In GTA Online, players can do older business content, but there’s no point if they can spam the Cayo Perico Heist for millions of dollars for less effort. Rare aims to make all content viable with seasons, so players don’t have to repeat one valuable voyage or event repeatedly. Everything else added in these seasons is built on the existing game world.

Players have to intentionally sail across the map and enter the region. This is an opt-in hard mode for plucky players, because you can not spawn there. The map is mostly unchanged, save for the new Devil’s Roar, a volcanic region that occasionally showers players with fiery meteors. Now Rare has entirely switched to a three-month seasonal model. Sea of Thieves’ initial strategy was to release occasional expansions, and then started running a monthly update schedule. Rare’s pirate game, Sea of Thieves, has neatly dodged this problem, and the latest update ensures the entire sea is worth sailing. World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto Online are both hugely popular games that struggle with this problem: The newest content is always the best, and the rest can be forgotten. But new content often invalidates everything that came before.

Everyone loves getting to log in and open their favorite game to find new character classes, dungeons, or worlds to explore. New content can, strangely enough, be a double-edged sword for online games.

Sea of thieves fish