Hello,
New administration has completed revising of the Blood & Gold: Caribbean! project, the results are below.
First of all, we investigated the whole development's roadmap. It's worth noting that the team behind relaunching of the project (Blood & Gold) did fulfill their promises.
Here's the list of what's been done:
- City locations for different factions
- Natives faction
- New captivity system and multiple ways of escaping
- Caravan trading
- Smuggle trading
- Criminal missions
- Underground horse races
- Storyline
- Multiplayer
- New system of controlling player's faction
- Card game
- Brothel system - including protection tacker, diplomatic options etc.
- Naval sieges
In in its current state the game should be considered feature complete. On the other hand, feedback from users is not positive enough and they may disagree with this statement.
We've taken this situation into account, our analysis has shown the following reasons for that:
- Incompatibility between the engine and the visual ambition. Models and especially textures were created with an excessive quality, that Warband engine had trouble supporting adequately.
- Too much of in-game content. The game takes up to 2.25 GB of RAM, which is too much for its stable work and can cause constant crashes on lower-end PCs.
- Lack of focus. The game tries to be a tactical simulator, an economic strategy game, an adventure, an action RPG and a naval battle simulator all at the same time. As a result, players looking for more ships in naval battles and those players who're looking out for economy and trading in this game will be equally unsatisfied.
- Incorrect promotion. The game is not part Mount & Blade series, but tried to attract its audience. The difference in interface, balance and the setting frustrated the players who wanted the things as they were before.
We came to the following conclusions:
- The new administration has factually no complaints against the old development team. A very complicated and content-heavy project was based on the outdated technology. The problem in this case lies with the management who took decision regarding the game's concept and its engine.
- Further development of the game on its current engine is not possible. Adding even a little portion of content (like a new ship) would lead to complete instability of the application. The game could only be worked on without having any new content added into it. But even in that case, with years, the game's code turned into a mess after many different programmers got their hands on it. Things such as code optimization and refactoring would require many months of work.
Snowbird Games investor can offer players the following:
- A brand new project about naval battle, based on a newer engine. New team is already doing some experiments with Unreal Engine 4.
- A farewell project based on Warband/Caribbean technology. This is a small spin-off game that will be available at a very affordable price. The project is being developed by a third party team, ORGS Studio.
- Next week, Blood & Gold players can expect a new update which would include the promised achievements, as well as fixes for some gameplay bugs (like troops hovering in the air after the walls are destroyed).
