On the Change to the Dark Adventurers Sails

In a video post on November 8th, Rare, the developers behind Sea of Thieves, announced that they’d be looking at the designs of several sails, and would be changing them to be more inline with all the other sails in the game. While there are several sails that are differently designed, the sails that most people are talking about are the Dark Adventurers sails.

The Dark Adventurers sails are unique in two ways. The first way that the sails are unique is that they are very, very expensive. Like all the other Dark Adventurers items, the sails are incredibly expensive, designed to be a money sink for veteran players. In fact, they cost 8 million gold, and can be bought in the Pirate Legend Hideout. However, the more unique thing about the Dark Adventurers sails is the V-shaped cut at the bottom of the sails. This cut allows you to see a little more than normal, and it’s most useful on the larger ships. The flatness of the brig and galleon in particular makes the sails kinda useful? It’s not a huge amount, but apparently it helps. Personally, I never really minded, and since I dislike the design on the sails, and since I normally don’t helm on a galleon, where it’s the most useful, it’s less of an issue to me.

However, in the Sea of Thieves news video, Rare stated that they feel that these sails offer a little bit of an unfair advantage. The whole point of larger ships is that numbers make things more powerful, and if you are on a brig or galleon, then you have team mates to help you steer the ship and point out things in front of you. The amount of benefit you get isn’t huge, but it’s still a benefit compared to almost every other sail in the game. It seems lately that Rare want to make things more fair for everyone, and forcing people to spend 8 million for a slight benefit goes against that. You can see this in the nerfs to quick-swapping/double-shotting, where people used animation skipping to fire one gun then quickly switch to a second weapon – people shouldn’t have to rely on a glitch to do more damage. While the Dark Adventurers sails aren’t as big, they are definitely an advantage.

I do think that Rare are missing a trick though. Rather than removing the cut from the Dark Adventurers sails, they could have added the cut to every sail in the game. It’s a LOT more work (because there are a lot of sails in the game) but it would solve the problem in a more positive way. A lot of people are suggesting that you should just be able to buy a v-cut variant of every sail, but I actually think that’s worse, you still have to spend extra money for an advantage. It’s easier to just modify one set of sails (well, a handful of sails, the Black Pearl sails and the Kraken sails in particular) than to modify all of them. Makes things more consistent as well.

With the Dark Adventurers sails nerfed, this will be a boon to fashion. More people will have more freedom to use different sails since they won’t feel forced to use something for a small advantage. Or they will continue to use the Dark Adventurers sails, because they are kinda cool, and people did spend 8 millon gold on them.