Hey guys, a friend of mine linked me this thread. Thought i'd clear some stuff up about Blackwake.
I can tell you that I am not paying much attention to it because it seems over ambitious and under developed. This thread is a year old and the team has not yet released a public build. Instead we get a few videos and some amazing looking screenshots.
The whole thing just doesn't seem plausible to me. It seems like they will get their kickstarter but will give up with a half finished game in a year or so.
Ispil is right, this isn't that ambitious. If you stand back and look at the games scale - match based ship battles with sea monster pve, you'll see what I mean. He is right in saying most of what's left is mostly polish. We did most of the work first to prove we could do it and hope people would better trust us to finish this.
As to the public build, we have no reason to do that. It isn't ready to be thrown out, and as soon as it is we were going to allow our backers into testing. Read our update on why we won't be doing steam early access
here.
What I remember from multiplayer FPSs is that if there is a vehicle controlled by a player and other players are moving around on it, everything is jump/jerky. Every game that I have seen locks other players into fixed points on the vehicle. I played pirate mod for BF1942 that had this problem.
This is also the problem in games like this that no one has anything to do most of the time, except the captain. There are limited jobs for most of the game.
Finally, localized damage (say to your sails or rudder) seems to be something that is almost impossible for games to get right.
I know what you mean by the stutter/lag when standing on moving objects. That's why it's one of the first things we got working.
Here is a video of players moving freely on a moving ships:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-iBcKRKj50Localized damage is already ingame, we've had sail burning for a while now (0:51)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p2DPcUj5QwObviously we ditched the cloth for performance reasons (looking into shroud), but the burning away is still there.
Personally I can't say I find this interesting on the grounds of it being multiplayer-only. If it doesn't catch on hard enough to have those 300 players per region, then off it goes into the pile of multiplayer-only games nobody plays. And Mount & Blade Warband has a hard enough time maintaining those kinds of numbers despite having a highly moddable singleplayer and being quite lulzy in multiplayer.
Even if we get to the point where 300 is possible, that would be a game-mode specific player count. Depending on the mode and ship sizes the counts will vary a lot.
We also plan to continue adding content post-release to keep things fresh.
PTW
Me and my partner are both gamers. No. No. No. No. No. We will never do PTW. We hate micro-transactions so much we won't even do it for vanity items.
I can tell you that I am not paying much attention to it because it seems over ambitious and under developed. This thread is a year old and the team has not yet released a public build. Instead we get a few videos and some amazing looking screenshots.
The whole thing just doesn't seem plausible to me. It seems like they will get their kickstarter but will give up with a half finished game in a year or so.
It is under developed. If it was almost finished we wouldn't be doing a Kickstarter. Why would we give up? This is a game we've been searching for too.