Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: StarSlayer on September 17, 2015, 12:41:37 pm
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So I've loved age of sail since I first bought a well used copy of To Glory We Steer by Alexander Kent from the Sanbornville Public Library as a kid. Actually the Bolitho Corvette in Diaspora is named for the main protagonist of the series. Unfortunately I missed out on the alpha entry for this particular game but suffice to say I am itching to skipper a swift Fifth Rates and powerful yet versatile seventy four Third Rates. The footage and gameplay I've seen posted by participating YouTubers looks fabulous and I will be jumping feet first when this opens up to the public.
(http://www.gdprice.com/j/15233.JPG)
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This is on my must have list :)
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It looks beautiful and it's an open world sandbox game. Apparently single player. With realistic sailing. Wow. I'd say, it's got a good chance of being an early-day purchase for me (or if they have a public beta, I can buy that). Few games can say that (in fact, only three. ArmA3, Take On Mars and KSP). Shame I missed out on the alpha. I hope that despite the open world, it'll also have quests and a good main storyline (or several). I'd really love a game that would allow me to do some Aubery-style prize chasing. :)
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Shame on you for not including a link to the project page: http://www.navalaction.com/
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Oh, mixed it up with age of sail, but looks amazing non the less.
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Looks like this is back open to early access purchases.
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Looks fairly cool though I wonder how much choice there'd actually be or how accurate the portrayal would be.
In the second trailer for example it shows a ship capsizing in completely calm waters which is . . odd at best.
Read some 11 Patrick O'Brian books now and setting the sails, navigation, firing etcetera is all quite complicated with chases lasting sometimes multiple days and nights and ships navigating for hours to get the weather gauge or to get in close enough. And almost always the battles result in either a ship striking its colours or a boarding action because of course they want to capture the ship and make money.
Whereas this game though very nice looking, also looks rather arcade-y and consequently somewhat shallow (no pun intended). It claims to be realistic but, given the time scale I cannot imagine that's accurate. Detailed maybe, but I doubt "realistic".
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After watching quite a few player gameplay videos and it seems like its hitting a decent balance between complexity and entertainment. I've seen players managing their sail plan and utilizing the wind gage, it's certainly more complex than WoWs for example. I'll compile some personal impressions once I get my feet wet.
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Oh dear, I was about to hit the pay bottun, when I realized, that I would buy yet another game which I cannot play due to my GPU not supporting DirectX11 :D
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I, for one, would love an Aubery-Maturin-style game, with a high degree of realism. :) Even if that does mean the game is slow-paced, time compression could alleviate that. Silent Hunter did that well, with some very high compression rates available for cruising, as well as lower ones that still allow you to zip through a day in a few minutes. A submarine won't be chasing anyone, of course, but once you set the optimal sail trim you don't need to change it unless the weather changes or your prey decides to try something, so I believe it could work in this game, too.
The website claims they're going for high detail, I think it makes sense for them to also go for realism. Time compression is ubiquitous in simulators, so I hope they'll do it.
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Time shift in a MMO?
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Bah, just found that this is a multiplayer game after all. That sucks, TBH. They'd have much more options if they didn't bother with that MMO crap. I hope that there's going to be a singleplayer mode one day, ideally with a story to match (sort of like Star Citizen's Squadron 42). When I first saw it very early on it wasn't clear, but now it is. :(
Really, I don't get why it seems that lately, a game can either have a good story or interesting gameplay. MMOs are not fun for me, they always make too many "gamey" tradeoffs, usually require cooperation with other people (that I hate), usually feature fighting with other people (whose skill can't easily be set in options) and don't have much in terms of the plot. I hoped for something like Age of Pirates, but with realistic sailing and not a bug-ridden mess that AOP was. Now it seems that it's another good concept wasted on a multiplayer game.
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Single-player scripted campaigns are resource-intensive to make and hold players' interest for much less time than games that focus on multiplayer competition or procedural and emergent content. It's no surprise that smaller devs generally don't bother with them.
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Yeah, but for some reason when a small team does make a story-heavy SP game, it's usually either crappy pixel art (miles behind actual oldies, which were usually doing their best not to look pixellated) or RPGMaker level 2D art as well. Such "art" games usually don't involve much gameplay, quite a few are 2D platformers and even if they aren't, they usually aren't 3D. Why can't we have a story-rich that also has decent graphics? I'm not talking modern AAA level, but at least enough not to be an eyesore. For some games, even a simple, objective-based campaign based on a series of multiplayer maps could be fun (kind of what SW:Battlefront 2 did), as long as it was well written.
And even with games like Naval Action, this concept would've worked well as an RPG. Singleplayer doesn't have to be scripted, quest-based stories can work quite well. And even without a large-scale story, simply having an open-world SP game with good gameplay can be fun (X series, for instance, though they've started to more resemble economic games after X3). The reason I was fooled for so long was that I kept expecting it to be something like Freelancer (which had an MMO-style multiplayer), with the multiplayer part being here first because it's easier to start testing stuff with (you don't need an AI, a pair of testers will do just fine) and SP being added later. I went to the forums after Crizza's comment, and saw it was an MMO at the core.