Mysteries will essentially blend in-game quests with the elements of an ARG, where players will have to solve mysteries both in and out of game. Whereas Adventures are pretty regular in their release schedule, Mysteries have multiple factors involving player engagement, player progression on the current clues, and so on. Overall, it’s a pretty interesting new feature for Sea of Thieves, and Game Rant recently spoke to creative director Mike Chapman and executive producer Joe Neate about them.

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The first mystery players will encounter involves a murder, with Sea of Thieves players having to figure out who did what. As Chapman described, players are “going to be investigating, piece together, all of these clues…who are the suspects? Who are your first bunch of suspects that you think it might be? Then, there’s center information in the community and different clues from different kinds of secret entities in the world.”

Players do not know yet who will die in Sea of Thieves, but Rare is aiming for very emotional storytelling with Mysteries and Adventures, so it’ll be interesting to see who loses their life and how the clues come to lead players down one path or another. Because Mysteries involve ARG elements, that are aspects that are in-game and out-of-game. In-game, Chapman used “finding hidden thing scratched into tree trunks…and using the tools in the game to piece together the clues rather than just observing” as how Mysteries involve players in the game world.

Of course, we had to ask about the real-world ARG elements, with Chapman summarizing it up as follows:

There are a lot of exciting things coming to Sea of Thieves, and these Mysteries may go a long way with keeping players engaged in the world. For now, players just have to wait and see who meets their fate in the upcoming murder mystery.

Yeah, so what’s really important to us is that we don’t use a bunch of abstract mechanics that almost feel counter to the spirit of the mystery. So with the ARG, we love the idea of the Sea of Thieves’ world feeling like it exists off the screen, but you still feel like you can get immersed in it even when you’re not playing the game because I think, like I say we want to capture people’s emotions, capture their imagination, and get people to kind of theorize what the next step is. So everything we do with the ARG will be completely in tone and tap into the unique theme of that specific mystery.

Sea of Thieves is available on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.

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