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Sea of Thieves has been out for just over a year, and while many enjoyed the pirate game, others felt it just didn’t have enough content. Developer Rare is further attempting to address that feedback with the game’s Anniversary Update, comprising a new narrative-driven questline called Tall Tales: Shores of Gold and an entire new PvP mode named The Arena.

The Arena is a competitive mode for five teams of four set in smaller, distinct areas. At the beginning of each 24-minute match, every team receives the same set of treasure maps. You must proceed to one of the X marks in order to retrieve chests, which can then be cashed in for Silver at a number of special ships.

Of course, other teams are competing for the same chests to cash in, so you might find you run in to some resistance on your travels. Killing other players or sinking their ships nets you a small amount of Silver, and respawns are active. Particular to The Arena is a new damage model for ships, which can now have their wheel, masts, and anchor destroyed–though these can be repaired with wood in the same way you would fix a hull.

Tall Tales, meanwhile, is a new questline for people who wanted more direction in Sea of Thieves’ classic adventure mode. It’s set in the game’s usual shared world–which will also gain a new island that Rare says is its biggest island yet–and will see you complete a number of puzzles and riddles in the search for treasure. The mode includes new enemy types, items enchanted with new abilities, and a new faction that will buy fish and meat off you after you utilise new fishing and cooking mechanics. Sea of Thieves’ Anniversary update will be released for free on April 30.

Rare’s pirate game launched in March 2018 and was awarded a 6/10 in our Sea of Thieves review. “There may come a time when Sea of Thieves is able to entice me back, and I imagine that will be with a mix of new mission types and hopefully the promise of rewards that allow for new types of interactions, if not improve my character’s capabilities,” wrote Peter Brown. “For now, it’s a somewhat hollow game that can be fun for a handful of hours when played with friends, and something worth trying out if you happen to be an Xbox Game Pass subscriber. Even though it’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend, I like enough of what I see to hold out hope that things will eventually improve as the game continues to be patched and updated with new content.”

Star Wars: Episode 9 was originally set to be directed by Jurassic World’s Colin Trevorrow. However, Disney fired him over creative differences, and not long after, the company hired The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams to come in and finish the trilogy that he started years prior.

In a new interview, Abrams recalled being pitched on coming back to direct Episode 9–and his initial response was no. He told Fast Company that he had some trepidation over returning because “it was almost, on a personal level, a dangerous thing to get too close to something that you care that much about.”

With The Force Awakens, Abrams was happy with creating new characters and building a new story as the foundation for the new trilogy. It felt like playing with fire to come back to direct another Star Wars film, Abrams recalled.

“Though of course I’m aware that there are critics of that movie, it felt to me like we dodged a bullet. Like we got in there, we got to do something,” Abrams said. “And I left loving Star Wars as much as I did when I got there. Like, somehow, it was on a personal, selfish level something I was really happy to have done. Not just excited about doing but happy to have done. And to ask to have that happen again, I felt a little bit like I was playing with fire. Like, why go back? We managed to make it work. What the hell am I thinking?”

Abrams literally said, “No,” to Kennedy at one point, but his wife, Katie, convinced him.

“I think that she felt like it was an opportunity to bring to a close this story that we had begun and had continued, of course,” he said. “And I could see that even though the last thing on my mind was going away and jumping back into that, especially with the time constraints that we were faced with.”

According to Abrams, there was no script for Episode 9 when he came aboard, which suggests the version Trevorrow was working on was thrown out. He had the challenging job of creating a script and getting the movie made in a two-year window to hit the December 2019 release window that Disney wanted.

“You’ve got two years from the decision to do it to release, and you have literally nothing … You don’t have the story, you don’t have the cast, you don’t have the designers, the sets,” Abrams said. “There was a crew, and there were things that will be worked on for the version that preceded ours, but this was starting over.”

Because it was such a “mega job,” Abrams said he knew he wanted to bring on a co-writer. He ended up hiring Chris Terrio, who won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Ben Affleck’s Best Picture winner Argo.

One possible benefit of having less time to work on a project is that there is little time to overthink, Abrams said. He said he learned that working on Lost, which he and the team had just 12 weeks to write, cast, shoot, and cut for the pilot episode.

“Truly, finally–now that I’m back, the difference is I feel like we might’ve done it,” Abrams said about Episode 9. “Like, I actually feel like this crazy challenge that could have been a wildly uncomfortable contortion of ideas, and a kind of shoving-in of answers and Band-Aids and bridges and things that would have felt messy. Strangely, we were sort of relentless and almost unbearably disciplined about the story and forcing ourselves to question and answer some fundamental things that at the beginning, I absolutely had no clue how we would begin to address.”

Now that it’s done, Abrams said he thinks Episode 9 will be “something incredibly special.”

“I feel like we’ve gotten to a place–without jinxing anything or sounding more confident than I deserve to be–I feel like we’re in a place where we might have something incredibly special. So I feel relief being home, and I feel gratitude that I got to do it. And more than anything, I’m excited about what I think we might have.”

The full Fast Company interview is incredibly in-depth and fascinating; read it here.

Episode 9, or whatever the film ends up being officially titled, hits theatres in December. In other news, The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson recently said he wouldn’t be bothered if Abrams decides to retcon Rey’s parentage.

And in Star Wars video game news, Apex Legends developer Respawn is planning to reveal its new Star Wars game, Jedi Fallen Order, at Star Wars Celebration this weekend.

Red Dead Online Beta’s latest Showdown Mode, Plunder, is now available. Along a new mode, new clothing, items, weapons and horses are available at lower ranks for limited time. In Plunder, up to 16 players can form teams and battle to capture supplies. Until April 15, all coats, holsters, boots and gloves up to rank 40 will be available to all players.