Fellow Swashbucklers,
We’re pleased to announce the next public demo of Buccaneers! is now available!
The demo is being run as a Steam Playtest, so you can sign up to join via the full game’s Steam page. There will only be a limited number of spaces at first, but we’re planning to expand this over the next few days once we’ve had some initial feedback.
The playtest will be live for two weeks, so you’ll have plenty of time to participate!
Please note that the playtest uses the Prologue quest, so you are limited to the British faction and start with a mid-game ship and several abilities unlocked. In the full game, you will be able to choose which faction to join and will start with a smaller ship to work your way up.
For this beta release, we are looking for feedback in a few key areas, including:
General Gameplay
The biggest aspect we want to gather feedback on is moment-to-moment gameplay. How does the game feel to play? Is it fun and intuitive? Do you think anything could be improved, and if so, what would you like to see changed?
If you feel that the ship combat is too slow or fast for your liking, check out the Gameplay settings and try changing the ship speed and cannon reload time to suit your tastes.
VR Support
As detailed in our previous developer update, we have overhauled the game’s VR systems to use the more modern OpenXR standard, and we now need to make sure the game works with as many headsets and controllers as possible. In particular, we want to find out if the game works with:
- Valve Index
- Oculus Quest/Quest 2 via Link
- Oculus Rift S
- Windows Mixed Reality (any device)
- HP Reverb G2
If you have any of these devices and are able to test the game, please let us know how it goes!
A few things to look out for include:
- Do the in-game hands line up with your real hands? (You can adjust this in-game in the Controls settings menu.)
- Do all the controls work as expected?
- Does the game display the right button prompts for your controllers?
Rebindable Keys and Improved Gamepad Support
We also recently added fully rebindable keys for mouse and keyboard controls, allowing you to change the primary and secondary bindings to your liking. You can find this menu under Options > Controls > Key Bindings. Feel free to play around with this and let us know how well it works!
We also improved support for different types of gamepad, so the game should now work with DualShock and Switch Pro controllers in addition to Xbox-style ones, and will show the appropriate glyphs automatically. If you run into any issues with this, please let us know (but note that your mileage may vary with third-party controllers).
Please send us your feedback either on our Discord or via the Steam forums - we’ll be keeping a close eye on it and responding when we can.
Happy pirating! 🏴☠️