00:02Hey, I'm John McFarlane, Community Video Manager here at Rare, where we're currently hard at work on Sea of Thieves.
00:08Now we wanted to create this new series to give you a behind the scenes look at some of the
00:11work that was going on here at the studio.
00:13We hear from the community almost every day that you want to know more about Sword Combat,
00:17so let's go speak to some of the developers and see how it's coming along.
00:21Follow me.
00:24In he's come.
00:26Greg's just handily waiting on me, Claire.
00:29So I'm here with Design Director on Sea of Thieves, Greg Males, who, if there's any madness building those about
00:34Swords, it's going to be you, right?
00:36I hope so.
00:38So basically, why are Swords important in Sea of Thieves?
00:42I think when you think about a pirate, the first thing that springs to mind as well as a ship
00:46and treasure and gold is a sword.
00:48So kind of a pirate fighting another pirate with a sword has always been an important part of the vision
00:53and a key player expectation as well.
00:56What can we expect from, what can players expect as the first implementation of Swords in the game?
01:01Yeah, the first implementation is we just want to get a sword into players' hands and kind of give them
01:05an option to engage with other players or call skeletons in a different way other than shooting a gun.
01:11A shooting a gun is a very ranged option, whereas a sword is kind of right up close and personal,
01:17one-on-one.
01:18So it's a very different way of engaging in combat.
01:20And what about the, in the future, what can we expect from swordplay?
01:24Yeah, we want to kind of, starting from just getting the basics in, we want to kind of expand it
01:29into a kind of a deeper system which allows players to kind of get better at it,
01:32kind of work out how they use the mechanics to kind of fight as a crew and trying to capture
01:36the vision of kind of exciting, dynamic kind of sword meeting, sword combat.
01:40Like the kind of ting-ting-ting of the exchanges and we want players to be using all the different
01:44environments, like on the ship, kind of jumping off the ship and the fight carries on in the water or
01:49you're up on a cliff and you knock someone off over the edge and you jump down onto the beach
01:52after them and carry on the sword fight.
01:54It needs to be kind of a flowing, living way of fighting. That's really fun.
01:59Okay, so I'm here with senior engineer John Watkins, who's going to run us through exactly where we are in
02:03the process of putting swords into the game.
02:07So we're talking about like a kind of version one of the swords going into the game. What exactly is
02:13that?
02:13Yeah, absolutely. So version one is pretty much hitting things with swords.
02:19and you've got the full-speed kind of animations and sound effects and pass effects and the feedback you'd expect.
02:26And what exactly does that look like in the game at the moment?
02:30It looks just controlling one person here. You can kind of go around, like I say, hitting people.
02:36You can also, by holding attack to a heavy attack, which does more damage and slightly kind of narrow hit
02:45detector on it.
02:48So we're seeing the feedback here. So this is the third person.
02:52Yeah, we've got two players running locally, but this would be much like what you'd see if you've got two
02:58clients.
02:59We've even got a spoofed latency in this built-in as well, so we can test that within the editor.
03:05So, yeah, we also have kind of combo attacks where you do several, three here.
03:12Attacks as a combination, where if you keep hitting and you're in the middle of attacks and you're hitting someone,
03:17as long as you keep landing attacks, you'll start the next one in the combo and you get sort of
03:21a slightly quicker second and then third attack
03:22as a result of landing a previous one.
03:25You've got this full-screen effect that also shows the direction from which you've been damaged.
03:28So any time you receive damage from any weapon, in fact, when this goes in, we did this work, particularly
03:35for melee,
03:36because it's so important to know when you're being hit from behind that it's coming from behind.
03:40It just immediately gives you some more information if you see, you know, these kind of indicators that stretch out
03:46to the back of the screen.
03:49But that's where any damage source, so the same would be true for Blunderbuss pistol.
03:54Yeah.
03:55So it's fair to say that when this goes in, it's not like it's going in an unpolished state.
04:01Sure.
04:01It's just a version of that, like there's going to be more features added to it, is that right?
04:06Yeah, that's right.
04:07There's a whole bunch more to come.
04:09The heavy attack is a good example where we want to have knockback where if you're knock blocking and you
04:13get hit with one of these heavy attacks,
04:15which you really can see coming, there's a lot of warm-up animation involved, right?
04:20So if you get hit with that, you should feel like it's your fault.
04:23And as a kind of balance to that, we also have the player getting sent flying, which is quite a
04:29disadvantage, obviously,
04:30and can result in you being sent off your ship or off a cliff and then taking falling damage further
04:34or whatever else.
04:35Lots of different things can kind of emerge based on sending someone flying.
04:39So that's something that'll come in later on.
04:41We're putting in this version one of it.
04:43What is the sort of feedback that we are looking for at this point?
04:47Like, what are we hoping to see from players?
04:51I think the balance of the weapons versus balance of melee weapons versus other weapons is something that we're interested
04:58to see.
04:59There's this thing that I think, as Mike Chapman's spoken about recently, you know, there's like cannons and then guns
05:04and then swords,
05:05which you kind of expect, but we want to make sure it sits well within that overall vision of how
05:11it should be when you engage another crew on your ships.
05:14So thank you very much for watching.
05:16We hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at sword combat.
05:19And remember, if you want a chance to play Sea of Thieves early and help shape the game with features
05:24like sword combat,
05:25then sign up to our Insider program.
05:27Thanks again for watching and we'll see you soon.
05:33We'll see you soon.
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