Sea of thieves is a highly social game that encourages players to befriend other pirates at sea or to betray their own alliances for gold and glory. The only problem is that players are limited to a maximum of four players on a ship. While it is technically possible for players to have more than four players on the same server, it is a major hurdle and is not likely to change any time soon.
At the moment, if players want to have more than four players on a server, they need to find another player on their own ship. Using the Xbox’s social features, that stranger can invite one of the galleon’s friends to his ship and then disconnect, giving control to the new group member. This requires a galleon to chase another ship, negotiate with its owner and go through the bullshit of getting the stranger to invite a fifth friend to his ship.
At the moment, Rare “has no specific plans” to change that, but creative director Mike Chapman told Polygon in an interview that the studio “has extensively discussed all the different ways you would expect in terms of changing ships dynamically in the world and crew size expansion. “
Part of the problem comes from clarity – when a player sees a galleon in Sea of thieves, Rare wants them to be able to understand immediately what it means that they can engage with four players and react accordingly. Another part of the problem comes with the Xbox Live infrastructure and network code.
“It’s more complex than we thought it would be in terms of Xbox Live session sizes and all that,” said Chapman. “It is quite complex.”
This does not mean that Rare will never present an option for players to start the game with a fleet or a six-person ship. But it will be a lot of work for Rare, and there are no updates on the horizon. At the moment, players will have to get used to playing with three of their buttons or chasing ships on the horizon to create their own fleet. In June 2020, Rare introduced private servers for content creators. The feature allows streamers or community figures to generate a code and share it with community members so that they can participate in a Sea of thieves server, although it does not grant gold or mission reputation.