Sea of Thieves: The Legend of Monkey Island expansion announced

Sea of Thieves has an all-new expansion on the way. And it’s one fans of a classic PC series will love.

Announced at the Xbox Games Showcase, part of not-E3 2023 season, Sea of Thieves‘ The Legend of Monkey Island expansion will bring three new Tall Tales to the online pirate-em-up. According to the official description, players will travel to the legendary Mêlée Island, potentially teaming up with Monkey Island protagonist Guybrush Threepwood.

The Legend of Monkey Island will launch in Sea of Thieves on July 20. If you’ve never played before, you can jump into Tall Tales right from a new game start. Plus, Sea of Thieves is available on Xbox Game Pass at no extra cost.

The Legend of Monkey Island will be split into three separate Tall Tales, releasing one at a time over the course of three months. That’s most likely going to be a pace of one a month, then. That’s kind of a shame, as Sea of Thieves’ Pirates of the Caribbean expansion, A Pirate’s Life, launched all its Tall Tales simultaneously.

Still, according to the official trailer description, each Tall Tale in The Legend of Monkey Island will offer a vast area to explore packed with “secrets and side-quests.” This was also the case in A Pirate’s Life, where you could tick off side objectives in your journal for extra cosmetic rewards. This will likely be the case, too, in The Legend of Monkey Island.

And if you did tick off all those objectives in A Pirate’s Life, you may have stumbled across a sneaky Monkey Island easter egg during one of its Tall Tales. At the time it seemed like nothing more than a cute nod, but in hindsight, it most likely was teasing Rare’s next major project for the game.

I’m most interested in seeing how the universe of Monkey Island is integrated into Sea of Thieves’ world. Will it build on the series’ existing canon, or stand on its own as something better suited to Rare’s pirate game.