Designer Diary: Multiplayer Ship Battles
Author: Dan Magaha, Producer, Sid Meier's Pirates! for the Xbox

One of the coolest additions to the Xbox version of Sid Meier's Pirates! is the new Vs Ship Battle mode. This new mode allows up to four players on one Xbox to compete in "party game" style ship battles, strategically firing cannon salvos, collecting special powerups, and ramming each other in spectacular "T-Bone" collisions.

When we first started thinking about bringing Pirates! to the Xbox, we spent a lot of time discussing the many benefits of the Xbox and how we could take advantage of them to really make something special. Since our team is made up of a lot of console gamers, almost immediately, the question of multiplayer came up. Since Pirates! is and has always been a single-player experience, we knew multiplayer had to be something outside the context of the main story mode of the game. From the beginning, Sid Meier's design for ship battles was accessible, responsive, and most of all, a lot of fun, so it quickly became apparent that it was a prime candidate for a special Xbox mode.

As we started prototyping this new mode, we had a couple of basic design goals. First, we knew we wanted the battles to be fast and frantic, but within the context of the game world -- a naval battle between opposing ships. Second, we wanted to ratchet up the skill-based elements so that players could use some advanced tactics to take out their opponents. Third, we needed to make sure that there was a balance between the smaller, faster ships, and the hulking warships. Because this mode was completely separate from the single player game, crew duels would be removed from the equation, and each ship would need to have a viable play strategy.

We first experimented with the idea of allowing players to "aim" their shots by using a range meter. This added an extra challenge to the game, but wasn't very intuitive, and was very hard for new players because you not only had to ensure your ship was lined up with the other ship, but also that your range meter was aligned. In this iteration, ship battles were taking far too long and they just weren't that satisfying because it was so difficult to hit your opponent. One thing we added that did have promise, however, was the ability for ships to damage their opponents by ramming them. This proved to be so much fun that we kept it in, adding special effects and a really fun physics system that results in some really fantastic collisions.

We went back to the drawing board and decided to stick with an aiming system that was close to the single-player game, and add some skill elements by allowing the player to fire the port and starboard cannons independently. This system, coupled with the ability to raise and lower sails to increase your turning speed, gives the player more control to create winning strategies and can really help even the odds in a battle between a small ship and a large one.

As a game balancing measure, we then added arcade-style powerups, so that players could temporarily increase their speed, attack, or defense. These powerups can be used to compensate for the deficiencies in a particular ship by bestowing extra defense or attack, a speed boost, and other effects. We knew we were definitely on to something good when we started playing the game in the office and people were immediately talking trash to each other :-).

We topped it off by adding a few more key features: the ability to choose different "battling arenas" (which added some variety), comprehensive stats to give the "trash talkers" plenty of information to throw at their opponents, and the ability to challenge the AI to really make the game accessible to everyone.

The result is a minigame that has all the right ingredients: easy to play, strategically challenging, addictive, and (pardon the pun) a boatload of fun! We hope you have as much fun playing it as we do! As a matter of fact, anyone on our dev team could kick your *&^@#$%! in this game...ooops...sorry...there's the trash talk I told you about...can't help it.