City of Abandoned Ships - Peek #1 @ RPG Vault

RPG Vault takes a Peek at Seaward's and Akella's City of Abandoned Ships, with this first entry looking at the gameworld:

Having escaped from Barbados on a Spanish frigate, the player is in free flight - no limits, storyline or main quest. The pirate Brethren of the Coast is ready to welcome the hero, the other option is to establish good relations with one of the colonial powers, France, England, Spain and Holland. It's possible to make a career in the navy and become an admiral. The gameworld is filled with events and opportunities to become rich and famous. Every governor has work for a brave captain, traders need to transport cargo, and the local citizens are willing to pay a lot of money to those who do their bidding.

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More information.

The game seems quite a lot like Sea Dogs which was also published by Akella. Does anyone know if the developer is the same as well? Sounds interesting enough, I don't think there have been any games like this since the Pirates! remake a couple of years ago. Still rather have a proper Port Roayle sequel, though.

Sisay said:

The game seems quite a lot like Sea Dogs which was also published by Akella. Does anyone know if the developer is the same as well?

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Kind of. The developer of Sea Dogs was Sea Dog.

These guys actually came from a modding group Seaward.ru, who worked on Pirates of the Caribbean/Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales (Sea Dog games, both of 'em). Akella suggested to them to make a full-grown gaming project, shoved over some Sea Dog developers to help 'em out and voila.

I just wish that they manage to actually finish the game this time around. Sea Dogs was horribly bugged. Pirates of the Carribean was even more horribly bugged. And Age of Pirates I haven't dared install yet due to numerous reports of it being horribly bugged.

*sigh* I really like the Pirate genre and the style of the Sea Dogs games is just up my alley but the bugs just sucks all the fun out of it, making me lose interest in the game before I've made any progress.

Here's hoping ...

Yes, there were some serious bugs with Pirates of the C and Age of Pirates; the kind of bugs that break the main quest or simply hang the whole computer forcing a reboot. For PotC, the community patches have fixed the quests but not the frequent crashing. I haven't played AoP for ages, but I remember that I managed to finish the main plot. But I really liked the games and generally prefer them over Sid Meier's Pirates!

This new sequel is therefore welcome, let's just hope that they get their act together and make a working game this time. The content seems to be much like the previous games, but I don't mind if I don't have to be afraid of crashing all the time.

I loved Sea Dogs! I still remember trying for a long time to play through the game as a pirate, but I always ended up siding with one of nations (there's a different story depending on what nation you choose). In the end, I managed to complete it as a pirate, but that was long after I got the game.

If this is anything like Sea Dogs, I will certainly buy it.

I wish someone would remake Pirates of the Western Sea, a turn-based pirate indy from long ago. That was one of my favourite underdog RPG's.

A bit of the backstory.
Russian title Corsairs - known as Sea Dogs here. Was a great game, somewhat buggy.
Russian title Corsairs 2 was bought out and released as Pirates of the Caribbean here. Was very buggy. Never released as C2 in Russia.
Russian tittle Corsairs 3 was never released here AFAIK (or may be it's Age of Pirates?). Was a bug infested mess. Was brought to senses by numerous patches. Still buggy.
Stand alone add-on to Corsairs 3 - Dead man's chest. That brought C3 concept to senses, still buggy.
All these titles were developed by Akella (I think these guys made ship models for Pirates of the Burning sea, at least i saw post from developers on beta forums).

Modders from Seaward took Corsairs 3, changed role-playing, combat and quest system, fixed bugs, added content and released it as Corsairs: Return of the Legend. This game is twice as good as original Sea Dogs, stable and has a high replay value.

Corsairs: City of abandoned ships is a sequel to Return of The Legend. More content, more quest, less bugs. In all fairness it is the greatest of them all. it is an incremental improvement over predecessor, but in our case we never got Return of the Legend so the point is moot.

Oooooh, that just sparked that familiar tingle I get when my attention is captured