Sea of Thieves players recently celebrated a long-awaited addition to the game: After six years, players finally had the ability to crouch. The game’s latest update added a number of new stealth features for players to make use of, but unfortunately, almost all of those features have now been disabled due to bugs.
The additions were part of the game’s stealth-focused 14th season, and two of the season’s biggest features–trap-laying and ledge-hanging–were cut before they even hit the game due to stability concerns uncovered during a last-minute round of playtesting. Now, just a few days after Season 14’s launch, even more features have been removed.
“We’re dealing with some significant issues,” production director Drew Stevens admitted in a video update posted to the Sea of Thieves YouTube channel.
“I want to be clear that we’re taking this situation very seriously,” Stevens continued. “We’re really unhappy about the quality of Season 14’s launch, and we’re going to be be taking some pretty drastic steps to get us back in control. Our first priority is stabilizing your experience in Live [Mode], we’ll then move to reenabling features once we’re confident they meet our quality bar. So today, we’re taking Sea of Thieves down for a short maintenance [period]. Now, given it’s only been a few days since launch, we don’t have a hotfix that addresses the high-impact issues yet. We will, however, be making some changes today.”
Some of those high-impact issues include the return of several exploits Sea of Theives developer Rare has previously addressed in the past, like the ability to swap weapons rapidly and control a character’s movement after being shot out of a cannon.
As a result, new features like disguises and crouching have been disabled, leaving blowdarts and grappling guns as the only Season 14 features to survive its launch. Stevens says Rare hopes to have a hotfix for crouching, gun swapping, and the game’s other “high-impact” issues by next week, with plans to implement the promised trap-laying and ledge-hanging sometime in November.
“I know I’ve spoken about it before, and I’m sure you’re sick of hearing it, but we know we need to do better here, and Season 14 has suffered from a lack of quality control,” Stevens admitted in the video announcement, before reassuring players that Rare is taking Season 14’s issues very seriously.
“We’re going to be all hands on deck through the next releases to get back in control of game quality.”