City of Abandoned Ships released??

Hey everyone, I've been anticipating the RPG Age of Pirates 2: City of Abandoned Ships for a while now. It's received a little bit of attention from the Watch, but I haven't followed it closely. I searched around the web today and apparently it has been released like a week or two ago? Can anyone else confirm this? Anyone playing it? … I'm surprised no one has mentioned it so I'm thinking the release dates I've stumbled upon are false.

Is that the sequel to Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales? I never played it, but I remember seeing some video footage that looked quite interesting. It actually reminded me of Gothic.

Yes, that's correct, but I never played the previous installments either. The official website seems kind of dead - the latest news being the site was launched in January of this year. It's from a small Russian developer from what I understand, but Gothic was from a small publisher too. From what I've seen of the game it looks very good. I clicked on the link to the forums and they are swarming with recent posts. Unfortunately many seem to be dedicated to bugs, so I don't know if they are beta testing or what?

I found this over at Worthplaying, Jabberwocky--there certainly hasn't been anything close to a real press release on it that I've seen, but I did find this one line that apparently says it's being shipped:

Another day, another batch of games shipped to stores. Instead of giving them all their own posts, we grouped them, and so far there are announcements for: City of Abandoned Ships…

The publisher's site (Akella) has no information. The Seaward site is in Russian only. IOW it's hard to tell exactly what's going on with the game. But there certainly hasn't been any of the usual fanfare.

There's a review in the latest issue of a games magazine here, and the verdict was: good for fans, but everyone else should probably avoid it. Apparently, control is fairly clunky (in all phases of gameplay) that you really must love what you're doing to manage to pull through.

I'm not getting it, in any case, and I was reasonably excited 'bout it too.

Anyone here ever play Sea Dogs? That was Akella's first game, and it was published by Bethesda. I heard it was pretty good.

Hmm… doesn't sound promising. Well, I suppose I'll have to stick to Sid Meir's Pirates! to scratch my swashbuckling itch then.

Never played Sea Dogs that I know of. Sounds sort of like a game I tried a long time ago (7 years +?) that was a poorly done knock-off of Sid Meir's Pirate games. It was published by Eidos I think. Probably not the same thing.

Originally Posted by Jabberwocky
Never played Sea Dogs that I know of. Sounds sort of like a game I tried a long time ago (7 years +?) that was a poorly done knock-off of Sid Meir's Pirate games. It was published by Eidos I think. Probably not the same thing.

I believe Sea Dogs was released in 2000. I good part of the game is played in a 3rd person adventure mode.

Yep, totally different than the one I was thinking of then. The whole OTS RPG was what drew me to this new game initially. The new non- medieval setting seemed refreshing. As I recall the same negative things were said about the controls and interface of the Gothic games, and yet they are some of my favorite, so I'll probably give this one a go someday still.

Sea Dogs was an excellent game, darn buggy, but excellent nonetheless. The follow up Sea Dogs 2 was to be released by Bethesda but far too late in the development process Bethesda decided that it should instead be based on the successful "Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl" movie and Akella was more or less forced to scrap large parts of the game and hastily include others that would link the game to the movie. The result was less than stellar and just as buggy as the original and consequently both parties were too busy washing their hands of the whole thing to provide proper support for the game.

Akella didn't give up and they continued the idea of Sea Dogs in the Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales but this one was still full of bugs and concepts that didn't really work or downright failed. The game was more or less released without any marketing campaign and there was again almost no follow up in terms of patches. That is to say: There was almost no INTERNATIONAL patches. As far as I know Akella made several patches for the Russian version but only one made it outside of Russia (one more reason why I'm not too keen on jumping on the indie/small development houses bandwagon, but that's whole different topic). I have the game lying around at home in my huge pile of not-yet-played games but I haven't gotten around to playing it yet. I was actually waiting for a proper patch …

Sea Dogs/Age of Pirates feels in many ways, to me, like FreeLancer did: So full of potential and great ideas … that just never gets fulfilled and the end result is all the more disappointing BECAUSE the potential for greatness was so evident in the game.

The game is already out here in Germany.

The reviews on Amazon Germany are very mixed. There seems to be an issue with a weak AI and someone says it is quite hard in some places/situations. There also seem to be problems with recruiting personnel for ships, which needs a very long time, according to 1-2 reviewers.

2 of the reviewers (of 6 total) brought the game back because of the copy protection.

For people who really do know what's this game about (especially the management of everyzthing), this game seems to be good.

But so far it is too early to say much, because of the limited number of reviews.

Thanks for the insight people. That's exactly why I started this thread - to find out what's going on with this game.

Try the piratesahoy forums. They are dedicated to the various akelia pirates games and have a TON of mods for the various pirates games (Sea Dogs, etc.).

From a quick glance at CoAS it sounds like a freaking bugfest, and is still listed as coming soon on gamersgate which tend to indicate to me that they're waiting some major patching before NA release. Thanks for being beta testers EU…