New Russia-based indie developer Snowbird Game Studios has announced a new action-RPG based during the Golden Age of Piracy, Caribbean! The game allows players to choose their career in a world filled with brutal sea battles, boarding fights, duels, political intrigues and piracy.
The developer is working with TaleWorlds Entertainment, who worked on the original Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword, and as such, Caribbean! runs on the Mount & Blade game engine, which will feature the same melee battles system and horse-riding mechanics.
According to the press release, the game will have the following features:
* Sea battles with intuitive and easy control system;
* The real-time boarding fights that throw player in the centre of the action;
* Detailed management and customization of both the fleet and the crew;
* Complex siege system allowing the players to storm forts, harbors or entire cities;
* Different kinds of artillery: shipboard cannons, mortars and howitzers;
* Random events system that keeps players question their decisions during their voyage;
* True ‘Carribean’ atmosphere of the vast and dangerous world;
* Unique NPCs whose design based on the real historical figures;
* Various multiplayer modes featuring the sea and land battles, boarding and sieges.
Caribbean! is due to be released on PC this coming Fall 2012.
In the meanwhile, here's a short summary of what has been done: unit sets are almost complete, we've added more ships to the game including Manila galleons and have implemented separate shooting from different decks in naval battles. There's more to come, stay tuned.
'Caribbean!' is currently in the alpha state and has reached the stage where it could really use some of the players' feedback.
The game has its basic features already in, and content-wise (weapons, armor, locations, sounds) we're 70% done. What we're mostly planning to do from this point is to build upon and improve what we already have with regular updates and your help.
You might be put off by the current simple economic system, visually incomplete locations and balance problems — these parts of the game will be reworked during the Early Access stage.
Check out the official forum and the store page below for current and planned features.
The price is lowered during the early access stage, all future updates come for free. Full version release is planned for Autumn 2014.”
What's already in the game:
Naval battles with controllable ships. There are several types of damage that ships can deal and take; Ships can lose sails and be caught on fire.
Players can purchase unique upgrades for their ships, like a more solid hull, fire protection, damage reduction for their crew and a greater chance to set enemy ships on fire and so on.
Ability to improve ship artillery and ship's crew.
A set of special perks available for player's character.
Plans for the near future:
Battle planning with squad management.
Improved boarding system with new locations.
New production and trading system.
Meta-goals for each faction, that provide a player with global goals. If player completes them, the game is considered finished in a way. Like foundation of Franco-American alliance or repulsing English punitive expedition against pirates.
Adding fortress and siege artillery for city assaults.
Judging by the screens on steam its like the original mount and blade engine they copied or something. The premise is great but the graphics are just very 10 years ago.
maybe the 2+ year delay has something to do with it lol
This past week has been very busy and intense for our studio. We released a free DLC for our turn-based strategy game, ‘Eador’ and launched ‘Caribbean!’ onto Early Access. But that didn’t stop us from reading through all the feedback on our pirate RPG. A ton of questions were asked, but as it’s difficult to answer to each and every one, we decided to lay our thoughts and plans in this one post.
The main question — “Why would I pay for a mod that’s not even complete?”. The answer is obvious, because ‘Caribbean!’ is not a mod. Just the scope of code work that went into the engine changes we requested has been tremendous.
You can look at screenshots of Crusader Kings 2 and say it’s merely a mod of Europa Universalis 4. Both games do share a lot in common — provinces, map, menus. But they remain very different projects, and their audiences aren’t necessarily the same. In the case of our Caribbean project we rely on M&B Warband’s engine but at the same time build a game that’s going to be very different. We don’t want to simply change the character models, we want to create another system for this game’s world.
As many of you noticed, earning gold in the game is currently not very fun. Honestly, we intentionally simplified the game’s economy to this ‘bare bones’ state. A new production system and new trading system are our main development goals for the upcoming month. You probably remember the old city-building strategy games. A lumberjack goes to the forest, chops trees, and brings wood to the storage. Then a carpenter takes it from there, makes a chair and so on. Goods are physically produced and moved around the game world. In our case, we have a game in the era of plantations, West-Indian campaigns and the origins of capitalism. So the medieval economic system of attacking enemy troops, looting 40 pairs of boots and then selling them in the nearest town doesn’t really suit us. We won’t go into detail at the moment until we have working code for this part of the game, but the plans for economy are very ambitious.
Another important part is monotonous naval battles. This is a very difficult aspect of the game and community feedback on this would be very much appreciated. The current implementation of naval battles is a compromise between simple arcade fun and something more realistic. We tried experimenting with turbo-ships at the beginning, but thought it contrasted way too much with the rest of the game. We also have a few ideas for adding strategic elements, to let players interact with his fleet. However, we don’t want to overdo it and turn the game to a simulation of Horace Nelson’s workday. If you have any ideas on this yourself, please don’t hesitate to share them with us.
Speaking of the boarding; as we mentioned in the devblog video, current boarding locations are more like placeholders and are not final. They will be replaced with new models, updated with quality textures and those sudden deaths from a random bullet in the first second of a fight will be dealt with as well. Pre-battle troop management for boarding fights has also crossed our minds.
Lastly, ‘walking around the towns’ and land locations. To be honest, we can’t really provide the content to a proper standard in this regard at the moment. This aspect needs some financial help, and that is one of the Early Access stage’s goals. We want to complete the game the way we see it.
We haven’t addressed many of the other matters — like multiplayer, interaction with native Americans, a meta-goal system and so on. These would need their own separate posts. For now we’d like to note that Warband’s engine allows us to create the best conditions for roleplaying — a chance to be a hero that changes the game’s world, not just a set of attack and defense attributes. We hope ‘Caribbean!’ will become a fine example of that.
We have to let you know that the big July update we announced earlier won't be coming — instead, it's going to become even bigger and land in August. We'll share the reasons behind this decision, as well our current work progress, below:
Boarding. We think that boarding is the heart of combat gameplay, even more important than sea battles. The current version of the boarding fights stopped being satisfactory for us a long time ago, and as a result we're redoing it from scratch.
Graphic quality of the boarding locations was too poor compared to the character models so all ships are being completely redone. Besides the evident difference in textures, we redesigned level geometry: got rid off jamming on decks and unnecessary rooms, made the movement on ships more clear and free for the player. We also added crow's nests on masts, to provide riflemen with additional spots.
Plus we'll try to add some new animations, including the classic boarding jump rope.
Naval combat. The second most important element of the game. We're still torn between which path to choose: making everything more simple and arcady or adding more options for strategy and control. But our internal tests showed that either way we'd need to deal with current small locations. Right now gameplay functions well only with 2 vs. 2 ship battles. Our limit is 12 ships on the scene, and with that amount of ships there's very little room for everyone in the sea. Making the location bigger is a challenge as we have to work around the engine's limitations. So for now our programmer added a 'spyglass' option that many of you asked for. More significant updates in this area should be coming in September.
Trading and economy. Initially it was supposed to be a side gameplay element, but we want to increase its importance in the game. Actually, working on economy takes more time than anything else at the moment as we keep changing some basic things in M&B engine. For example, right now we separate player's personal inventory and his cargo. It's not very convenient and logical to carry not only a set of 12 breastplates but two tons of cacao as well. Another new element is building construction in the towns — there's so much to do here that we won't even dare to promise it done by August.
Strategic map. We got a lot of feedback on geography of our map and its flaws. Apologies for the inaccuracies — that was our first try to befriend realism with gaming. In August we'll do our best to finish the new world map, more accurate and, possibly, far more attractive.
The plans are pretty ambitious for us, and we hope we can implement all of this with no problem. After the August update we'll be ready to switch to the next big step — refining land battles and implementing city sieges.
Time has come for us to share what we’ve been working on since the last status update.
Firstly, boarding locations seem to be complete. While we were working on the scenes with the battleship, we had some ideas on how we could improve the whole boarding process, but in the end decided to hold off implementing until later development stages. Battleships were the most powerful means of destruction in XVII century, really huge ships. Adding them into the game took us some time. Anyway, we really hope you’ll like this ship.
Next, the old global map is no more, and the new one is in the works. It’s a bit hard to read at the moment, but the world should get prettier soon. If you remember, initially we wanted to include not only local tribes, but Brazilian colonies, Maia’s and Apache Indians’ towns, even cities of New England as well. This idea proved to be too ambitious, so instead we decided to focus entirely on the Caribbean region, territories of Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and other states have been taken out from the game.
The new troops hiring system is now finished. Our main goal was to distance it from the system familiar to you by M&B games. Now the troops aren’t hired with a series of questions and answers (“How many Spanish musketeers would you like?” – “I would like 5 Spanish musketeers”), it’s now done with the system of icons and sliders. It’s working very similar to the current trading screen.
Finally, we began working on the new quest system. Quests have been untied from the dialogues and lords. To be honest, dialogues in M&B sometimes seemed quite routine to us — especially when a lord that assigned a quest, decided to go to war, then lose it and be jailed for a couple of weeks. Now quests are assigned by cities and factions in a single quest panel.
Plans for the following month:
[list=]– Making more quests (possibly some special ones with smuggling involved);
– New rank system to replace the current one;
– Adding trading renown – as we mentioned, we’d like to make trading and business a full-fledged activity for roleplaying;
– Finishing the global map and the new version of the city screen, which we’ll show you in a separate post once we have some pretty screenshots on hand.[/list]
Today we're putting out the release version of 'Caribbean!'. On this occasion we'd like to say a few words about the new things you'll be able to find in the game since the last update and what you can expect in the future.
The release version now has a new storyline which we didn't show before. Some of its parts could of course be noticed during Early Access by the most attentive players, but hopefully nobody spoiled themselves just yet.
Secondly, companion hiring. Now players can appoint them as ship captains as well.
Next is treasure hunting system. We won't tell how exactly it works beforehand as it's closely tied to the story, companions and treasure hunting, so you have this part to explore for yourselves.
In other new additions: the tavern, where players can buy rare collectible weapons and get rid of their prisoners; new town screen and new 'governor' construction system — now, when you govern a town, you get access to its special town buildings.
We also updated the siege location. Now attacking and defending sides don't clash with each other in a narrow bottleneck. We think this should help making the town sieges a bit more challenging.
Now, what can you expect next? First of all, more siege locations. We finished working on the small siege constructor and will soon fill the game with different fortress variations.
After that we'd like to add some quite intriguing nationalities and their special troops. Which exactly? We'll talk about that a bit later.
We consider our main goal of making the game as stable as possible achieved. Despite the huge stress on the engine, greatly increased quality and quantity of in-game models, the game doesn't take more than 1,7 Gb in memory. Based on this, we can safely continue working on the game without much trouble.
There is also the Buccaneer Edition available (both Codex and 3DM), but I think I'll wait for the inevitable dose of patches, which has become a tradition nowadays
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what are those two pics in my last post there 
On Early Access 
