According to Rare, the studio wants to offer a balanced experience that's equal in almost every facet. In practice, that means a game with full feature parity, but more than that it means an equal playing field from day one. So Rare also says they're planning on launching Sea of Thieves day and date on both console and PC, with launch still on track for early 2

This isn't the first time that Rare has talked about cross-play for Sea of Thieves , however. Earlier this year, when Rare first activated the closed alpha on PC, the team decided to try out cross-play just to see how it felt. Executive Producer Joe Neate called the experience "magical," explaining that it led him to question why any game would split player bases. But questions about balance and fairness prevented Rare from making it official straight away, however the more the studio considered cross-play, the more it realized there was no good reason not to include

Azario: Exploring the island with only a riddle to guide us added the right amount of difficulty to cause us some confusion without making us feel stupid. I could only imagine what the other riddles would ask of play

Despite experiencing a "rough" development process , Crackdown 3 ’s development finally seems on track for a 2017 release. The game’s explosive nature will rival that of Just Cause 3 , and finally give Crackdown fans the open-world sequel they’ve been begging for since the release of Crackdown 2 back in 2

Microsoft has officially announced that Rare's multiplayer pirate action game Sea of Thieves will feature cross-play between Xbox One and PC. The announcement came during today's Xbox Gamescom livestream, which included some new trailers, a few announcements, and Seaofthievesfans.com concluded with the launch of Xbox One X pre-orders. But cross-play for Sea of Thieves could be the biggest surprise, with the game's closed technical alpha implementing the feature, effective immediat

Undead Labs has revealed that it plans to release new details about State of Decay 2 at this year’s E3, but in the meantime has released a handful of screenshots and a reveal trailer that show how much the developer has learned these last few years. It’s obvious the sequel will incorporate many of the features gamers loved about State of Decay , while also injecting new features that players have been asking for since the first game in the series released. There’s little doubt State of Decay 2 will be one of Xbox’s most successful exclusives this y

For now, though, Rare will continue with the development of Sea of Thieves in preparation for its forthcoming launch. There's plenty to do, and Rare seems like they're adding new ideas as fast as they can come up with them. The studio just revealed how players can now get sick and vomit into a bucket, then use the bucket as a weapon against friends (or alli

What do you think about Sea of Thieves not being free-to-play? Is it fair for developers to still take this approach to multiplayer content, or has the era of paid multiplayer business models started to fade away? Let us know in the comments be

"One of the things we’re very aware of is the need for the balancing to be right. After running some recent tests, we found that PC players were 4.5% more efficient at killing skeletons than Xbox players, and this feels close enough that it’s something we’ll continue to monitor. However, PvP between platforms, or more importantly device input, is the big focus point for us as a Design team, and already we’ve been working closely with the Game Experience team to change the way the guns work to be better balanced for cross play. We’ve put in a bunch of telemetry around this, and with the change to guns it’s made them feel tonally so much more fitting, as previously they felt more like laser weapons than ancient plundered-and-pillaged gunpowder-driven blunderbuss

If you've ever wanted to glaze over a truly beautifully crafted MMO, you can definitely do so with Perl Abyss and Kakao Games' Black Desert Online , which is headed to consoles sometime early next y

While the Sea of Thieves trailer was short, it did provide a few interesting details about the upcoming title. Players will explore an open world that includes big and small islands, ships to sail aboard, and people to interact w

That said, the gameplay and information that have been released has many gamers excited for the possibilities coming in Sea of Thieves . There will be a strong focus on cooperative gameplay between players, plenty of customization with ships and activities, and engaging player-versus-player battles that will undoubtedly rival any multiplayer title currently available. Oh, and of course players will have to battle Scurvy, that wonderful sea disease brought on by a lack of vitami

At the upcoming E3 event, Phil Spencer and the rest of the Xbox crew are planning to give plenty of stage time to the games coming for the Microsoft console. And while not every game coming out this year has yet been revealed, there are plenty that have already been announced and are set to arrive in the coming months. In that vein, here are five Xbox One exclusives on the horizon that look poised for succ