One of the most requested updates in the Sea of Thieves community right now is improvements to hit detection when firing guns. Sometimes you shoot an enemy, get the hit marker, but no damage registers. Of course, this is a complex online game where a lot of information is being sent to the server at once, but Rare said it had teams working on improving this back in 2019. It’s 2021 and hit detection in Sea of Thieves is still patchy. With the big A Pirate’s Life update coming on June 22, will it bring hit detection fixes along with it? The short answer is: no.
“No, not as part of this update,” game director Mike Chapman tells me. “This is something that is very much focused on giving that cinematic experience, and that original story, using AI features and encounters that give you that cinematic feeling with a little action set pieces, rather than about pinpoint accuracy. We want it to be something that's accessible to new players, as well as engaged players.”
Rare has had a small team working on hit registration for a while now and progress is being made, but significant improvements are still to come. Chapman says it’s a “very complex” issue.
“But we have a team of actively looking at the moment and some things that we will be improving,” he says. “There's just ongoing investigations and little incremental fixes that we're slowly making.”
There’s no current timeframe on these improvements, however, so you’ll just have to live with it for now. At least we can experience the new Pirates of the Caribbean crossover in the meantime, which takes player teams into their own instances, away from the PvP seas of the main game. You’ll also be able to test your combat skills against a range of new enemy types, including spirits, sirens, and crustaceans. Check out our full interview about Sea of Thieves: A Pirate’s Life for more details.