If it's not on your radar yet, we need to tell you to stop what you're doing and take a closer look at Rare's new IP, Sea of Thieves. Seriously. Because it's one of the most fun games we've had the pleasure of playing, and we were also lucky enough to have a chat with the notoriously reclusive studio about their new endeavour.

The setup is simple -- party with five people, man a ship and take to the high seas to do almost anything you want, including battling teams of other players. Find treasure, make people walk the plank, fight undead skeletons, escape the jaws of sharks, fight a kraken and do it all however you see fit.

Sea of Thieves is an emergent multiplayer beast that redefines player-driven gameplay. Here's a snippet from our chat with the games' design director Gregg Mayles and its executive producer Joe Neate.

Honestly, Sea of Thieves was probably the game I had the most fun with at E3, and I only played roughly 15-minutes of it, but it’s packed with potential. The game is a series of systems and opportunities, which then require the player to determine how they all work together. Actually, scratch that. It’s not the “player”, it’s players.

“It’s a shared-world experience; a shared adventure game,” adds executive producer Joe Neate. “And what that really means is that every time you see a set of sails in the distance, that’s another group of players and you’re not really sure what their intentions are -- are they going to come at you? Do they maybe need help? Do they want to parlay, or trade, or anything else?”

It’s best described as a kind of co-operative experience, with a team-based competitive side, as well as a personal progression component. You’re sort of forced to play together and perform individual roles, specifically on ships, but as a pirate it’s not a hard and fast ruleset -- you get to play the game how you like.

Click here for our complete Sea of Thieves interview feature.