Things are about to get lively on the Sea of Thieves! After spending far too long as giant, trash-talking disembodied head, the nefarious Captain Flameheart finally makes a proper return to Rare’s multiplayer pirate adventure next Thursday, 25th July – and he’ll be terrorising players with his formidable fire-belching warship as Season 13 gets underway.
As Rare explained earlier this year, that warship, The Burning Blade, serves as a new roving world event out on the waves, giving players the opportunity to go head-to-head against its awesome firepower if they so choose. The Burning Blade is officially the most powerful ship in Sea of Thieves, sporting ten cannons, the ability launch Ashen Roar balls of fire from its flaming bow, and a sizeable crew of obsidian skeletons to deal with. But if players manage to defeat it in battle, they have a choice: sink it in defiance of Flameheart or pledge their allegiance to the dread captain and become the new crew of The Burning Blade, temporarily at least.
Players that choose to do Flameheart’s bidding and man The Burning Blade will get some assistance from its former obsidian skeleton crew, which’ll be useful as other players – who can always see the vessel on their map – move in to try and take control themselves.
But what can you do as the new crew of The Burning Blade? Well, that ties in with Season 13’s other new feature: Skeleton Camps. These are located throughout the Sea of Thieves, built by obsidian skeletons in order to extract mysterious artefacts from ancient temples hidden deep below the earth. Any crew, regardless of their allegiance, can approach active Skeleton Camps to ride the lift down into their depths and solve the puzzles within, but Flameheart has a special task for those commanding his vessel.