How Microsoft’s Rare imagined the pirate world of Sea of Thieves

Sea of Thieves is a silly pirate game where you can board an enemy ship by being shot out of a cannon. Microsoft’s Rare studio has been working on it for a few years, and it is looking better each time I see it.

The title is a massively multiplayer online game where you can share a world with lots of other pirates. It’s a four-player co-op game with voice chat. You can all run the ship together, performing manual tasks like unfurling the sails or shooting a cannon at another ship. This year’s demo showed what it’s like to go on a quest to an island and unearth a buried treasure. It seemed fairly trivial, but it was one of the most interesting gameplay experiences I had at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game trade show last week in Los Angeles.