Developing multiplatform games is always a challenge for most development teams, especially for PC releases. With so many different possible system configurations, it's difficult to develop a game that runs well on a wide range of machines. No matter how difficult this can be, Rare is striving to make the PC version of Sea of Thieves as enjoyable as it will be on Xbox One.

　　Recently, the Sea of Thieves development team shared some interesting insights on how they're proceeding with the development of the PC version of the game. The team is keen on making the game enjoyable on a wide range of PCs, and, as such, will begin some intense testing, starting with a testing phase as a PC testing lab called "SHIELD" with over 250 configurations of devices.

　　While we’re developing the game features, we of course need to actually get the game to you! This is where things start to get a little more complicated. The most important thing for us is that Sea of Thieves performs well on PC. Not just from the point of game stability, but also its frame-rate and how well we can bring the experience to a range of PCs in the future. This is where the Xbox One has an advantage in that it’s a fixed platform, which means we can go into Technical Alpha earlier, so on the PC side whilst the game has all the same content as Sea of Thieves on Xbox One we need to test it across hundreds of PC setups before going into real players hands. We’re fortunate as a 1st party developer within Microsoft to have access to some great facilities, one of which is named “SHIELD” which is a PC testing lab in Seattle with over 250 (!!!) different configurations of devices. The information we get back from this facility (which looks just like the Goldeneye level, honest) is absolutely priceless, and helps inform not just our engineers internally at Rare, but also our partners AMD, Intel and Nvidia.

　　Rare also underlined how important it is for Sea of Thieves to get the minimum spec right, as the team wants to invite more people into their world. Medium spec will reflect the most common setup.

　　In all seriousness though, each machine is important in its own way, as we know that the minimum spec is crucial for us being able to invite more people in to share the world with us, the medium spec will reflect the most common setup in the wild… And the 4K setups are just, well, awesome. One thing that unites all of these players is their expectation around stability, so we’ll keep working hard as we’ve set this as our number-one goal.

　　Sea of Thieves launches on Xbox One and PC on a yet to be confirmed release date. We will keep you updated on the game as soon as more comes in on it, so stay tuned for all the latest news.