Several years ago, a minimally publicized pirate game released for PC that breathed life back into the swashbuckling genre and reinvigorated our interest in PC role-playing games. Sea Dogs, as it was called, presented a Caribbean sandbox not unlike the Grand Theft Auto games, save for the fact that it took place on water rather than land. With allegiances to make and break, Galleons to hijack and loot, and hundreds of vessels to commandeer and turn into your own fleet, Sea Dogs provided dozens of hours of piratey goodness.
Flash forward two years, and Sea Dogs 2 promised much of the same sea battles, plus the ability to walk not only through island villages but also right through the gates and all over the rest of the island. But before you could say ?marketing deal,? Sea Dogs 2 became the Xbox and PC game Pirates of the Caribbean, essentially stopping the franchise from advancing further.
That is, until E3 2005, when Akella, developer of the Sea Dogs game(s), announced Age of Pirates, essentially the next swashbuckling RPG in the Sea Dogs line. We had a chance to sit down with Renat Nezametdinov, project manager for Age of Pirates, to hear more about what gamers can expect from Age of Pirates, as well as what the team learned from its previous two outings about the pirate lifestyle and the power of its Storm graphics engine.
Sea Dogs and Pirates of the Caribbean were both outstanding pirate RPGs and were originally designed to be part of the same franchise. What inspired you to create Age of Pirates, a new franchise, rather than the ?official? Sea Dogs 2?
Well, the Sea Dogs franchise owner is Bethesda Softworks, and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise owner is Disney Interactive. But the spirit and ideas with these games were born here in Akella. We really like this romantic courage of sea rovers and wanted to create new, extravagant stories of thier life in a new game.
The stories in Sea Dogs and Pirates of the Caribbean were based on strong main characters that players could customize through role-playing. Who are the main characters in Age of Pirates, and how do their stories intertwine?
In Age of Pirates players can choose one of two main characters, a reckless fortune-hunter named Blaze or a redheaded daredevil named Beatrice. Both of them are successors in some way to Nicolas Sharp, the hero of Sea Dogs and founder of pirate republic Libertalia. But how they are related with the great pirate I won?t say right now. What I can say is that story isn?t pre-scripted and will never be the same for different players, although the final goal of the game will be the same: to rule the Caribbean.
Akella gives a great deal of publicity to its STORM engine, even though the gameplay in these titles traditionally has been solid, too. How have you improved the engine from the previous games?
Well, we are working on improving both the technology and gameplay. We upgraded the game engine to version 2.5 (PotC was based on 2.0), and the main improvements are better sea (as always ;-)), more frames per second and more polygons. Also, the engine features a brand new shader-based particle system, full-screen glow effect and (drum-roll) a network module.
On the gameplay side of things, Age of Pirates really widens the boundaries compared to any other pirate game. The playing experience varies from naval battles and sword fighting to colony management and intricate quests. This really started with Sea Dogs, a good pirate RPG, but the series has now grown into a new genre we call ?pirate-sim.?
Will Age of Pirates include land-based aspects, similar to Pirates of the Caribbean, or will it focus more on the sea-based action similar to Sea Dogs?
While defining the concept of Age of Pirates, we discussed land adventures like exploring jungles, etc. But we wanted to make the game close to Sea Dogs and keep naval battles and sailing the main feature of the game. So, we shortened the land-based parts to what is really related to pirates and ships, excluding the other, more purely adventure aspects. We hope players who wanted to walk through jungles will forgive us for that. 😉
It sounds as though you will be implementing a Sim City style of gameplay, where players can develop colonies after they defeat and capture the fort. Is this true?
That?s absolutely true. In Sea Dogs and PotC, capturing a colony was a kind of gameplay dead-end. OK, you?ve got a colony, received some loot and that?s all. All you can do after that is just go capture another colony. We thought that was not so much fun, so we decided to redesign the idea of capturing the colony. Now capturing a colony is just a start; players must now retain the colony under their own rule. And that isn?t an easy task since the previous owner of it will soon try to get it back.
All of that lead us to idea of upgrading colony defense to make it bigger and stronger, so it will be easier to repel enemy attacks. And, of course, to maintain the good defense, a colony must have well-established infrastructure. With all that, we ended up with a concept close to building a castle in the Heroes of Might and Magic series. Different buildings give various bonuses to the colony, and not all of them are dedicated to defense.
This game seems perfect for a massively multiplayer pirate world and player-versus-player battles. Will Age of Pirates include any multiplayer support?
Your words are true, and we discussed the idea of MMO pirate world many times. But Age of Pirates features multiplayer that allows playing over Internet or LAN only. Multiplayer supports up to 16 players in one battle and has four game modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Fort and Sink the Convoy. I believe the mode names clearly describe what players will be doing while playing. Multiplayer also features a Ranking Table, where players? results will be saved so players can see how good (or bad) they are.
If you?re interested why we don?t make a massively multiplayer online game, I would answer that ?it?s not the time.? But when the time will come, it will be the best online pirate game ever. Really. 😉
The marketing materials talk about the advanced AI of opposing captains. Will the AI captains attack a player?s fort from time to time when the player leaves? If so, will players be able to leave a few ships under their command to guard the town, or how will they defend their colonies?
I shortly mentioned colony defense before, so I?ll just tell how it works. When a player has left his colony and the colony is attacked, he gets a message that the colony is under siege. Depending on the colony?s power and the strength of invaders, the colony can repel the enemies by itself or resist the siege for some time. The amount of time left before the colony surrenders is displayed so the player can try to return and defeat the aggressors with his own fleet, if necessary.
What lessons did you learn from Sea Dogs and Pirates of the Caribbean, whether from a gameplay or story-telling standpoint, that you have applied to Age of Pirates?
Actually all the aspects of Age of Pirates were designed with the experience and lessons we learned from Sea Dogs and PotC. And what is more important, before designing Age of Pirates, we gathered a huge amount of feedback from players all over the world. We read forums and e-mails to understand what players wanted, and many ideas in Age of Pirates came from the suggestions players proposed. I suppose one of the best lessons we learned was that it?s better to have a game without scripted cut-scenes at all than to have a game with bad cut-scenes. 😉
Approximately how many hours of gameplay to you anticipate Age of Pirates will include for each campaign (you said there are two main characters)?
Unlimited, if you don?t try to finish the game ASAP. The game features a quest-generation system to keep players occupied with new tasks and missions all the time. Even then, if you?re going straight to the victory, it will still take 30-40 hours to complete the game.
Is there anything we haven?t asked that you would like to tell people about Age of Pirates?
I?m sure that all people who wait for AoP will be interested to hear that main idea of the game is a total freedom and non-linearity that won?t push limits on players like following a prescripted storyline or completing prescripted quests. We tried to make a world that lives and allow player to live in it and we succeeded.
Thanks to the team at Akella for speaking with DailyGame.