Past, Present, and Future

Ahoy!

It's been a month since the release - time to count the loot and make some tough calls. What's it gonna be - 5, 10, 15, or 25?

Past

Let's rewind the clock back a month. The game's release was marked by three rather unpleasant factors.

A ton of content and features missing in the release version.

• Three new side quests were never delivered, namely "Unforgiven", "Pirates Don’t Need Heavens", and "Old Sea Dog’s Tales". I only discovered this a couple of days ago. Now, that's some quality project management. ːrofl_pirateː Those responsible for this monumental screw-up will leave our ranks very soon unless they rectify it promptly.

• The Exploration, aka No-Timers mode, was underdeveloped. The issue lies in underestimating the complexity of the task - all quest timers need to be manually deactivated in each quest to avoid conflicts. Delving into old code is a rather unrewarding task, but this is the way, and the mode will be set right in patch 1.1.

• Balancing amounted to only 60% of the estimated target - new weapons were poorly integrated, new features like stealth remained largely untested, and numerous adjustments of the difficulty curve and side quests remained on paper.

• English localization is still a mess - despite the entire game's text being proofread, thanks to the heroic efforts of Goddart and Co., only a portion of it was integrated by the time of release. Same as with the quest timers - lots of manual labor and no technical way to merge new texts fast. Furthermore, due to the lack of my time to proofread the interface, nearly half of the players are still unaware that the Iron Will perk can save characters from mortal wounds once in several minutes. And that's just one example of the issue.

These questionable results are primarily attributed to the small team size and its part-time involvement, the outdated engine, and the colossal workload: Sandbox, Demo, and a 200-hour game with tons of legacy code.

In other words: not in the office and not on the payroll. Of course, that's our problem, not yours. You've paid real money for the product, expecting a certain quality bar. However, I believe that without such details, our today's summary would be incomplete.

Steam doesn't count pre-order reviews

That's almost 5% subtracted from the final rating. Nevertheless, even this cost is justifiable - without pre-release testing and the financial support from our community, the game might never have seen the light of day. To be honest, that was projected beforehand, and these 5% of user score should not have played a significant role if not for the following point.

An organized review bombing

Crafted almost like a coordinated attack, a mass of negative reviews was deployed and then pushed up in the list for everyone to see. Undoubtedly, the game is not perfect and it totally deserves being criticized, but the concerted effort against the game costed us another 4% of the user rating. It nearly dealt a fatal blow to the full version and most likely killed Sandbox for good. In a perfect world, the game would boast a score of ~75%. In reality, everything Caribbean Legend aimed for has taken a hit.

Present

We deliberately took a month to gather all the metrics before making difficult decisions. Plans may be futile, but planning is always essential. Last summer, I outlined four scenarios for our trajectory.

Scenarios:

• Pessimistic: 5,000 copies sold in the first month, averaging 10 copies/day without discounts. In this scenario, we release patch 1.1,