

The trouble is that melee hit detection and melee combat is at a very early stage, so sword fights feel a little weightless, random and flailing, like an early beta test for Mount & Blade. Suddenly being close-up, face-to-face with them gets the heart pumping every time. Even getting close enough to snipe at the other crew with muskets is relatively rare. For a huge majority of every match, opponents are tiny dots, specks climbing around the deck of faraway ships. Melee sword fights are a fascinating addition to Blackwake. If grappling hooks land and a ship gets boarded, everyone drops their work and a melee suddenly breaks out-usually while one or both ships creak and take on water. Cannons are a full-time job, but crates of fresh powder and shot also have to be shuttled to from the magazine to the guns. Damage to the sails has to be fixed in person by sailors climbing up the shroud, or the ship won’t be able to move. Any damage to the hull has to be patched by hand, with hammer and nails, before the ship fills with water and sinks.

(opens in new tab)Īnd in battle, there are dozens of jobs to do. You will spend the entire match manning this one cannon and you will like it. The cooperation in Blackwake's multiplayer arena is self-reinforcing because no one can do more than one job at a time. First-person shooters usually want me to feel like the biggest boss, the hero who can do everything. But most important is this: it is an anti-power fantasy. It’s an FPS with black-powder muskets, smooth-bore cannons, and the most ridiculously foppish faux-British voice acting I’ve ever heard. It’s an early-access, first-person multiplayer deathmatch between Caribbean pirates and the British navy. There are a few ways to describe the maritime warfare of Blackwake.
#Pirate simulator blackwake Patch#
I reload as fast as I can while crewmates restring sails, patch holes in the deck, and die all around me. The captain finally steers round, the warship comes into view, and I fire.

I'm bleeding from the blast but I stay on my station. Inches away from my face, a cannonball tears a chunk out of the deck railing, flinging a crewmate dead into the pitching waves. Chainshot rips through our foresail and our ship slows. I'm hunkered behind my cannon, waiting for my shot, when hot iron starts raining down. One of the British warships has spotted us moving in, and they pivot and face their cannons in our direction.

This worked together with unlocking of cosmetic items.That's easier said than done. ENVIRONMENTAL MAPSWe wanted a bit more variance to TDM matches so we added maps that had certain environmental settings.A volcano map which when erupted, the entire environment would turn red with ash and ships would get damaged if they were close to the volcanoAn iceberg arena, with ice patches which would slow down your ship and cause holes if sailed through.WaterspoutsThese would pick up ships and kill the crew if they were not aware of their surroundings and raised their sails.Tortuga map arena with new islandsA ranking/prestige system, we wanted to reward players with long playtime. You also needed the range of ships by using the spyglass which we implemented as an item. You can also turn the cannons too, which you couldn’t before. After much demand from crewman for more importance, experimenting with different methods we settled on the “grenade launcher” approach to cannon aiming. Unfortunately this was not received well for the players that purely liked naval combat, so eventually it was scrapped.We also implemented a new cannon aiming system.
