Sea action game Blackwake has left Steam Early Access. Its sales have already exceeded 1 million copies.

Australian studio Mastfire has released the final version of Blackwake, a multiplayer action game dedicated to naval battles. The game spent three years in Steam Early Access and during this time has collected a lot of positive reviews.

With the release of version 1.0, the price of the game was permanently reduced to $10 (259 rubles in the Russian Steam segment, excluding the current discount). Also, the developers have doubled the experience for all users.

About how the game appeared and how it has changed during early access, the creators spoke in detail in Steam Community. The idea for the project came about in 2013 under the influence of Pirate Ship Wars (Garry's Mod) and Battlefield Pirates (Battlefield 1942, Battlefield 2). Tyler Newton (Tyler Newton) and Dakota Walls (Dakota Walls) wanted to make a solid game about naval battles - such projects, they recall, were few at the time. However, the Kickstarter campaign launched in 2014 failed. The game looked too serious and ambitious, and only a few YouTube bloggers were interested in it. There were a lot of laughs in their videos about Blackwake, and the authors realized that it was worth adding a little humor to the action.

Second attempt on Kickstarter turned out to be successful: they managed to raise 170 thousand Australian dollars (about $113 thousand). Twitch streamers helped promote the project. The developers expected that at the start the number of simultaneous players will be approximately 300, and sales for the first month will be about 30 copies. However, the reality has surpassed all expectations: in February 2017, Blackwake was played by over five thousand people at the same time, and by now it has been bought more than 1,2 million times.

Over the past three years, Blackwake has added new modes, ships, maps with various hazards (including icebergs, volcanoes, and whirlwinds), and a rank system with cosmetic items as rewards. The developers also added bots, a lot of new "cosmetics", made it easier to find friends and fixed more than 500 bugs.

“Considering that our team initially consisted of two people, we are quite pleased with what we were able to achieve,” the authors admitted. — We saw that gamers like our game, and it forced us to move on. Blackwake has reached its current state thanks to the players."

blackwake

Blackwake has "very positive" customer reviews (based on 11,7k reviews). feedback). Users note that playing it with friends is very exciting, however, despite the "frivolity", the action requires strategizing and well-coordinated teamwork. Among the shortcomings, technical problems were mainly mentioned, but the developers have already solved many of them.

The game is quite demanding on the PC. Minimum system requirements are Intel Core i5-2400 and AMD FX-6300 processors and 10 GB of RAM, while recommended (for playing at 1080p and at 60 fps) are Intel Core i5-6500 and AMD Radeon FX-8350 and 12 GB of RAM. Blackwake is only available in English.

Source: 3dnews.ru