Sea of Thieves' latest update is live, combat has been improved

UPDATE:

Sea of Thieves’ February update is live and well! While you will have to redownload the entire game, albeit with a slimmer install size, you’ll also see a fantastic rebalancing of the game’s combat.

• Double-Gun Switching ?– The Flintlock, Blunderbuss and Eye of Reach have new wield animations and enforce a delay when equipping and switching between these weapons.
• Fluid Swordplay?– Missing a Cutlass swing no longer slows player movement down, ensuring a more fluid swordplay experience.
• Eye of Reach Hipfire?– Reduced accuracy when hipfiring the Eye of Reach. Under pressure you can still get lucky with a Hip-Fired Eye of Reach shot, however at mid to long range this is significantly reduced.
• Weapon Knockback?– Flintlock & Eye of Reach shots will no longer apply knock back to enemies hit, Cutlass and Blunderbuss however will still retain their ability knock back players. Skeletons wielding Pistol, Blunderbuss & Eye of Reach have also had their ability to knockback players removed.
• Weapon Reload Improvements ?– Following the recent changes to the Eye of Reach, now both the Flintlock & Blunderbuss reload the moment the hammer is pulled. This allows players to sprint sooner when reloading without restarting the animation.
• Bullet Projectile Speed?– Bullets fired from a Blunderbuss or Eye of Reach now travel faster through the air, providing more predictable accuracy at range.
• Weapon Damage Falloff?– Bullet damage no longer decreases over distance.
• Eye of Reach Damage?– Reduced Eye of Reach Damage by a small amount to ensure this weapon’s damage is balanced following the improvements to bullet speed and damage falloff.

Alongside this update, players also have a new way to play the pirate-mmo game online with their friends for free this weekend! Look here for details!

Original Story:

Sea of Thieves’ upcoming February update will see players re-download the entire game.

The newest update comes due to a change in the game’s file structure, allowing Rare to keep the game’s total file size lower than it previously was.

Xbox One X owners will have to download a total of 25GB with base system players only seeing a 10GB file size. PC will be slightly larger at just 27GB. Before this update, Sea of Thieves weighs in at 47GB, 35GB, and 47GB respectively. It’s a substantial decrease!

With this new file structure, Rare says they’ll have much more control over how they patch the game. The game may see larger patch downloads, but the game will have a smaller data footprint on your console.

This also helps the developer themselves. As the game gets incrementally larger across updates, transferring builds over their internal network takes longer. It takes more time to make, test and polish.

The update launches on February 6th alongside a host of quality of life improvements: streamer settings and combat tweaks to remove double-gunning.

Sea of Thieves is available on Xbox Game Pass for £7.99 or $9.99 a month.