‘Sea Of Thieves’ Beta Launch Hits Some Rough Waters But Races To Top Of Twitch
The highly anticipated Sea of Thieves closed beta launched Wednesday morning for the Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs. The co-op action adventure title unfurled its sails and rocketed to the top of Twitch viewer counts. However, it has not been completely smooth sailing as some players are still attempting to get into Rare’s latest.
Some Sea of Thieves players began noticing they were unable to get into the closed beta as soon as it went live at 7 a.m. ET Wednesday morning. Multiple reports in the game’s Reddit forums reveal some participants receiving an error informing them they are too early. That should obviously not be the case and Rare is currently working on the issue.
The official Sea of Thieves Twitter account posted a note saying: “We’re aware some players are getting a ‘too early’ error when attempting to launch the Sea of Thieves Closed Beta. We’re currently all hands on deck investigating and will provide updates ASAP.”
Additionally, Rare Studio Head Craig Duncan shared, “Hey, we fully appreciate some players are having issues downloading and getting entitlement to the beta, this was unexpected and our engineering and operations teams are working on this as a priority — appreciate your support here until we resolve.”
There does not appear to be a direct correlation with the “too early” error as of yet.
Update: Rare announced just before 3 p.m. ET that “a fix will be rolled out in the next few hours.”
Update 2: Rare said at 6:30 p.m. ET most of those affected by the “too early” error should be good to go now. The rest will be fixed in the next couple of hours.
The sudden amount of interest in Sea of Thieves has also flooded the official website in a “tidal wave” of visitors, per the official Twitter. The site is currently offline while the studio drydocks it for some upgrades.
This “tidal wave” of interest has had plenty of positive effects, however. Sea of Thieves quickly jumped to the top of the Twitch charts with more than 170,000 viewers at the time of this article. This far surpasses the viewership of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite: Battle Royale as the more social co-op experience of Rare’s title draws in viewers. It is also the most viewed game on Microsoft’s Mixer streaming service with more than 3,500 viewers.
#SeaOfThieves at the top of Twitch!!! Unbelievable!! ?? #PlayersCreatingStoriesTogether pic.twitter.com/LhceLzmWJY
— Andrew Preston (@keeyaaaa) January 24, 2018
The Sea of Thieves closed beta will run for five days and end at 3 a.m. ET/12 a.m. PT on Monday, January 29. Access to the beta can be gained by pre-ordering the game or will be given automatically to those who participated in the Insider Programme.
Pirates interested in Sea of Thieves shouldn’t expect a taste of the full version of the game during the beta. Rare crafted a special version of the game just for the test in order to keep the bulk of the pirate life a surprise for the full release in March.
Sea of Thieves will officially launch on March 20 and will be included as part of the $9.99 a month Xbox Game Pass subscription service immediately. As previously covered, Microsoft upgraded its Netflix-like subscription service for games to include all first-party Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive titles when they launch. This also includes Crackdown 3 and State of Decay 2 for 2018 plus new entries in the Halo, Gears of War, and Forza franchises in the future.
