Sea of Thieves competitive PvP mode announced, out early next year

Sea of Thieves developer Rare has revealed a new competitive PvP mode called The Arena, which will launch early next year.

In The Arena, you and a group of friends take on rival crews with the aim of amassing the most loot. Expect both ship and hand-to-hand combat as you try to sink your opponents and steel their goodies.

It's all in service of impressing a new trading company, called the Sea Dogs—presumably they'll be the ones totting up the treasure at the end.

Essentially, it's Sea of Thieves PvP condensed down onto a smaller map where you're given specific goals, and I can see that sort of guaranteed action appealing to lots of people.

You can watch a trailer for the new mode above.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.