Recently I got to play Sea of Thieves for the very first time. And what immediately stood out was just how different it was to anything I’d played before. And afterwards I had the opportunity to chat at length with Rare's Joe Neate about the game. So pull up a chair, pour some grog, adjust your eye patches, and enjoy this interview with Rare about all things Sea of Thieves.

AusGamers: With studios that have been around for a while people assume that it's the same people that are there after 20 years or more, but that's not how the industry works. I'm assuming the culture at Rare was established a long time ago, but Sea of Thieves feels different to just about everything we’ve seen before.

Joe Neate: Rare has been around for 32 years now and it's a studio that has always grown and evolved to kind of look at what new trends are emerging in the industry or kind of where player tastes are going and almost changing what they make and what they do to meet that. If Rare did just make the same stuff over and over they probably wouldn't still be around. Because player trends change, and player tastes change, I think what has always stayed true to Rare is that every game they make reflects the people who worked on it. So, the team's sense of humour, the culture of the studio, the values that Rare has. And so, every Rare game that you've grown up playing will have had a sense of humour, and it would have made you smile, -

AusGamers: There's a very British and dry sense of humour throughout all of Rare's history.

Joe: For sure. With Sea of Thieves, how we do that in the modern age, and a very different game than something that Rare has made before has been interesting. We've got this multiplayer game. We give players the tools to almost create their own humour. So, firing stuff out of cannons, getting drunk, and um, being able to be sick, and throwing up into buckets and throwing up on each other. All those things. It's almost like the difference between improv comedy and stand-up comedy. A game that delivers the jokes to you and tells you the jokes and makes you smile is like a stand-up comedian. Whereas in improv comedy, it's very much situational and dependent on the kind of tools you're given. But it's still funny.

Click Here to Read Sea of Thieves – The Big Rare Interview