Sea of Thieves has launched into Season 3, and with a new Disney collaboration in tow, and there are also accessibility features that make their debut with the new update.
Rare’s swash-buckling Sea of Thieves title has received a number of new accessibility features with the launch of Season 3. These updates are very much welcomed, especially as the game is no doubt expected to experience an influx of new players with the addition of A Pirate’s Life Tall Tales. These are a series of quests created in collaboration with Disney from its Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, featuring characters from the movies.
For those booting Sea of Thieves for the first time, they’ll be offered a range of accessibility settings now and will be offered a shortcut to the wider accessibility settings menu. There’s also a “Family Mode” that disabled voice and text chat from other player-controller crews in the open world.
Sea of Thieves Season 3 has also had UI menu visibility improvements for accessibility, now using an opaque background behind UI menus instead of a blurred effect that was introduced in the last major update. The front menu will now use a darker background in addition. And for pop-up notifications, players can adjust how long these appear on screen for by using “Toast Message Duration”.
Sea of Thieves can also make use of an in-game language that works independently of the operating system language. And when it comes to narration, Let Games Read to Me will now narrate cosmetic chests and Shop UI menus. The Pirate log area will also be narrated for both Season and Reputation sections, while the Trading Company representatives menu navigation is now narrated. Finally, barrel contents are now narrated as well with the Let Games Read to Me feature enabled.
Another interesting feature is that those jumping into the game to take part in the Pirates of the Caribbean Tall Tales won’t have to worry much about other players attacking their ship and ruining progress. In usual Tall Tales, they take place in the game’s open world, but with A Pirate’s Life Tall Tales, they take place in separate instances away from other players. This means that they will be less concerned about working hard to get treasure or progress, only to be sunk by some ruthless cutthroats.
Sea of Thieves Season 3 accessibility updates are only some of the studio’s continued efforts to improve the game. Rare recently opened up support requests for those that want to flag accessibility-specific concerns, and in April, Season 2 improved text and UI legibility. A single-stick mode was added to the game which was followed by auto move and narrated emotes, while additional communications were improved with radial wheels, and text size was made customizable.
