The latest Sea of Thieves Adventure titled “The Forsaken Hunter” has finally begun, kickstarting another wave of narrative-driven quests to invest players in the lore of the game.
It’s been a few weeks since the last Adventure where the community got to choose between trying to save Golden Sands Outpost by helping Merrick and the outpost’s former residents, or destroy the outpost to satisfy the vanity of The Servant of the Flame who had attacked it previously.
Rare’s new Adventures have been making the lore of Sea of Thieves more overt, where before it was tucked away in hidden journals and optional dialogue with NPCs. Now players are being properly introduced to characters that have existed for quite some time, and breathing life into the actual roleplay of the setting.
In The Forsaken Hunter, we find that Merrick has been trapped in the Sea of the Damned. He’s been killed by an unknown assailant and waylaid by a Masked Stranger and Duke, the former leader of the Bilge Rats. You can check out the launch trailer for The Forsaken Hunter below.
For those not in the know, the Masked Stranger is likely Wanda the Warsmith, a key figure of the Cursed Sails update. She used to be a vendor on Morrow’s Peak Outpost before experimenting with the cursed metal that made up the cannons of The Burning Blade. Wanda melted these down to create cursed cannonballs, but inadvertently cursed herself as well. Since then, Wanda has become a Skeleton Lord. Now under the name Captain Warsmith, she wants to destroy the Sea of Thieves.
Meanwhile Duke used to be the leader of the Bilge Rats. However he uncovered some terrible secret in the events leading up to the Sunken Kingdom update. Whatever he discovered, has convinced him to work alongside Captain Warsmith and other forces of evil.
In order to advance their plans, Captain Warsmith and Duke have trapped Merrick in the Sea of the Damned, a place where pirates slain on the Sea of Thieves wait to be ferried back to the land of the living (respawning is canon in Sea of Thieves, barring certain exceptions). It will be up to the player and Belle to discover what happened to Merrick, and rescue him from the Sea of the Damned.
The Forsaken Hunter adventure began on June 30th and will be live through July 13th (I know the trailer says the 14th, but Rare does some whacky stuff with time zones. I’m pretty sure it will end at 5am EST on the 14th so get it done before then).