What the developers have to say:

Why Early Access? “Over the last few months, we’ve received a ton of support and feedback from our public testing via Discord, and we think it’s important to keep this going! Blazing Sails has already improved a lot from the pre-alpha and we couldn’t have done it without our devoted community. Early Access allows us to keep expanding this amazing community and keep the valuable feedback coming while testing our newest features.” Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access? “We still want to implement, balance and fix a lot of stuff before we can start calling our game “fully finished”. Of course, this takes time - especially for a small team. Get Up Games is a start-up studio, Blazing Sails being its first game. We want to do it right. While we think the Early Access period will last about 6 to 9 months, we don’t want to fix ourselves too hard on a specific date. If we don’t feel like our game is finished, we also won’t feel comfortable with a full launch.” How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version? “There is still plenty of stuff we want to add! That being said, the Early Access version of Blazing Sails contains all the core mechanics and features we wanted the game to have. Things we will add during our Early Access period will be stuff like:

• More ship types

• More Islands

• More weapons and weapon types

• Lots of extra pirate and ship customisation

• Extra ship upgrades

• Female character model

• Custom server options

• Bug fixes and balancing

• Performance improvements

• Controller support

• Different map settings (weather conditions)

• Extra language options

• …” What is the current state of the Early Access version? “The current version of Blazing Sails contains all the core features you need in order to have plenty of fun! These are all relatively well polished but can easily be expanded and improved upon in the near future. Right now the game contains:

• 20+ unique weapons (including a few wacky ones)

• The ‘Brigantine’ ship type

• 3 Island clusters all with their own unique theme (Pirate town, Trident and Temple cluster)

• 3 different map settings (noon, sunset and night)

• Ship upgrades for the steering wheel, swivel cannons, cannons and capstan

• Plenty of pirate and ship customisation unlocks

• Client/community hosted servers including a few admin commands

• Official dedicated servers

• A party system including in-game Steam friends list

• Anti-cheat system” Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access? “The current plan is to increase the price upon full release but this is not final yet.” How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process? “We’ve already implemented and considered a lot of community suggestions during our Discord testing phase and closely look at the reactions of the community every time after we push a new update. If you want to suggest something, give feedback, or report a bug the official Blazing Sails Discord is the ideal place for this. We tend to be quite active on Discord and read through the suggestions and feedback many times a week. We’re essentially making Blazing Sails the game we’ve always wanted to play. We would also appreciate devs listening to the community.”