Sea Dogs

by Bethesda

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000051SGS
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: December 5, 2000
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,535 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Sea Dogs casts you as a young English privateer who had the misfortune of getting boarded and captured by the Spanish during the golden age of piracy. Left to rot in an island prison, you soon make your escape, capturing a small ship and making for the nearest English port. There the adventure begins as you accept a letter of Marque, which grants royal authority to attack and plunder Spanish ships.

Sea Dogs offers three games in one. A third-person perspective lets you guide your character through the various towns and ports and interact with the citizenry. The shore-side adventure plays like a good 3-D RPG and allows you to uncover plots, hire pirates, and buy supplies. But the gameplay on land is merely a prelude to the real action: piracy on the high seas. The combat model is excellent, enabling quick-thinking captains to maneuver their ships to fire broadsides into enemy vessels. You pick from the surprisingly wide variety of cannon shot in order to bring down mizzenmasts and mainsails, clear the decks of crew, or simply blast the enemy ship into matchwood. When you board or are boarded, a third option pops up that lets you duel with the enemy captain. Your health is a representation of the amount of crew you have relative to the enemy. It's a decent system pirated straight from Sid Meier's Pirates!, the original high-seas adventure.

Another bit of stolen Pirates! booty is the ability to pursue your own destiny. Unlike most other games, Sea Dogs does not impose a restrictive plot upon the player. Stay loyal to the English, join the Spanish, plunder the French just for the fun of it, or renounce all nations and become a pirate king--the options for adventure in Sea Dogs are as limitless as the ocean.

Where Sea Dogs takes on water is its difficulty. It took an awful lot of dying and reloading before we came upon an encounter that we could handle with our meager initial force. Getting thrown to the sharks wouldn't be quite so bad if gamers were given a chance to hone their skills, but Sea Dogslacks any kind of tutorial to let you practice ship-to-ship combat and swordplay. If your interest is only casual, this one won't shiver your timbers. But if you're in it for the long haul the game delivers a fantastic pirate experience. --Bob Andrews

Pros:

• Great piratey atmosphere
• Excellent graphics
• Lots of depth
• Dramatic ship-to-ship combat

Cons:

• Too difficult
• No tutorials

Product Description

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome, August 13, 2003

By 

Yossarian (Durham, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sea Dogs (CD-ROM)

You have to get this game. That's all there is to it. Sea Dogs is a great free-form pirating game. You start, naturally enough, as a would-be buccaneer with a wimpy little ship and no idea what's going on. Never fear, that changes rapidly. You can roam towns in a 3-D third person view, talking to inhabitants, recruiting crewmembers in bars, collecting orders and quests from local governors, and generally having a great time. You can align with the British, the French, the Spanish, or be a rogue Pirate (Pirates are effectively a 4th country). The pirate lands are sort of neutral territory for all, and there you can buy letters of marque from agents of the other countries to fight one another. This is necessary because, for example, if you're allied with the British, you can collect quests and information from the British, but if you go to a Spanish town you tend to get blasted out of the water by coastal batteries. Yet often the bigger quests require you to visit the islands and towns of several different nations.

But what is it, really, that we all want from a good seafaring game? Ocean battles.. and you get them here in spades. Beautiful graphics, highly detailed ships and combat effects, and even the ability to switch between steering your ship from afar like a racecar, or walking the deck and using a spyglass to view your enemies make this game totally amazing. The graphics are so good that I was shocked to learn that this game came out years ago. Holes appear in sails as chain kippels fly, waterspouts ring your ship from missed shots, planking flies in the air and badly damaged ships smoulder, masts blow completely off from critical hits, and cannons explode off the walls of fortresses as you engage them with explosive rounds. The weather effects are amazing..fight a running battle with spanish frigates in 20 knot winds and waves so high your ship nearly flounders, or hound your foes through fog so thick the first warning of contact comes from the creak of timbers as you run into their beam. Sinking ships go down with great fanfare and often leave a floating debris trail of cargo you can salvage, although if you want the big hauls, grapple your foe and go hand-to-hand on the quarterdeck to take the cargo and even the ship intact.

Other great aspects:

1) RPG EXP system allows rewards for everything from sinking or boarding ships, persuading governors to give you new quests, recovering items, or even just hang out in bars and chatting. As your level increases, you are able to spend points on everything from improving your sailing skills and sword skills to learning how to duck incoming cannon fire. Hire unique NPCs like a First Mate or a Surgeon to augment your skills, although it will increase your crew costs (don't pay and suffer a mutiny or two). The higher a level you are, the better the ship you can command, although this is not as restrictive as it sounds; each class of ship has a half dozen to experiment with. Build your own fleet by hiring NPCs with their own vessels, and placing your First Mate aboard a captured war ship.. command them in battle by telling them to sink specific targets, board others, or follow you and provide covering fire. Complete quests to gain rank and esteem from your allied country, such as a Barony from the British, replete with a fancy new coat and breeches.

2) Great graphics, can't emphasize this enough. Occasional cutscenes add to the flair, such as when you and your mates invade a town with bloodied swords held high.

3) Merchandising. You don't even have to be a pirate or a naval officer, you can just run goods from town to town, taking advantage of local prices and preferences. Most folks will do some of this anyway to pay for repairs, upgrades, new ships, and crew, but you can make it your job and it's still fun. You can even sell captured ships for huge profit.

A few other things that I've found helpful in playing the game:

1) The default difficulty is 'Hard'. You can change this in Options at the main screen. A lot of folks seem to have missed this, and get discouraged when they get blasted from the start. It also seems to cut down on the number of times you get attacked in general.

2) High wire act. There aren't a lot of do-overs in this game.{Anger} a governor once, chances are you won't win him back. So save a lot, and really pay attention to your dialogue choices because if you just say the wrong thing you might miss a quest permanently. For example, one quest was to destroy a fort and pillage a town. I destroyed the fort, but accidentally agreed to be paid off by the mayor after running amok, rather than claiming the island for Britain. This effectively 'broke' the quest, since whenever I returned to that town, it was already pillaged, yet I was not able to officially claim it or pillage it again. Also, occasionally things will get buggy with the letters of marque; at one point I was operating under a British letter of marque, yet the British were hostile to me, and the British agent in the pirate town was willing to sell me another. Yet at the same time the Spanish reacted as if I already had one.

3) You sail between islands on a world map, and interact with encounters in the 3-D sailing setting. Time compression options let you zip into friendly towns if you want instead of tacking around the island, or chase down slow fat merchantmen that tried to sail off while you destroyed their escorts. Learning how to use the time compression menu will shave hours of relatively tedious chasing off your fights, and occasionally even let you sneak up on enemy forts and ships without taking damage.

In short, get this game.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not perfect, but nothing else like it., December 8, 2000

By 

Matthew Duren (Tracy, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sea Dogs (CD-ROM)

I've been waiting for a game to do justice to the Pirate's genre for years. Sea dogs makes a valiant effort, though not succeeding on every point. For those who enjoyed Sid Meyer's Pirates, like myself, you may find a few things lacking in Sea Dogs. The setting is an imaginary group of islands, not the Caribbean as I had hoped. The number of visitable islands is also fairly limited. The towns you can visit are pretty, but limited in their scope. Gameplay is limited to one character so I don't believe this is a true RPG, but the game does deal in experience points, hit points and skill points in your character's progression. This game does have a steep learning curve, with novices getting blasted out of the water on a regular basis. So why did I give this game 5 stars? The sailing sequences are breathtaking with beautiful waves, ships, and environmental effects. Battling other ships and forts is also great 3d fun and the gameplay in between is solid enough to keep me playing again and again (much to the irritation of my wife). The makers are developing patches as I write this, so hopefully the game will only get better. Until then, there's still nothing else out there like it.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wow...what a game., December 19, 2000

By 

JT "JT" (TX USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sea Dogs (CD-ROM)

Despite the fact that it is the buggiest game I have ever played, I can't stop playing it. Despite the fact that the patch recently released for it did nothing to reduce that bugginess, I can't stop playing it. Despite that fact that there are certainly some important features missing altogether (meaning things I wish had been included in the game), I can't stop playing it.

The graphics when on the ocean, whether firing cannons at enemy ships or trying to avoid a storm, are simply breathtaking. Make sure you have a GOOD video card, because a decent one just won't do.

I had been looking for a good pirate game since Pirates! Gold. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, come one, come all, for this is it. Yes...yes...I bashed it good on the bug issue. And yes it does have bugs, but bugs can be patched. What patches do: They cover a pirate's eye (stereotypically). What patches don't do: Add playability, eye-popping graphics, and overall interest. No sir, the game must already come with that. This one does.

P.S. Despite the fact I am very tired, I can't stop playing it.