Hey! When I was a kid I used to play roblox. Yes, most of the games were crap but there were a few gems.
One game in particular that I liked was
Galleons!. Basically, there were two teams. Each team controlled a ship and the members would have to man various parts of it to destroy the enemy. One of the mannable positions was the captain’s chair that steered the ship. Arguably the most important role to fulfill, his job was to steer the ship and make sure that the cannons were in the optimal position to take out the enemy. The rest of us manned cannons and we would aim them at certain parts of the ship to blow it up.
The most notable thing about that game was its detailed destruction. Like many objects in roblox, the ships were made out of LEGO bricks. Shooting the right LEGO bricks would obviously cause it to get blasted off. But the creator didn’t stop there. The individual legobricks themselves could also be broken apart. If you shot the left side of a 2x24, you would blow off a 2x6 and be left with a 2x18 still attached to the ship. Not only did it increase optimization, but it also made the game as a whole look nicer. Destruction wasn’t just a vanity thing either. A key part of the combat was shooting out vital points of the ship. You could shoot out cannons for example, though it was difficult to do since engagement ranges were pretty far and cannonballs are not the easiest projectile to work with. If you damaged enough of the hull, you might expose some gunpowder barrels and shooting those would cause them to explode for massive damage.
Fast forward ten years from now and all of a sudden
Blackwake hits early access and receives rave reviews. The game is basically a galleons clone, but there are differences. For one, we have modern graphics. Two, the cannonball system is more sophisticated. Now you ferry gunpowder from a designated area to the cannon and load one of several varieties of cannonball. Grapeshot for example. These changes I mentioned above are great, but there were many missteps as well. I’ll list them from least shitty to most shitty.
First, the ships are tiny now! In the original Galleons, you were inside a full sized pirate ship. There were potentially 3 floors underneath the deck alone! It was easy to appreciate the scale of the destruction as your ship slowly became Swiss cheese. The Blackwake ships on the other hand look like shrunk down versions that you would find at an amusement park. This change was a result of a shift from a game where you were just a cog in the swashbuckling machine to one where it’s you and your friends vs the world. Though I don’t like it, I understand the reason for it.
The second change that I hate is the removal of being able to aim with your cannons. I realize that it’s more realistic, but the gameplay consequences are huge. The outcome of a fight is even more disproportionately reliant on the skill of the captain and now as a crewman, the only thing that determines whether your shot will hit is your timing. Press the button right as the enemy ship is about to sail into it’s trajectory and you’ll get a hit. Maybe with enough practice you’ll be able to hit something important and really mess them up.
Except you can’t! Destruction is massively oversimplified in that game and none of it really means much since you can just repair it away. The ship is divided into segments and if a canonball hits that segment, a hole appears at the designated spot for the segment. It doesn’t matter where in the segment you hit it, the hole will always appear in one of the predetermined places. You can then walk up to it, wack it with a tool a few times, and it’s like nothing ever happend. This just makes the whole game a lot more artificial and since there aren’t any proper weak points on the ship, destruction is reduced to being merely a graphical effect. No more will your ship be slowly worn down in successive fights with the enemy as you wear down their’s. Now it’s just about who can get
the fight that does more damage than the opposing crew are capable of repairing in time.
There were other positive changes as well (such as ramming), but the core of Galleons!, what made it so great is completely missing in Blackwake. People will play it for a while, but then it will drop in popularity once the novelty has worn off. There are many games that you can play with friends. There are very few that allow you to shoot at and dismantle a ship piece by piece. It’s a shame Blackwake wasn’t one of them.
EDIT: Just checked the steam page. Seems like they’ve made a few improvements since I last saw it. Ship sizes are getting bigger, though still not as big as the ones in Galleons!, and it’s now possible to aim the cannons up and down (though still no left and right). Being able to hit your shot is still dependent on the captain and there are as of yet no weak spots. It’s only a matter of wether you can hit the enemy ship or not. Destruction is still shit, though I don’t think they’re ever going to remove repairing.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14915966 times)