When Sea of Thieves eventually launches sometime in 2018, PC and Xbox players will be able to do battle with one another thanks to cross-play support. 

It is certain to be a bloody war, for cross-platform rivalries run deep. Developer Rare knows this and almost added platform-exclusive sails to the game, to further fuel the conflict. PC players would get their own sails, and Xbox players would get theirs. Then, if a PC player spotted an Xbox gamer (or vice versa) at sea, they’d know they were a hardware rival. 

Rare ultimately decided against this, choosing to instead “assimilate players as seamlessly as possible.”

Speaking to PC Gamer, Rare’s PC design lead, Ted Timmins, spoke more about this decision: 

“We’ve had these conversations internally … What we do have done if there was a massive imbalance [in cross-play]? I thought: Maybe we should just embrace it, and try to settle some 30-year old disputes. We thought about PC players having their own sails and Xbox players having their own sails … But we decided to shy away from that, for now at least, because we spent a lot of time on the balancing side and are keen to assimilate players as seamlessly as possible.”

Would you have wanted to see platform-exclusive sails in the game? Or do you think the platform war is bad enough as it is?

Source: PC Gamer