Sea of Thieves is an upcoming exploration-based pirate game from Rare. Rare is a first-party studio owned by Microsoft and they've promised Xbox One X enhancements for the game.
The developer is known for many famous franchises including Conker and Banjo-Kazooie. However, for the past few years, the team was focused on developing Kinect games for Xbox One and Xbox 360, but that's no longer the case. Sea of Thieves is a result of that and it's a concept the team hasn't tackled before.
Sea of Thieves features co-op multiplayer and is played from a first-person perspective. Just like Destiny, it takes place in a shared world. A group of players travel in the open world together and take on different roles. For example, the captain may steer the ship while the other individuals attack enemy vessels. Despite being open-ended, there are numerous quests, loot and combat opportunities. It's all about finding your own way in this massive oceanic world.
Sea of Thieves has been delayed a few times and now is scheduled to release in 2018. Given the fact that the Xbox One X launched a few days ago, a recent developer interview focused on the console. All of the upcoming enhancements were detailed during this conversation.
Sea of Thieves runs at native 4K resolution on Xbox One X. During the interview, the developers made is clear that this is native 4K and doesn't utilize techniques like upscaling or checkerboarding found in many other games. Towards the end, they also added that the Xbox One X version is on par what you find on an "ultra-spec" PC. Those with 1080p televisions will also benefit from the upgrade because it uses higher-resolution textures than the standard Xbox One version.
It's great to see Rare pushing the Xbox One X by making Sea of Thieves comparable to the PC version. Hopefully this isn't just talk and the final product will stand strong. The developers also said that they weren't going to use a dynamic scaling solution, which lowers the resolution if it senses problems with the frame rate. Let's hope the performance is stable as well. However, only time will tell. We'll have to wait until 2018 to find out.
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