More and more of us are going digital, but that transition is coming at the price of hard drive space. Having an external hard drive is pretty much a necessity these days. We all have those games that push 50GB or even 100GB. I’m looking at you Halo 5.
Sea of Thieves is another game that was slowly creeping up in size after nearly one year’s worth of updates. But the folks at Rare are prepping an update that’ll take a significant chunk out of the install size. Here’s the breakdown by platform:
Xbox One – from 35GB to 10GB
Xbox One X – from 47GB to 25GB
PC – from 47GB to 27GB
The change helps the developers and us. For us, the change is obvious. Less room is taken up on our hard drives. For Rare, it helps in the day-to-day dev cycle we don’t often see or think about. Simple things like transferring builds around become quicker with a smaller install size. Or generating builds and getting them sent on to players. It also means bigger content updates in 2019 won’t add too much to the install size.
The change does mean we’ll have to reinstall the game. Rare plans to push this update on February 6th, so be on the lookout for a larger update than usual.
The February 6th update will also include a handful of more traditional changes/updates. A new streamer setting will allow you to toggle crew names off/on so enemy crews can’t crash your stream.
Rare will also be tweaking the combat mechanics as well including changes to the ‘double gun’ exploit. Right now, you can fire a gun and instantly change to a second one to get easy kills. No specific word in the dev update about how they plan to address it, but a fix will be coming with the February update. A longer animation or making the cutlass take a mandatory slot seem like the obvious choices. Maybe Rare has something else in mind that’ll leave players with the choice of how they want to fight but at the same time getting rid of the exploit.
February is just the start for what should be another solid year of Sea of Thieves updates in 2019. A competitive PvP mode called Arena was announced back in November and is slated for launch in ‘early 2019.’ Hopefully, Rare shows off a bit more once this February update lands.