Events, Accessibility and a Charitable Collaboration: Sea of Thieves News October 13th 2021

Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Sea of Thieves News. On today's show, Joe Neate gives us a look back at some of the things you may have missed over the past month as well as some of the fantastic charities we've been supporting. I'll be taking you through some of the latest editions in our in-season update and James Thomas is gonna be talking about some of the recent accessibility work we bring to the game. It looks like we've got a jam-packed show today so let's get started. He

y, everyone. Great to be back with another Sea of Thieves News. To begin with, just a bit of a reminder around season four in the Sunken Kingdom that we released recently. So, if you haven't already dived beneath the waves into the treasuries and the shrines, then, make sure you do like it's it's amazing to really be able to open up a new part of the Sea of Thieves world. We're also running the Fury of the Damned live event which is live now and it's running through until November the fourth and

so make sure you take part in that if you wanna get your hands on the amazing Wicked Web Cosmetics. I also wanted to some time to talk about the one special rematch which was the charity football match we took part in recently where Rare went up against Playground for the amazing Special Effect charity. Unfortunately, the the result on the pitch wasn't everything that we hoped for but the results of the pits and in terms of donations was incredible. I think so far, we've had over 5, 000 pounds

of donations but there's still an opportunity to donate if you if you can. You can also go and rewatch this as other kind of VOD on Twitch dot TV slash Xbox. I think we're really worth going back and watching the the match again because the commentary was incredible like I think yeah the whole presentation everything was brilliant and there are some real highlights in there George Orton's goal Kem's run for our third goal obviously my free kick was was alright and the less said about Craig Dunca

n's tackling the better I I think. Here we go. Here we go. But yeah brilliant stuff and some amazing highlights for the Playground team too who ultimately were the with a better team on the day but but you know if you can then it's still open for donations and we're just love any any support you can give is just incredible for for such a wonderful charity and Special Effect. Everyone that organized it George Orton especially on the rare side but so many other people and yeah just just incredible

like honestly such a cool cool moment and and really worth watching back. So staying on the theme of amazing charities, we're really excited and proud to announce that we're gonna be partnering with No Kid Hungry, an incredible charity who are working to end childhood hunger across the US. So soon, we're gonna be bringing the Sails of Sharing to Sea of Thieves in the Pirate Emporium as we've done with previous charity sales for anybody to be able to purchase and again, all proceeds of that will

go to the No Kid Hungry Charity. So, yes, so if you're able to either donate to the Special Effect, one special rematch or if you're able to purchase the Sails of Sharing in Sea of Thieves, then, we hugely appreciate that and you know, we're just so proud to be able to be in a position that we can do that and help support these amazing charities. Uh so, I think that's it for me and I will be handing over to Mr Jon McFarlane. So, as always, I'll see you on the seas. Hello, so let's get started w

ith some free stuff because we know you love free stuff. The Sea of Thieves Origins Champion of Souls issue three comic is now available for free on Comixology.com. And remember if you missed any of the Origin Comics series you can get them for free on Comixology.com. In case you missed it, Sea of Thieves The Gauntlet presented by the Crown Channel, an exciting new competition based within the game has been playing every Tuesday from eight to 10 PM BST on Twitch.com forward slash crown. Tune in

to watch some of your favorite Sea of Thieves partners and the celebrity guests as they take on the evil Captain Crowtuck to earn points. And points mean prizes for you in the form of Twitch drops. So tune in and earn some gold. Our next end season update arrives on October 14th and comes with a whole host of bug fixes and some new content too. Arriving in store is the suitably spooky Crimson Crypt ship set, weapons, cost and tanker and if that didn't send a shiver down your spine, we've got the

Halloween high drinks and moat bundle and diabolical dog. If you ever feel lost, we've added interactable sign posts on every outpost on the Sea of Thieves. These will give you directions to your nearest trading company. Perfect for new players. And lastly, we've added Turkish language support to the game as part of our ongoing effort to make Sea of Thieves a place where everyone can play. And on the subject of bringing more people into the game, we have James Thomas up next talking about acces

sibility features coming in the next update. When deciding what we wanna try and put in C of Thieves for new accessibility options, it's always the community that helps lead us with this. Be it our interaction with special effect or our insiders. And one aspect that we're introducing is something that we're calling nautical narration. It's basically a speaking compass, something quite unique to Sea of Thieves and it all came about from one of our devs, Tofa, listening to how sightless combats a

player who is blind but plays Sea of Thieves and when you when you hear that, first off, that there's a blind player playing your game. How does how does he do this? And he managed to navigate the world by having one of his crewmates play a and so you are literally following the music around the island and the world and there's there's there's a nice vision of that but also you think we can we can help here. So in the same way that we added text to speech for the emotes that can narrate what peo

ple are doing. We thought well why not just do that with the compass as well? So Tofu quickly put together a little prototype and it worked great guns. So we've productionized it and now if you're wondering around the world you can pull out compass and it will tell you exactly where you're heading. Northwest. And hopefully people like cyclist will not then just have to rely on relative music. They'll be able to position themselves in the world and like anyone else talking about the treasures ove

r there, the targets over there. They'll be able to use the compass and feel more ingrained in the world of Sea of Thieves but it just shows what our community means to us. Half of the accessibility options we're adding in recent times have been triggered from the community themselves. There was a gift at the start the year based around our ghostly pirate loot and our community team put probably about 50 different pieces of booty in the rowboat and the ghostly effect that shimmers and wavers ove

r it they were just all fighting each other and it looked like you were staring into the void the beyond was trying to drag you into this gift and it was amusing picture but then reading the comments we saw a few people say that actually that triggers things in them they either feel seasick or just can't play the game and anymore and so we were just reading through that. We realized we can do more by turning off certain effects as well. So we've added a new suite of toggles where people can turn

off the ghostly effects screen shape and we realized these could have been simple things that we should have thought about but if it wasn't for the community reaching out and asking us to do it. That's that's what spurred us forward. Our community is what drives so many of these options and we encourage them to reach out. So if you've got any accessibility requests that you'd like to see in the game please head to Sea of Thieves.com slash accessibility and leave your feedback there. The team wi

ll definitely read it and we'll see what we can do in future updates.