Rare's Sea of Thieves had a strong presence at E3, and Lead Designer Mike Chapman gave a few more pieces of information during Twitch's live coverage.

Chapman mentioned that some people want to be explorers, others want to do quests and want to go on epic adventurers, some want to deck out their ship, customize their characters, have cool sails and cool upgrades. To that end, the team is going to build "meaningful progression around what those motivations are." According to Chapman, "if you want to do specific things, there will be things you can do to progress in those areas."

On top of that, we hear that to get a ship going, you have to lift the anchor. More people pushing the anchor lets you raise it faster. Then you need to unfurl the sail by pulling the ropes.

last, but definitely not least, the coolest detail of them all: if you look at the sky in the game, there actually is a north star, and you can sail by it.

Sea of Thieves's next step towards release on PC and Xbox One will be a beta, even if we still don't know when that will happen.