Since April 30, 2024, PS5 players can now play Sea of Thieves, one of the Xbox exclusives that Microsoft has loved a lot in recent years. No wonder with its 40 million players, an ultra active community, a game which pushed Ubisoft to want to do the same, but which was completely lost with Skull & Bones, in short Sea of Thieves, it’s the story of a huge success that many players, but also people in the industry did not believe at first. Because we must also not forget that Sea of Thieves is the project of the Rare studio, which experienced a lot of problems after its acquisition by Microsoft in 2002. A former prestigious studio when it worked hand in hand with Nintendo, Rare has had one set of disappointments for almost 20 years, searching for a new identity. But in recent years, the studio has regained its letters of nobility, and can even boast of being the game with the best physics and the best rendering of water in a video game, even in 2024. But how did the developers -he does ? This is what we are going to see together.
Sea of Thieves is a game that was first released in 2018, on Xbox One and PC, but which received a technical update when the Xbox Series was released in 2020. A priori, the PS5 version is of the same ilk, the exact replica. In fact, Sea of Thieves is not a game that is cited for its graphic or technical qualities, and it is true that seen like that, the game is not very beautiful. We are far from the photo-realistic AAA games that we usually see, such as Hellblade 2 or Alan Wake 2 to name just these two games. That was never the goal of Rare, which opted for a very cartoonish graphic approach, a bit in the spirit of Fornite-style games, the idea undoubtedly being to attract a certain audience, quite young obviously, allowing at the same time to fulfill all the technical constraints if the game was a war lightning and a photo-realistic game. So, the goal here is not necessarily to impress and be a technological showcase, the objective is for players to have fun quickly and well, with constant and permanent fluidity.
SAIL SET
Despite everything, there is still one technical and visual element on which Sea of Thieves puts the entire industry on notice, and that is the rendering of the sea in the game, sublime and technically impressive. As much as the graphics are a bit cubic with this rendering, the water physics in the game is exemplary and ultra realistic. Of course, the rendering of the water displays the same artistic direction as the rest of the game, with this very cartoonish aspect, but it is its rendering and its physics which are ultra grounded, ultra realistic. I’ll let you admire the images, and you’ve seen them since the start of this video, but never has a video game reached such a degree of realism in the management of the sea, water or a liquid in a video game. And that was precisely one of the challenges that the Rare studio was willing to take on during its development. Obviously, for a piracy game where we will spend 100% of the time at sea, Sea of Thieves had to be impeccable in terms of the sensations obtained at sea, on a boat. And we can say it, the work is simply striking. Whether it’s a sea of oil, with swell, or in the middle of a storm, it’s total control. But then, how did the Rare developers do it? What did they understand that others did not? Why are they the masters in this field?
First thing that allows the water to be so realistic in Sea of Thieves is to begin with the management of light, the way in which lighting overall has been managed throughout the game. Since the latter plays with the notions of day/night cycle, but also weather, the reflections in the water had to be as credible as possible, and that is absolutely the case. You just have to take a look at the moment of sunrise or sunset to see the effects that are projected onto the surface of the water, considerably changing the atmosphere of a sequence, or of a moment. It’s so beautiful that you could stay in front of it for tens of minutes, just looking at it. And it was essential for Rare to be able to offer such a contemplative universe, which encourages exploration and discovery, since the entire game system is based on this principle of going on an adventure. Can you see an island in the distance with your telescope despite the big waves that are raging? No problem, that’s also the challenge in Sea of Thieves. Make you want to let yourself be guided by the discovery of the unknown.
STRONGER THAN CINEMA
Technically speaking, Rare relied quite a bit on the techniques used in cinema, by Hollywood studios, but they nevertheless needed tools that could allow them to have total and above all dynamic control of the water. Obviously, a film is a pre-calculated rendering whereas in a video game, it is real time. And this was all the more important since the sea in Sea of Thieves is both an ally and an enemy, especially during combat. We had to take all of this into account and if the rendering is so natural and realistic today, know that the developers continue to work on it, sometimes making updates. For fans of techniques and tools, know that Rare has used Vertex Displacement technology, which allows you to control the movement of the tops of waves, or at least water in general. It is a joint work and in permanent communication between the CPU which calculates the vertices of the mesh, while the GPU will divert and move the positions of each vertex to create the movement, the undulation, which will create a new geometry and dynamic.
But all this needs another tool so that the movement of the water is natural and above all never the same, and this is where the famous Gerstner Waves technique comes in, which consists of splitting dynamic fluids, also called trochoidal swell. Okay, can you follow along? It gets a little technical, but in reality, it’s super interesting. It is a calculation that was discovered by Baron Von Gerstner in 1802, which describes gravity waves of periodic form which propagate on the surface of an incompressible fluid of infinite depth, in steady state. Didn’t you catch anything? Me neither, and I copied this formulation from Wikipedia. In reality, this calculation solution makes it possible to simulate the behavior of the ocean, in any case its movement, using a sinusoidal wave. But this is the calculation of a single wave in fact, so you have to multiply this calculation to obtain several waves together, and by changing the intervals and the magnitudes, it is then possible to create a surface which undulates like that of the sea And with 3D engines like Unreal Engine 5 where it is possible to implement these calculations, we can have fun going further, by changing the inclination and all the parameters. As a result, we can have rough seas, rougher seas, and even storms.
But that’s not all, to refine the rendering, developers must push the technology further, by having fun with the shader, the mesh and other technical equations which will make the rendering of water even more complex and therefore more natural. Here, it is the talent of the developers that comes into play. Moreover, games like Assassin’s Creed Black Flag and Batman Arkham have already used the Gerstner Waves formula, but it is said that the next revolution in game management The water would come from the highly anticipated GTA 6. Leaks speak of a version 9.0 of Rockstar’s RAGE engine, knowing that for GTA 6, no less than 20 technical developers would only take care of water physics. We might as well tell you that we can’t wait to see such a result in 2025. In the meantime, we can enjoy contemplating the already magnificent water in Sea of Thieves, which remains the master in this area to this day!
