Rare"s weekly developer update went up today with some good news for those running out of space in their systems. A change in the way to how Sea of Thieves updates is handled is bringing down the installation size of the pirate adventure title by significant amounts across all platforms in February.
Since its launch last year, Sea of Thieves has been getting regular updates, ranging from major expansions to minor cosmetic additions. This has slowly bloated up the game to massive sizes across all platforms, with Xbox One X and PC players suffering the most.
With the new system in place, Xbox One gamers will see the install size go down to a whopping 10GB from 35GB, Xbox One X version will lower to 25GB from 47GB, while those on Windows 10 will see the game shrink to 27GB from the current 47GB.
There is a couple of downsides to this though. The game will have to be redownloaded from scratch once the new update hits on February 6. All future updates will also be slightly larger than usual as well, but they won"t massively inflate the base installation like previous updates.
In the same February update, Rare will also deliver a streamer-friendly option that will hide player nametags to prevent stream sniping, remove the double shot instant kill mechanic, as well as something special that the studio is keeping to itself for now.
The upcoming competitive treasure hunting mode to Sea of Thieves, Arena, is still under development as well, with no official release date being shared quite yet. Rare said it is currently going through internal testing and that Pioneers will be able to jump in soon.