For the second year in a row, Microsoft's online pirate fantasy game Sea of Thieves was one of the most purely fun experiences on show at the E3 expo in Los Angeles.

Made by the legendary British studio Rare, the colourful, ridiculous game is all about living out your pirate fantasy on the high seas, and is designed to be an online role-playing game that anybody can get in on.

Mike Chapman, the game's design director, says Rare "passionately believes that we are building the pirate game that you've always wanted".

"Maybe if you grew up reading Treasure Island, it's the fantasy of following a map to buried treasure, exploring mysterious islands, hanging out drinking grog and playing musical instruments" he says.

"That tone and the humour, if you're old enough you might remember, from Monkey Island. The thrill and the excitement of Pirates of the Carribean, we think we capture all of that".

Quests come in the form of treasure maps and riddles that crews can choose to investigate, but the you're likely to get distracted along the way. A crew member in the crow's nest might spot some gulls circling, indicating a sunken ship to plunder, or a random crew of rogues might spot your ship and decide to engage you in battle (or join you for a drink!).

What sets the game apart from many online experiences is the lack of complicated rules and statistics you need to be across. Joining a crew is as easy as getting some friends together and going online, or going online solo, and having the game fill in any remaining slots with other players in the world. Most actions are as easy as approaching an object — say some rigging to open the sails — and pressing a button.

This easy, non-technical attitude permeates the whole game, which seems designed to keep you in the pirate fantasy as much as possible without pulling you out and reminding you you're playing an online game. If you die, you go to a ghost ship with other lost souls while you await your chance to rejoin the living. If you get separated from your ship, a singing mermaid shows up to lead you back where you should be.

"Even if your ship sinks, we don't want it to be like you lose everything", says Chapman. "It's fun to mess up in the game, because that becomes a memory that you take away".

During my most recent time with the game at E3, I was grouped up with complete strangers and we were left to figure out what we wanted to do. Within minutes we had the anchor up and the sails unfurled, headed towards an island we believed would yield some good loot (based on a map that was handily in one of our inventories, and a big chart table in the captain's quarters of our ship). One of our crew (perhaps inadvertently) fired himself out of a cannon towards a totally different island, so we dropped anchor and followed along.

After a brief scuffle with some skeletons, one of the crew members and I witnessed a different crew leaving the island with a hefty-looking treasure chest. Rallying the troops we scrambled back to our ship and set off in pursuit. Although we did manage to put a few cannonballs through the scurvy dogs' hull, we were ultimately separated by a massive storm and left with no idea where in the sea we were. If we had have made off with the treasure we would have been able to drop it at a nearby outpost, but as it was we got our compasses out and tried to work out how far we were from our original goal.

From the ability to bust out a musical instrument or a stein of grog whenever you like, to the fact that all players need each other to sail the ship successfully and can communicate via voice chat, the game is designed so that players will make friends even if they're total strangers. Unlike many shared world online games, there's very little advantage to double-crossing or "griefing" your team.

A good example of this in practice is the way that loot works. You can't simply race over to a treasure and touch it to collect, you need to work together to lug the chest back to your hold, often fighting off skeletons and other hazards.

"We deliberately have the chest as a physical object. And the contents are shared out amongst the crew", Chapman says.

"[So] if you were the one to grab the chest, it's in my interest to protect you. We're swimming back to the ship once we've got the chest, I'm there trying to fight off sharks to make sure you get back because I want whats inside as well. And that bonds us together".

This is true in my experience, although it's certainly not without a degree of crew members screaming at each other as their hull fills up with water or a consensus on which way to sail can't be reached. As fun as the game can be, it remains to be seen how many times you could get on a ship with random strangers and set out into the world before it starts to get tiring. It would seem that those sailing with a group of good friends are likely to have more fun (and be much more efficient) than temporary rag-tag crews.

Still there may be another option for those sailing solo. While all the demos so far have shown crews sailing in big four-person ships, the final version of the game won't require you to get four friends together or be matched into a crew of four.

"If you want to come in and play on a small ship, and have this great solo experience in a shared world, you can do that as well", Chapman says.

"We really don't want to put barriers in place for people to play how they want to play".

All of these design decisions will, the team at Rare hopes, contribute to a shared world RPG that isn't as intimidating or exclusionary as similar games have been in the past.

"I love the idea it could be someone's first multiplayer game", Chapman says.

"Someone could come in and dip their toe into the water playing on that small ship, but have that magic of coming across other players. Maybe they die and they meet other players on the Ferry of the Damned, hit it off with people and go crew up with them".

Sea of Thieves is due to launch in early 2018 on Xbox One.

The author travelled to Los Angeles as a guest of Ubisoft.