experience. When we deliver this first major update, that’s when we’ll turn on the ability for players to spend money optionally.
“We thought long and hard about what’s right for our game experience, and the key thing we think is that it has to add to the fun, social nature of the game. So anything in this area will not impact power or progression, and you’ll always know what you’re getting – so that means no loot crates.
In other words, Rare is not following the mistake of EA by adding a pay to win system that is hidden behind stupid loot boxes. In Star Wars Battlefront 2 when it first launched, people could literally pay real life money in order to get ahead in online multiplayer. Worse still, you were just buying loot boxes meaning you were buying things blindly at the time.
It sounds like in Sea of Thieves, it will just be the old fashioned kind of microtransactions where you pay a small fee just to look cool. You can still earn cosmetic items by playing through the game itself, although it might take a long time to go that route.
Sea of Thieves releases worldwide on March 20th, 2018 for Windows 10 PC and Xbox One. It is an online multiplayer video game where you can be a pirate that can sail the seas and do more like-minded activities.