Almost six years have passed since Rare launched its pirate adventuring game Sea of Thieves, and major under-the-hood upgrades are still in the works. Despite being light on gameplay changes, the newly released 2.10.1 update is a massive one, both in size and scope.
With it, the game now runs using the latest edition of the Xbox GDK. Plus, DirectX 12 has finally arrived at the title, making it an option for modern hardware over DirectX 11, which will still be available for older systems. With these feature upgrades, Rare is promising performance improvements across PC and Xbox consoles.
"General client performance improvements should be seen throughout the experience, with PC players seeing the largest improvements," says the studio.
Unfortunately, the upgrade comes with almost a complete redownload of the game's files on Xbox and Microsoft Store (PC Game Pass) platforms, with sizes reaching up to 102GB. Only Steam players have been spared from the massive download, with a comparatively tiny 10GB update waiting for them instead. Here are the download sizes for each platform:
- Xbox Series X: 88.36 GB
- Xbox Series S: 90.15 GB
- Xbox One X: 88.36 GB
- Xbox One: 90.15 GB
- Microsoft Store: 102 GB
- Steam: 10.49 GB
Thankfully, following this massive update, Rare says future changes on console and the Microsoft Store will be much smaller in size thanks to internal improvements. Perhaps updates will be similar in size to the Steam version going forward. The Microsoft Store version has been improved further too, with Sea of Thieves now supporting custom installation locations via the Xbox app.
The Sea of Thieves 2.10.1 update's complete patch notes can be seen here, which also touts water visual improvements, details the balance changes being done for some voyages, and the latest Pirate Emporium refresh for premium cosmetic items. There's a massive list of fixed issues here too.
Don't forget that Sea of Thieves is rumored to be one of the games incoming to PlayStation 5 consoles as part of Microsoft's newest initiative to bring some of its first-party titles to rival platforms.
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