Rare released an update for its pirate sim Sea of Thieves yesterday, 19 September, but it seems that the changes that have been introduced have completely broken the game. So much so, in fact, that the development team has announced an emergency maintenance for the game starting at 15:00 CEST today, 20 September. As they report in a statement on their blog, the game is likely to be closed for the whole weekend while they fix the most serious issues.
In this regard, it seems that the most pressing issue is the fishing rod. The update changed the way it works and that has caused a bug that has branched out to the whole game experience, so the first hotfix will be to revert or fix this, presumably during the afternoon-evening of this evening.
The second hotfix will arrive next week, Thursday 26th to be exact, and will fix the behaviour of throwing knives and change certain appearance patterns for the Burning Blade and skeleton ships.
“We appreciate all the bug reports and feedback we’ve received since we released the update on Thursday, and myself and the team recognise that this update has not reached the level of quality it should. It’s disappointing that many of our players are experiencing issues at the moment and we hear your frustrations – we have some work to do here to improve the experience for everyone – so thank you all for your patience.
Drew “Sonicbob” Stevens”
So you know, if you’re playing Sea of Thieves now, drop off as much loot as you can at the nearest port, because it looks like the ships will be tied up this weekend.