https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXCky2W9mSU
I wrote about Blackwake in March of this year, a crazily ambitious multiplayer naval combat game filled with pirates.
There are a few things that stand out immediately with the game. It’s developed by just two Australian indie developers, thus far. If you’ve watched any of the gameplay for Blackwake, you’ll have already noticed the insane scale of the entire project, from the ships and the crew to the combat.
Tyler and Dakota have taken their project to Kickstarter in the hopes of making it a full-fledged game, instead of something they develop on the side. They’ve been working on the game pretty steadily since the middle of last year, and it currently exists in an early alpha state, with most of the core ideas already implemented.
Here are the key features for Blackwake:
- Team oriented sailing—Blackwake is a game with heavy focus on team cooperation and tactics. This includes gun control, navigation, overall combat strategy and planning. Ships are sailed with a captain and crew, hulls can be destroyed and ships can sink before you know it. Blackwake is not very forgiving of positioning mistakes leading to ship damage. While you can extract water and slow sinking, you cannot repair the ship.
- Melee & ranged weapon combat—The game will feature an assortment of 18th century firearms, each with their own strengths and flaws of the era. You can expect boarding to be a fun-filled, chaotic experience.
- Realistic & fictional modes—We hope to not only provide a spiced up traditional team-deathmatch, but also have more scenarios to make you really feel like you’re a part of something epic with objective based game modes. For example, sailing towards a sea monster with an armada of ships to your inevitable doom.
- Sea monster PVE—Speaking of fictional modes… In the trailer we hinted at sea monsters, and yes, we were serious! This is something that caught our attention early on. We love the idea of 2-4 ships working together to defeat unique sea monsters while planning and avoiding their deadly attacks. We built the game so far to be compatible with a gamemode like this, and it is actually crudely implemented in pre-alpha.
- Varied weather & Environments—Each match on the open ocean randomizes the weather and time of day. From the calm seas of day to the chaotic storms at night where timing is everything. You can expect to get a lot of variety every time you play. Eventually we want the ability for weather/time of day to change mid-match.
- Goal of Land/Sea simultaneous battles—We’re eager to add more to the game but we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We’re excited to try new things in the future to expand gameplay in a few areas.
- Grand multiplayer battles—We’re going to push player counts as far as we can. We’re currently limited by Unity’s built-in networking, but our “Alpha 6.5” video contained about 40 players. We’re interested in 3rd party networking solutions to boost this number. We do hope to support around 100 players if it’s possible but not all servers will have this amount of players.
To be clear, the team behind Blackwake are not looking to lock content behind stretch goals and piecemeal them into the game. They are, however, open to the idea of adding things if they exceed funding. The Kickstarter rewards are only for the campaign, and not indicative of the game itself. This means the final game will not have Early Access on Steam, nor micro transactions.
Finally, the footage that you’re seeing above is from their pre-alpha build, and as such, most of the stuff is implemented but very rough-looking. If funded, Blackwake is poised to look entirely different in rough six months.
If you want to fund Blackwake, head on over to their Kickstarter campaign.
