Caribbean! Interview
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RPS: Why pirates?
Souslov: That must be obvious, pirates are almost communists, and we here in the former Eastern Bloc just love anything communist. Perhaps we were ought to call it Caribbean Comrades!, but that would make an impression of a game about Che Guevara and the Castro brothers, and we're pretty concerned about the US market.
In all seriousness, we have to blame the old boy Fenimore Cooper. After the performances given by Johnny Depp, getting involved with the pirates would be what Dostoevsky and Nabokov referred to as (poshlost) thus, no pirates ever, that's what we decided after With Fire and Sword was out. Let's make our next project a game about the Great Lakes, about the trappers and the Iroquois, about Indian massacres and the scalping of the stupid palefaces. That was our plan.
Naturally, if we're going Great Lakes, the game has to feature pirogues. We've built a level with the Iroquois assaulting an English fort across a lake, but the redcoats had some cannons and kept sinking the poor Americans (the native ones, that is) to a man. Just for laughs, we then put some cannons on the pirogues, allowing the Indians to fire back. One thing led to another, and we ended up with a 40-cannon frigate sailing in this lake. After that, coming to a thought of (well, maybe it will be the pirates after all?) was only a matter of time.
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RPS: Is the game a sandbox or is there a plot to follow?
Souslov: Sandbox all the way! Frankly, making a plot-driven campaign wasn't really our cup of tea. Considering how much time and efforts it eventually consumed, we wonder why didn't we dump the idea straight away and implemented siege artillery instead. So, adventures in the Caribbean are fully open-ended. We do plan to implement a few short story arcs involving several quests each though, to flesh out the world.
