Less port, more starboard
Were building Sea of Thieves on Windows 10 in parallel with the Xbox One version. Its important that players on all platforms are in sync, which has the added benefit of being able to support great features like Xbox Play Anywhere. This means the more traditional port approach of bringing games to PC simply wouldnt work for us. Whenever were working on a game feature, Lead Designer Mike Chapman and I discuss how the feature will work across both platforms. Most of this boils down to a discussion around UI and control input, but with some features we get the opportunity to (excuse the pun) push the boat out a little more. An example of this, which those of you might have seen in our videos, is the inventory radial UI. On Xbox One this is controlled with the analogue stick, but on PC this is controlled with the mouse (although of course youre more than welcome to use a controller as well!). Both platforms have their sensitivity fine-tuned separately, but the core underlying feature is the same. This means that players who take advantage of playing across Xbox One and PC will have a consistent experience, which is very important to us.
Getting our PC legs. Get it? Like sea-legs?
While were developing the game features, we of course need to actually get the game to you! This is where things start to get a little more complicated. The most important thing for us is that Sea of Thieves performs well on PC. Not just from the point of game stability, but also its frame-rate and how well we can bring the experience to a range of PCs in the future. This is where the Xbox One has an advantage in that its a fixed platform, which means we can go into Technical Alpha earlier, so on the PC side whilst the game has all the same content as Sea of Thieves on Xbox One we need to test it across hundreds of PC setups before going into real players hands. Were fortunate as a 1st party developer within Microsoft to have access to some great facilities, one of which is named SHIELD which is a PC testing lab in Seattle with over 250 (!!!) different configurations of devices. The information we get back from this facility (which looks just like the Goldeneye level, honest) is absolutely priceless, and helps inform not just our engineers internally at Rare, but also our partners AMD, Intel and Nvidia.
This is our current PC focus as a development team, and were going through our first round of Shield testing next week so well be able to share more in a future update!
Testing back at port
We also have 24 different devices in our own testing labs, 12 laptops and 12 PCs, which cover a wide range of specs from low-end machines all the way up to the overclocked 4K monsters. Theyre all equipped with different keyboards, mice and monitors, with my personal favourite being the beautiful 21:9 curved monitor (144Hz!), so that we have a good spread of inputs. Its certainly a race to the best PC each time we have a playtest! In all seriousness though, each machine is important in its own way, as we know that the minimum spec is crucial for us being able to invite more people in to share the world with us, the medium spec will reflect the most common setup in the wild
And the 4K setups are just, well, awesome. One thing that unites all of these players is their expectation around stability, so well keep working hard as weve set this as our number-one goal.
We plan to keep all of our PC Insiders informed on progress as we head towards that first Technical Alpha on PC, so feel free to throw questions our way in the official Sea of Thieves Forums and well do our best to answer them