Ahoy!
This dev diary won’t feature any sales pitches, sneak peeks, or triumphant reports. Put away your maps, cutlasses, and pistols — we’re having a serious conversation today. It’s your turn to speak and share your thoughts. ːseawolvesː
Today's Items:
- Patch 1.4
- Plans for the future
- The Big Question
- FAQ
Patch 1.4
Eight months ago, we launched the game. Back in February, we decided to focus on two key things: lowering the entry barrier for new players (tutorials, notifications) and rapidly filling the game with as much content as possible — animations, quests, locations, ships, and more — for veteran players.
This focus allowed us to triple the size of our team, streamline our processes, and discover what we do best. However, it also created a significant amount of technical debt and exposed the game’s biggest problem — outdated controls and camera mechanics. Bugs frustrate veteran players, and the controls confuse new ones.
That’s why I decided not to rush straight into patch 1.5, but instead, release an intermediate patch — 1.4. In this patch, we’ll focus on fixing bugs and creating a new control and camera system.
The bugs are straightforward to fix, but the camera and control issues are more nuanced. The problem is that most new players rely solely on WASD, without actively using the mouse. This results in "tank controls". As for the the camera is too close to the player, doesn’t respond to character movement, spins sharply, and often keeps enemies out of view.
In other words, the game doesn’t fully support gamepads, which leads to a lot of frustration for new players who want to enjoy the game but can't. It took us some time and R&D to fully understand the root of the problem because, after so many years of development, our vision of certain things had become a bit blurred.
Without fixing this technical debt and addressing the controls, there’s no point in moving forward.
- Hire new team members.
- Quickly add new content to the game.
- Lower the entry barrier for new players.
- Begin research to improve graphics, the engine, and controls.
- Understand what we do best. [You are here]
- Understand what players want most.
- Resolve the technical debt.
- Fix tank controls and janky camera.
- Write the design document for version 1.5.
- Make a significant leap forward with version 1.5.
- Resolve technical debt again.
- Release version 2.0 and [redacted].
- Resolve the technical debt one last time.
- [redacted]
- Caribbean Legend 2
New boarding scenes and muskets as proper secondary weapons
The Future
While the technical part of the team will be suffering from stabilizing the game and fixing the controls, the creative side will be enjoying themselves with quests and designing version 1.5.
If the first stage of development (1.0–1.4) was about exploring the game, the dev team, and the players, then the second (patch 1.5) and third (patch 2.0) milestones will mark significant changes and leaps forward. The future of Sea Dogs series and all that.
Caribbean Legend is a massive game with over 200 hours of gameplay, countless mechanics, and hundreds of content pieces. Games like Sea Dogs, Mount & Blade, and Kenshi are rare. But no matter how strong the ideas from the 2000s may be, the game needs to evolve; otherwise, it’ll become stale and sink into the oblivion. We can’t rely on old gameplay forever. If we want to preserve this genre, which still has no real competition in terms of depth, we must keep moving forward — like how Mound & Blade: Warband transitioned to Bannerlord.
And no, it’s not just about aimlessly adding new quests, perks, ships, or updating graphics and throwing in mechanics for the sake of numbers. We need to make ship plundering and trading fun again. Rebuild the combat system. Recapture the sense of novelty and exploration that makes great new games so captivating.
Port Royal in its glory
Patch 1.5 will be the first step in that direction. Right now, we’re gathering data to prioritize correctly. Prioritize incorrectly, and we risk breaking the entire project. We already have player metrics, feedback notes, our own vision, and a well-established development process. We're also working on the design document for version 1.3 — dissecting the current game to fully understand how it works now.
Almost everything is ready, but to start writing the design document for 1.5, we need just one thing — your opinion. Every one of you has your own vision of what the game should be, and it’s up to you to answer the Big Question.
Freeplay or Story?
No, this isn’t about choosing a game mode from the main menu. This is about what you want to spend most of your game time. It’s about what truly matters to you and what you consider fun.
If you choose freeplay, we’ll focus on things like trade, high seas piracy, colony raids, career progression, wealth accumulation, and restoring that sense of novelty and exploration. The benefit of freeplay is that it also enhances the story mode. The downside? Lots of unknowns, because game design is pure alchemy and randomness.
Possible Freeplay features:
- Boarding parties and their upgrades.
- Weapon mods and sharpening.
- Personal pirate treasures, more physical appearance of money and loot.
- Plantations and factories.
- Reactive world: live factions and new bounty hunters system.
If you choose story, we’ll focus on the epilogue and adding more quests. The plus side? Our tasks are clear, and we already have hundreds of pages of content ready to code. The downside? Story is subjective — some are already tired of Charles de Maure, while others may never have cared about his story in the first place. And, of course, any story can be written either poorly or well. That’s a bit of alchemy too, I suppose.
Possible Story features:
- Epilogue.
- Rework of the "Happily Ever After" questline.
- A proper pirate path and a career of Charlie Prince.
- Targeted improvements to quests and cutscenes.
Personally, I lean toward Freeplay. Raiding ships and hoarding doubloons — isn’t that why we play this game? And based on current stats, only 10% of players will ever see the epilogue. Maybe we should focus on increasing that percentage first?
Survey
We’ve prepared a survey that will be open for a week. It’s short, and the best responses will receive a unique DLC with three in-game items.
Beyond the epic showdown between "freeplay vs story", there’s another important point in the survey. Patch 1.4 will include a refactoring — we need to go through the code and fix long-standing issues that have been bothering the community (WHEN WILL YOU FINALLY FIX THIS?!).
We really need a list of these issues. Without it, we’ll have to go through the entire code line by line, which is highly inefficient. If you’ve been playing for a while, you probably have a list of these kinds of issues. Please share them with us. ːrespect_soldierː
This won’t be the last survey, but after this one, we’ll be able to start writing the design document for patch 1.5 with confidence. And patch 1.4, with fixes and new controls, will likely be released in December.
To sum up:
- Together, we’ll make the strategical choice between freeplay and story.
- We’ll stabilize the game and introduce modern controls — for both veteran and new players.
- We’ll focus on what matters most and take the game to the next level with patch 1.5.
Visible armor for everyone
FAQ
For fun, try loading the Russian version of this blog post. ːrofl_pirateː The FAQ is 10 times bigger, and the reason for that is explained in the first item below.
What's up with all the negative Russian reviews?
Simply put, the game has a long history and deep ties with the Russian modding community. While this community was, and still is, crucial to the existence of the genre, it also brings a fair amount of toxicity. Plus, I’m not the best community manager.
Tank controls. When will you fix them?
Hopefully in Patch 1.4. The game was originally designed with extensive mouse camera control in mind. Everything is built around it, including combat and level design. Not to mention the several hundred animations we’ll need to create to make the switch.
In short, our goal is to create controls that can fully support a gamepad with a reactive camera. This involves more movement axes, animation blending, etc.
Pressing A or D will make the character strafe. W/A or W/D will make the character run in circles until the player stops pressing A/D, at which point the locomotion will continue in the chosen direction. If the player turns the character far enough, the camera will gradually and smoothly match the direction. That’s the gist of it.
I hate the wind on the Global Map. Is it rigged to ruin my day?
It’s random. The trouble with randomness is that we tend to only remember when it works against us. We plan to adjust this in Patch 1.4, making wind much less of a factor in Global Map travel.
Sailing is too slow. Any plans to fix that?
Aye, we’ll make sailing super fast and easy in non-combat mode to eliminate this unnecessary drag.
The energy system is boring. It drags down land combat and makes it less fun. What about that?
Oh yes, the energy war. Eventually, we’re going to scrap this relic entirely, but that will require us to overhaul the entire RPG system. For now, how about a compromise? We could turn off energy consumption for basic attacks while increasing it for special, heavy, and group attacks. This could be interesting and would definitely speed things up.
Will you ever fix the crashes?
According to our automatic crash reporting system, only 1% of players experience crashes. The most recent spike in crashes was caused by patch 1.3, which introduced a lot of new ships, preventing older sea-based saves from loading. That’s on us — we should have made it clearer by adding in-game notifications. Most of the other crash causes are hardware-related. The game still doesn’t get along well with AMD, and we’re working hard to fix that.
When will proper modding become available?
As soon as the game no longer requires regular tech support, and once we finish active development. Ideally, we’ll also implement a proper module system for modding.
Will you add support for more languages?
I believe that German and Spanish localizations are almost done at this point. French should be in progress too. They all need centralized dev support and coordination. Stay tuned for future updates.
How is the state of the English localization at the moment?
It’s improving with every patch. I might be overly optimistic, but I think we’ve finally fixed most of the major issues. Big thanks to all the players who posted English bugs and errors in the dedicated Discord channel.
Anything I can do to help?
Filling out the survey would be a massive help, really. Also, if you know any senior C++ devs who would be interested in a paid job working through 20 years of legacy code — please DM me. Especially if they have experience with custom game engines and DirectX rendering. Lastly, if you think the game deserves it, please leave a blue review. I know it’s lame to ask for reviews, but seeing those 500+ hour red reviews with “devs are bad” is surprisingly demotivating.
That’s all for today, folks. Brace yourselves for 1.3.1 and 1.4. Things are about to get very interesting, very soon.
Good hunting.
ːjollyrː