Sea of Thieves players roast Rare over Season 18 delay: “Seasons may be delayed, but these ‘season delayed’ drops are always on time”

Major seasonal postponements have been rare since Rare adopted a seasonal cadence in 2021, though smaller features and minor updates are frequently delayed. It’s also worth mentioning that Rare felt the effects of Xbox’s summer restructuring; while the precise impact on the Sea of Thieves team is unclear, the Everwild project was canceled outright.

Season 18 Delayed – Sea of Thieves Developer Update: October 31st 2025 – YouTube

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“Quite remarkable that switching to a mildly different approach to content release and some reskinned Merchant voyages for this season seems to have completely obliterated the release schedule, rare never fails to impress,” reads the top comment on Reddit, which had nearly 250 upvotes at the time of writing.

“Rare is one of the only developers that manages to only do reskinned content and still fail to deliver it on time. Truly impressive work,” reads a response with roughly 100 upvotes.

“I’m so glad Rare started drip feeding the most thread bare updates ever just so they could still manage to fuck up,” reads another widely upvoted comment.

That said, not every response is purely negative — this comment is my favorite: “Seasons may be delayed but these ‘season delayed’ drops are always on time.”

Beyond the delay itself, much of the frustration centers on perceived repetition and a lack of meaningful variety. It has been some time since Sea of Thieves shipped an expansion on the scale of 2021’s Jack Sparrow collaboration with The Pirate’s Life, and players miss those larger, standout experiences. Still, it’s worth remembering Sea of Thieves remains a rich, evolving pirate sandbox that has improved in substantial and positive ways since its launch.

While we wait for Season 18, here are the best Xbox Series X games to play right now.