If you were hoping to play through Sea of Thieves on your own as an offline single player experience, you might be a tad disappointed. Lead Designer on Sea of Thieves, Mike Chapman, recently answered a bunch of questions about the game in an IGN report.

According to the recent IGN report on the game, Sea of Thieves will be an always-online experience and will not give players the option to take on the seas through an offline experience. The report indicates that, while there are NPCs on land for players to contend with, there will be no NPC controlled ships on the seas.

Chapman constantly makes mention of how every ship you see will be another player, somewhere in the world, so presumably AI characters will be entirely locked to the land.

You are able to play alone online as you would in other shared world games like Destiny or The Division, but there will be obvious benefits to playing with others online.

According to the report, quests often won’t require more than one person to complete, but you cannot control an entire ship by yourself. You can, however, utilize a smaller “single-crew boat, equipped with one sail, a small capstan (the wheel that drops the anchor), and (I’m extrapolating here) a single cannon.”

Obviously you won’t experience the full breadth of the game playing this way so while it’s an option, it’s not necessarily recommended. Chapman’s hope is that players will find each other in the world and team-up or, inevitably, engage in conflict. The IGN report includes more details on how these systems work in the world of Sea of Thieves.

You can read the full IGN report for a host of new details on Sea of Thieves.

We’ll keep an eye out for future updates in regards to the ability to play Sea of Thieves offline as a single player experience, but for now it seems to be taking the route of games like Destiny and The Division.

I’ve scoured the official Twitter account for the game and haven’t come up with any definitive answers just yet, so we’re going to mark this as a rumor for now.

Source