It is infuriating that they added land parts but not ship-boarding. The ship-boarding is the main thing people wanted. It worked well in Assassin's Creed how you could swing around on ropes, climb through rigging, use swivel guns, and how there were different targets on the ship including things like marksmen. This is bullshit.
I AM glad they're making a game in the Indian Ocean, because although I'm a pirate buff it does get really old how pirate settings are always the same tired Caribbean cliches.
I'm watching the trailer. I guess it makes sense to have as many weapon types as possible, it's not like this is some historic ship simulator, but having ballistae and Greek fire and hwachas feels really out of place and goofy. (I did enjoy hwachas a lot in Ghost of Tsushima.)
also would multiship combat have even worked? especially with boarding. you'd be literal sitting duck for the rest of the team to fire on you.
Ughubug's Pirate Simulator:
- Ships have different health bars for different parts. At a minimum, we're talking gun count, manpower, hull integrity, sail integrity, rigging integrity, and the masts. Reducing the sails reduces speed, reducing rigging reduces maneuverability (abstraction of your crew struggling to make the sails work with their ropes in tatters), disabling a mast takes out the sails with it. Reducing hull integrity raises the inflow rate of water, which if it goes above what your bilge crews can handle then causes the ship to start to sink.
- Ships also have specific things that can be knocked out: the rudder, the powder store, etc. Obviously rudder effects steering, while powder store is either a one-shot-kill or just causes catastrophic damage.
If you wipe out the guns, the ship can't shoot back. If you wipe out the sails/masts, the ship can't run. If you wipe out the rudder/rigging, the ship can't steer. If the crew is dying in droves, the ship has less defense for a boarding and maybe starts doing everything less efficiently (not enough men to both fight and sail simultaneously).
I don't have a clue how boarding worked in multi-ship engagements, other than it did. I assume you would try immobilizing the ships (AC3 actually handled this differently than Black Flag, because in AC3 chain shot actually demasted for in-story boarding sequences instead of being a stun gun) that could threaten you, or failing that have a friendly ship screen for you, while you board. In a multi-ship engagement you may just not be able to capture that many.
Problem is, in Sid Meier's Pirates it was way too easy to just rush a ship and board it with no gunfire. Now, in part that was because you could win any fight with a small crew by just cheesing the dueling minigame, so if a game made swordfighting difficult than that would be more balanced (a smaller, more maneuverable ship would be able to board easily, but would be at a disadvantage in the boarding). Could also board from any direction - it didn't matter - which I imagine would make a difference (boarding without knocking out the guns first from the side would expose you to broadsides, whereas boarding from a corner would create a brutal chokepoint. Regardless, there needs to be something mechanically to make a player want to try to beat up a ship before boarding.
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