My Dream Game is almost here!

[Steve Clark]

Well, friends, the game that I have been praying for is almost here...

Sea Dogs
http://akella.com/seadogs/main-eng.html

Finally I get to play pirate in an emmersive 3D world. It is not very often that a gamer gets to play its dream game (Civ2 came close, very close).

Fairwinds to ye, mates!

[John-SJ]

Hi Steve,

I assume you bought Sea Dogs? How do you like it? Care to give a quick critique?

John-SJ

[Jeffrey Morris FIRAXIS]

It's Pirates meets Ultima 9. Very quest oriented, lots of text to read, etc. Good water model (ship pitch and bob) and decent ship art. Town stuff is pretty much the same as in Pirates, but now you have to walk from location to location (a arguable improvement). Naval combat is expanded in that you can have 'heroes' now as crew (hotshot gunner for bonus for instance) and you now have 4 types of shot.

All in all, I think it was a very conservative design, that ultimately bored me. The lack of their originally planned multiplayer (or any multiplayer for that matter) really hurt it. When I think Pirates sequel, I think robust and team (or nation) oriented MP.

Jeff

[Steve Clark]

Thanks for reminding me that I said this. A follow-up is certainly due. I got onto the official forum before the release and was very active since alot of my old friends were there! After 200+ posts and playing the game solidly for 3 weeks, this was my last post to that forum...

quote: ...I've enjoyed being a part of this community, in providing my insights and in offering help. But ... Sea Dogs is not that replayable as a whole. For me, that is the sole reason for sticking with a game and after doing some of those tedious quests, it's just the same thing over and over again, even starting a new career. While I enjoy the sea battles immensely and seeing the different weather effects in town, without an engaging gameplay purpose (and in doing new strategies and experiences upon replay), Sea Dogs has become a one-shot game. AKELLA/BETHESDA: my suggestion for Sea Dogs 2 are these: Make the strategy game drive the gameplay, not the RPG "stories" and "quests". Keep the experience points/ranks/skill points, but make them based on a much wider range of endeavors. And most importantly, design the game that would produce a new experience each time you play, whether it be a random world or having the player choose from one of 5 nationalities within 6-7 time periods. The goal of the game should not be to accomplish that last quest (quests should be optional features), but to learn and to get better as you play, thus opening up new challenges and experiences. The one failure of Sea Dogs is that you made the gameplay pretty much the same at the beginning as well as the end, and pretty much the same from one career to the next. Thus, a one-shot game.

That pretty sums it up for alot of us hard-core strategy/war gamers. In a conversation with Bethesda in a private forum, they did confirm that they designed the game to appeal to the CONSOLE gamer, not to the serious PC gamer. The forum has now been completely dominated by the 'Tomb Raider'-type crowd asking for cheats, help on quests and mindless chatter. Sea Dogs 2 will become even more of console game, focusing on more quests, bigger battles and more characters to interact with.

It has now been removed from my playlist and replaced with Shogun. Civ2 is still my dream game and will be for a long time.

[Jaakko]

I'll probably still wind up buying Sea Dogs, but the next big thing for me is Talonsoft's Age of Sail 2.
I got the demo and even though I haven't gotten around to actually learning to play, it seems very promising.
16 player MP, everyone with their own ship, mmmmmmmmm...
[This message has been edited by Jaakko (edited December 29, 2000).]

[Steve Clark]

Age of Sail 2 is being developed by Akella, the same Russian development house that did Sea Dogs. If the sailing/battle engine in AoS2 is anywhere as great as in SD, it will be a worthwhile game.