Well, Sea of Thieves season 18 has been delayed to December, and wouldn't you know it, players aren't happy about it.
In a video update, production director Drew Stevens announced "things aren't going to plan" with Sea of Thieves season 18, and that the new season will now be a part of the game's December update, which doesn't have a firm release date yet.
Stevens didn't get into a lot of specifics, but simply said "the team are behind where we needed to be at this point in the production cycle" and, after reviewing feedback from players as well as insider testing, "it's clear that we're currently not on track to deliver an update that's gonna hit the quality bar we should be striving for."
Actual Sea of Thieves seasons have only been significantly delayed a handful of times since Rare shifted from monthly updates to the seasonal model in 2021, but it's a lot more common for smaller updates and features to be delayed. It's also worth noting, before I get into the absolutely brutal response from the Sea of Thieves community, that Rare was hit pretty hard in Xbox's Red Wedding over the Summer. It's unclear how much the Sea of Thieves team was impacted, but Everwild was canceled entirely.
"Quite remarkable that switching to a mildly different approach to content release and some reskinned Merchant voyages for this season seems to have completely obliterated the release schedule, rare never fails to impress," reads the top comment on Reddit with almost 250 upvotes at time of writing.
"Rare is one of the only developers that manages to only do reskinned content and still fail to deliver it on time. Truly impressive work," reads a response with almost 100 upvotes.
"I'm so glad Rare started drip feeding the most thread bare updates ever just so they could still manage to fuck up," reads another popular comment.
Although not 100% fair given what I previously said about seasons usually arriving on time, this one's my favorite: "Seasons may be delayed but these 'season delayed' drops are always on time."
In case it wasn't clear, Sea of Thieves players aren't just up in arms because another season's been delayed; it's also about the lack of variety. And, yeah, fair, it's been a while since we had anything on the level of the Pirate's Life, Jack Sparrow-themed expansion in 2021. Still, I'm reticent to dogpile here as Sea of Thieves remains a wonderful interactive pirate sandbox that's changed in massive, positive, fundamental ways since launch.
While we wait for season 18, here are the best Xbox Series X games to play right now.
