Sea of Thieves outlines more tweaks to the blunderbuss and its general balance strategy for Season 14

Last month Sea of Thieves promised some adjustments to the blunderbuss weapon, changing its role from an offensive to a defensive tool with the addition of a knockback effect. Now that those changes have had some time to settle in the game, Rare is reconsidering some of those effects.

Production Director Drew Stevens reckons that the blunderbuss’ knockback ability was “maybe a tad too powerful on reflection,” with the devs now looking to lessen the knockback and make it a bit more consistent. Stevens admits that striking a balance between offensive and defensive capability for the weapon requires some fine tuning, but he promises that it will arrive to the full game once insider testing has yielded the right results. In addition, throwing knives will get faster aiming and projectile speed in a patch later this month.

Stevens then discusses what will be happening to weapon balance in the immediate future, which essentially boils down to nothing for the time being: Rare is electing to halt any major revamps to the other weapons in the game until the release of the grappling hook weapon in Season 14. The studio reasons that it wants the new addition to “settle into the meta” before tweaking existing weapons further, but Stevens does point out that the eventual goal is to give every existing and upcoming weapon in the sandbox a defined role.

Otherwise the video news digest discusses the community weekend events landing on September 21st and the usual highlight of cosmetics in both outposts and the cash shop (natch).