Rare talks listening to critics and running Sea of Thieves on a potato

A few years ago, we published an article asking developers to stop making horrible PC ports. It's a guide that should have been inscribed on massive stone tablets throughout the land, but it's 2018 now, and rubbish PC ports are still happening. One developer our words did get through to is Rare, who took to the stage at the recently concluded PC Gamer Weekender to reveal just how close Sea of Thieves comes to following our extensive list of commandments to the letter.

One particular area from our guide that's brought up is social media integration—to whit, there isn't any. Not that that's something I want in a game these days, but I'm sorry we've missed out on a bespoke pirate dating app named 'Tind-arrrgghh!' Here's Rare's PC design lead Ted Timmins chatting about that, the PC port, and analysing reviews:

Rare seems to have put a lot of of effort into making Sea of Thieves run on older computers, too. While it's not quite playable on a potato—at a push, maybe a King Edward—that's something the team joked about as they worked on optimisation, and tracked down old monitors with outdated or obscure resolutions, so they could be sure the game would look good for everyone:

Sea of Thieves will be with us on March 20th, so mighty soon. You might want to take a look at those surprisingly achievable system requirements while you wait.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.