sea dog: Definition, Synonyms from Answers.com

Platform: IBM PC Compatible
Release Date: November 21, 2000
Genre: Role-Playing
Style: Strategy RPG
Similar Games: Sid Meier's Pirates! (IBM PC Compatible)

Game Description

Return to the age of sail in Sea Dogs for the PC. Created by Russian-based developer Akella and published by Bethesda Softworks, this epic role-playing game is set in 1625 AD and features a highly detailed 3D world, real sailing ships, pirates, adventure and nonlinear gameplay.

Sea Dogs allows you to play as one of three sides in a struggle to rule the high seas. The adventure begins somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean in an archipelago discovered by Ojeda Alonso de Quena, a famous Portuguese explorer. Choose to play as an ambitious young corsair for one of the European superpowers, the English, Spanish or the French, to take part in conquering the newly found archipelago in South Seas.

You begin your adventure with a small ship and some general guidance as to what to do next -- you must sail to the archipelago and start your career by attacking and looting ships, disrupting trade and gradually improving your ship and weapons.

Combining elements of role-playing, naval combat, action and strategy, the game provides an ample amount of opportunities for adventure as you set out to make a name for yourself. The Archipelago is a fertile land, with great treasures of gold and gems just waiting for you to discover them.

After you have proven your skills and feel you are strong enough to conquer an island for his country, the real war begins. Your task is to eventually conquer the entire archipelago for the empire (whichever one you are fighting for). You may also choose to become a pirate, to forget the contracts you've signed and start a new country, small but free. In this case, your task is to conquer all the islands for yourself and build the pirate republic.

You do all of this with complete freedom. There are no missions that you are required to undertake, but the game provides a series of quests and missions that will gently keep you headed toward an overall final objective. There are plenty of adventures available for you to gain gold, experience and magic artifacts. You can also take and ransom hostages, trade goods, hire men, accept quests, follow rumors, sink ships, board other ships in 3D, take control of up to three allied ships and then attempt to capture forts and towns in coordinated attacks, operate and arm your crew, sail your ship, throw money into the sea and much more.

At any time you can choose to change your allegiance. You can give up pirating to join the cause of another nation, or leave the service of your country to become a pirate. Regardless of your actions in the game you always have the ability to choose another course through a number of means, including using bribery. You can even decide to make your fortune as a trader.

Towns serve as focal points in the game, allowing you to repair, re-supply and upgrade your ship, pick up new crewmembers, look for work, or simply listen to rumors. You can also use towns as a source of income should you be able to capture a fort that protects a town. The income of that town now becomes the property of you or your country.

Through wealth or combat, you can obtain additional ships and begin building a fleet under your command. You decide which NPCs to hire as captains for your ships as well as their crews and supplies. Send your ships to attack and defend other locations or have them work with you to complete missions. You can customize your fleet by selecting from a variety of different ships, cannons and shot types. Purchase a new battleship loaded with the best cannons available for lots of combat, or choose a small skip for trading goods and outrunning the enemy.

Sea Dogs offers high-resolution 3D graphics, day and nighttime environments, detailed water effects, landscapes, towns, forts and complex weather. Small details like sea foam, wakes, billowing sails and translucent water add to what the designers wanted to be an "authentic feel" for the game. In addition, wind and weather effect how your ship sails and can leave you sitting dead in the water or crashing into shallow shoals.

~ Tara Hernandez, All Game Guide

Roots & Influences

Sea Dogs combines role-playing and action along with a mix of 3D strategy, combat and first person adventure on the high seas. The game owes its premise to real life exploits of European explorers and pirates of the early 1600s and gameplay style to other Bethesda Softworks efforts such as Daggerfall. Most sea-going piracy games of the genre can also count Sid Meier's Pirates! among the early influences.

~ Tara Hernandez, All Game Guide

Review: Overall

"Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of bug spray!" You can't count on smooth sailing and fair winds when you play Sea Dogs but, despite the numerous bugs, the game is an addictive and enjoyable experience that brings new life to the open-seas genre started by Sid Meier's Pirates!. Not only does Sea Dogs come close to matching the enjoyment of playing that venerable classic, it does so in full 3D, adding a new dimension to gameplay.

The most striking aspect of Sea Dogs is the 3D sailing and combat system. The feeling of being on board one of these 17th century vessels is almost perfectly captured, save for the lack of crewmembers being shown on deck. As you sail from island to island throughout the waters of the Archipelago seeking fame and fortune, your ship rolls along the waves, your sails turn into the wind as the invisible crew keeps your ship on course and foam sprays as your ship cuts through the waves. You can fully control the ship either from on board the deck in first-person view or from a third-person perspective to get a strategic view of the battle.

At times, ship-to-ship combat becomes very intense, requiring both quick thinking and strategy, especially when in the middle of an epic battle between two opposing sides with multiple ships. The great variety of ships and their characteristics require different tactical approaches and provide a chance to try out varied playing styles. You can choose a slow, heavy ship with massive firepower but poor maneuverability or a fast, agile ship with fewer guns -- each requires a different combat technique and has unique cost requirements. Faster and lesser-armed ships seem to be the best choice during gameplay as, quite often, slow ships are sitting ducks, no matter how good the captain or the number of cannons it carries.

One flaw in combat occurs during random encounters when your ship is mysteriously ambushed and you begin a battle with as many as three enemy ships within firing range and no chance to escape. Being ambushed in a dungeon is understandable but being surprised out on the open ocean is difficult to imagine. These ambushes are frequently impossible to win and require a restart since your sails are often too badly damaged to allow you to escape before your ship is destroyed or boarded. The mismatches that occur during these random encounters are ridiculous and truly unfair.

Perhaps to compensate for some of the unfairness, the damage modeling and effects in Sea Dogs is superb. As you blast away at the enemy ships, their sails are torn and bursts of flame explode from impacts against the hull. At times you manage a critical hit that ignites a powder magazine, causing a massive explosion. Combat against land-based forts is also very exciting as you can see them progressively sustain more and more damage and watch cannon emplacements explode, signaling that plunder of the town is near.

Subtle problems with the otherwise efficient combat system include a somewhat weak ship AI that at times has trouble keeping ships from bumping into things, often with disastrous results. Many times, a heavily damaged allied or captured ship sank because it rammed into land or another ship repeatedly during an approach to port. It is also difficult to give allied ships orders such as escape or prevent them from destroying a ship you're trying to capture. Controlling secondary ships can also be frustrating to the point of eventually opting to sail alone to cut repair costs significantly.

An alternative to capturing ships through combat is to board them, an aspect basically handled the same way it was in Sid Meier's Pirates!. You select different moves and block left or right when attacked or feint an attack to catch your opponent off guard. Success depends not only on playing ability but also on the character's boarding skills, the number of crewmembers and level of play.

The combat system, although not perfect, works as intended while the rest of the game suffers from what is obviously a lack of quality assurance and testing. There are, indeed, dozens of quests, trading opportunities and unique events but often they don't function properly or, at other times, require you to shift allegiance to another country. Shifting allegiance costs reputation points and to get a new allegiance requires five thousand in gold. Even more serious is that when you break an allegiance to sail for another nation or as a pirate, the other nations become hostile and prevent you from entering their ports. This requires you to switch several times just to keep the campaign progressing since quests can require you to go to ports with which you have no allegiance.

Other problems include certain quests breaking for unknown reasons or not being accessible, hiring some officers for your crew such as a replacement for a dismissed crewmember or discerning exactly what you're supposed to be doing at any given time due to dialogue not matching the actual quest. One particularly nasty bug occurred after repeatedly sinking a ship, the San Miguel, to move to the next stage of a quest -- it kept reappearing! Was this intended to signify it being turned into a ghost ship after being sent to a watery grave? Be warned -- there are possible dead ends from some of these bugs that will cause you to restart, so save often.

After extended play, it becomes apparent that Sea Dogs was shipped too early. None of the bugs is a game killer and all could have been fixed easily. Combat could have been balanced a bit better had Bethesda Softworks tested the game longer and quests fine-tuned a bit more. A patch is available at their website that fixes some of the problems and should be installed prior to beginning the game.

Despite problems and frustrating and tedious moments, the game is still recommended because it's fun to play and offers a unique gaming experience. If you're looking for a pirate action-adventure-RPG loaded with combat, excellent graphics and dozens of quests, you could do a lot worse than Sea Dogs.