After I was writing about pirate video games you need to play as a substitute of Cranium and Bones, I needed to give a nod to Blackwake, though it did not fairly make the minimize. The multiplayer naval FPS left early entry again in 2020, after making a little bit of a splash initially on YouTube due to its emergent mayhem. Consider it as a extra aggressive, much less cartoonish Sea of Thieves, the place the main target is on blowing up ships and preventing their crews. Sadly, the participant rely dwindled quickly after, and it stopped receiving updates earlier than the yr was out.
Presumably in response to Cranium and Bones’ launch, somebody from the now defunct studio is trying to inject new life into the sport, particularly by making it free to maintain. Hop onto Steam and you may obtain it proper now with out spending any of your booty.
It is a fairly good technique for any sport caught in playerless purgatory. Clearly it isn’t making any cash because it stands, so conserving the price of entry is not doing anybody any good. Sadly, it is seemingly that this shedding of the value is the final replace we’ll see for Blackwake. The studio not exists, the web site is gone, and with no upfront price, DLC or microtransactions, no one is making any cash out of this, which suggests the possibilities of it getting extra help are subsequent to nil.
Funnily sufficient, again in October a participant made a put up on the Steam boards stating that they might “pay the devs $5,000 to make the sport free to play”. The put up has, naturally, resurfaced. Time to pay up!
Whereas Blackwake most likely would not have a lot of a future, hopefully this implies it’s going to not less than spawn explosive and generally slapstick pirate brawls as soon as once more. Whereas it by no means drew in enormous numbers, at its peak it had simply over 6,000 gamers duking it out concurrently. During the last yr, although, it is solely managed double digits. Till at the moment. Now it is on its method to 400 concurrent gamers, which not less than means you will most likely be capable of discover some fights to get into. I am tempted to fireplace it up once more myself.