Sea Of Thieves PC Features 540p, 15 FPS Lock Options

Like a growing number of games, Rare's swashbuckling adventure Sea of Thieves will be playable in 4K on Xbox One X and PC. Even if you don't have a high-end machine, however, Rare has made it so that you'll still get the full experience out of the open-world pirate game.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Sea of Thieves executive producer Joe Neat briefly touched on the hardware requirements players will have to meet to play the game. "We're trying to go as low as possible," he said. "We have an idea of what the minimum specs are but aren't quite ready to reveal them. We've actually been inviting people below our current plan for minimum specs into the technical alpha so we can test a number things on the performance side."

Even without minimum specs, we do know what the low end of the spectrum will be like. According to PC design lead Ted Timmins, the developer has added a mode to support 540p. "We've also added a 15 FPS framerate lock because when we were talking to the community some people were like: I'm actually happy playing 15 frames per second," Timmins explained. "We were like: that's actually really cool, we should support that. And to go to them and say, oh, we've added that mode for you--it's below our Rare certified min spec, but if you're enjoying the game, why should we as developers knock you for that?"

Sea of Thieves releases sometime in 2018. We learned a bit more about the title at Gamescom earlier this month, where Rare revealed that the pirate game will allow cross-play between Xbox and PC. We had a chance to talk with Rare studio head Craig Duncan back at E3 2017 about the challenges of creating a new multiplayer game.