Ahead of its sometime-in-2018 release date, Sea of Thieves has spent the last several months showcasing its mechanics, modest technical specs for lesser-equipped machines, and behind-the-scenes dev processes, among a number of other things. Its latest trailer is less serious in tone, but is good fun nevertheless.

Riffing off Trainspotting's iconic 'choose life' speech and Iggy Pop's accompanying Lust For Life, Sea of Thieves asks that players "be more pirate".

So, less in the way of drug abuse, stealing televisions and pegging it down Edinburgh's Princes Street—and more "treasure-grabbing, skelly fighting, and taking no prisoners", among other high seas-living, swashbuckling activities. There's a fair bit of theft in there too, mind you, but it's more focused on treasure chests and desert islands.

Earlier this year, I chatted with developer Rare about the game's cross-play features. Most interestingly, it almost included PC-specific sails designed to spark cross-platform rivalries.

"There are some games where you play cross-play that might be for a certain mode or social only or not PvP and things like that," the game's PC design lead Ted Timmins told me. "With our shared world, what we're saying is: if you've got a Windows 10 device or any Xbox device, you're welcome to play Sea of Thieves with friends or meet new friends.

"We've had these conversations internally. What we do have done if there was a massive imbalance [in cross-play]? I thought: Maybe we should just embrace it, and try to settle some 30-year old disputes. We thought about PC players having their own sails and Xbox players having their own sails. But we decided to shy away from that, for now at least, because we spent a lot of time on the balancing side and are keen to assimilate players as seamlessly as possible."

Sea of Thieves is due at some stage in 2018.