Just days after the release of Sea of Thieves' stealth-focused season 14, developer Rare removed nearly all of its new features, including the ability to crouch and disguise, acknowledging “major issues” arising from its addition to the game.
Rare had already been forced to disable a number of flagship new features ahead of Season 14's launch last week – namely the ability to set traps and hang from ledges – as a result of stability issues and a “high player impact” discovered. during a final round of testing. As such, their decision to now remove crouch and disguise means that only a small fraction of Season 14's announced features are currently available to players.
Speaking in a video update detailing the “drastic steps” today, Sea of Thieves production director Drew Stevens explained that the arrival of crouching had “introduced a series of knock-on effects to the broader experience” . More specifically, it led to the return of a number of PvP exploits that Rare had previously attempted to remove, including the ability for players to switch weapons faster than intended and control their aerial movements after firing a cannon. Rare has also identified an invincibility exploit.
“We're really unhappy with the quality of the Season 14 release,” Stevens acknowledged in his update video, adding that Rare is “taking this situation very seriously.” He went on to explain that the studio's first priority is to “stabilize” the player experience, and that it will begin reactivating features once it is “confident they meet our quality standard.”
Crouching and disguises were temporarily disabled during emergency maintenance today and the hope is to bring them back as part of an urgent fix targeting “high-impact issues” scheduled for next week. Stevens said that rather than rushing its release and “further exacerbating the problems,” Rare wants to ensure that next week's review brings “significant” improvements and is given “the necessary time.” [in] internal quality assurance.
As for traps and hanging ledges, the studio hopes to re-enable them as part of its regularly scheduled monthly update in November, which also promises “more fixes, improvements, and balance changes.” In this update, Rare will test a new behind-the-scenes process that aims to provide “more time and focus for our internal testing” and allow for “additional hardening” with Insiders. If all goes as planned, all commendations, rewards, and achievements associated with the currently disabled features should also return.
“We all understand how frustrating this has been,” Stevens continued. “I know I've talked about it before, and I'm sure you're sick of hearing it, but we know we have to do better here, and season 14 has suffered from a lack of quality control… Us.” “We will be all hands on deck over the next few releases to regain control of the quality of the game.”