While Sea of Thieves had a rocky launch back in March 2018, Rare has stuck by the game ever since consistently updating and improving the experience. Today, Rare and Microsoft revealed an impending optimization focused update for the game that will actually reduce the file size of Sea of Thieves.

This should surely pleases those players that are operating on the original 500GB Xbox One models still and are running out of space five years later. The update will be releasing on February 6, 2019. On an original Xbox One, Sea of Thieves' file size will be reduced from 35 GB to 10 GB. On Xbox One X, the game will go from taking up 47 GB to 25 GB. Finally, Windows 10 PC players will see the game's size shrink from 47 GB to 27 GB.

While its improvements are very welcome, this update will technically require that players re-install the entire game. According to Rare, the game install changing is actually quite beneficial as it will allow the developers to "more quickly generate and transfer builds" of Sea of Thieves. In turn, Rare is hoping that this will allow them to get updates out quicker.

Sea of Thieves

By making this change, Rare will be able to ensure that Sea of Thieves' initial install size won't bloat with each new update, though it may ultimately result in patch sizes increasing slightly. As for other tweaks, this update will also remove a double-gunning exploit and enhanced streamer settings. Sea of Thieves' Executive Producer also teased that there would be "another fun little thing" coming to the game alongside this update, but doesn't plan on revealing it until closer to the patch's arrival.

Rare is still promising tons of Sea of Thieves support throughout 2019 following this update. The Arena, which was teased at X018, will be releasing in the coming months, marking the first large content update of 2019 for Sea of Thieves.That being said, those of you who are curious about what DualShockers' thoughts on the game were at launch can check out our review.

You can check out the most recent developer update video where Executive Producer Joe Neate discusses this update in more detail. Sea of Thieves is currently available for PC and Xbox One. Those of you who want to get the game can either pick it up on Amazon or download it through Xbox Game Pass.