We chat to the scurvy dogs behind the latest Warhammer board game adaptation

It’s open season for Warhammer board game licenses at the moment, and the latest team to announce a title set in Games Workshop’s gory, grim but colourful fantasy world is Evil Twin Artworks, best known for its naval RTS Victory at Sea. Fittingly, they’re heading out on the open ocean once again, with sandbox pirate adventure Man O’ War: Corsair. As the name suggests, it’s inspired by the classic 1993 board game Man O’ War, though as Evil Twin co-founder James Carroll expanded to me, this isn’t some dry tabletop conversion.

GameWatcher: How did you get involved with the IP? Did you specifically go to GW with the idea to adapt Man O’ War?

James Carroll: Well my brother and I, who started the company, we’ve been fans for years of Games Workshops stuff, so we pushed the idea to them, basically. They’d seen Victory at Sea, our previous RTS, and I think they liked the concept of being able to take that further. That’s where they came in, said they like the idea and they wanted to go with it.

GameWatcher: Does that mean the general gameplay will feel familiar to Victory at Sea players? Are you using the same model for combat?

James Carroll: Actually no, that was the thing. That’s how the conversation started, but our concept evolved as we went on. I think we all got chatting about it, and got more and more excited as we went on. As these things do, you suddenly think “oh my god, we’ve put ourselves right in the middle of this huge game,” you know? That’s the most exciting bit about it. Actually, through discussing the idea with Games Workshop we came up with an idea that’s much more exciting than just doing a port of Victory at Sea and filling it with fantasy ships.

GameWatcher: We’ve seen GW adaptations that have stuck very closely to the core concept, and others that have done their own thing with it. So how close a adaptation is this going to be?

James Carroll: Well, we’re not doing a straight-up tabletop battle game. We have taken the basic mechanics – all the rules that govern the world and the way the ships move and stuff is happening behind the scenes – but it’s not a straight, turn-based game. It’s got some adventure in, you get to sail around the Warhammer world, visit different ports and do trading, upgrade your ship and that kind of thing, but also you can walk around on deck as your captain, take control of wizards and fire fireballs at enemy ships, things like that.

GameWatcher: Cool, so are there boarding actions in the game? Hand-to-hand combat with the enemy crew?

James Carroll: Yeah, well what we’ve done – obviously we don’t have the budget of something like Assassin’s Creed, so there’s not a lot of hand-to-hand fighting. We’ve got blunderbusses and pistols. For us that’s nice, because it gives us a nice separation… that’s one of the good things about Warhammer, is that compared to other fantasy worlds, there’s not many that give you shotguns and ridiculous anti-aircraft weapons and so on. On the back of the Empire ship we’ve got a Hellblaster Volley Gun, with is this huge automatic cannon that fires off massive rounds. All that stuff allows us to go on a very different way with it.

GameWatcher: How does a typical naval encounter play out?

James Carroll: Essentially the ships have a sort of autonomy. At the moment there are different types of captain for each ship, and those captains are defined by a set of rules that governs their personality. For example, you might find a cowardly captain, or a brave captain, or one that’s bloodthirsty. All these rules affect how they come into combat. So we’re aiming at giving it a fresh flavour for each fight, you know that not every ship is going to do the same maneuver in battle. We’ve got so many different classes, so you might have a sensible captain that stays at range and tries to hit you, or a foolhardy one that charges straight at you and tries to ram you.

So there’s different factors to think of there, but essentially when you enter battle, you’ve got all your weapons and depending on the type of ship, it depends on which way you can aim those weapons. Some can fire from lots of different angles, and things like that. So you steer your ship about, and you command your crew to fire their guns, so there are cannons going off, you can use your wizard who’ll be casting his spells at the enemy ship as well. There are lots of different kinds of wizards in the game, some of whom will be more beneficial for raising strong winds in your favour, so you can get away from the enemy, or some who can summon a volcano under the see to smash into the enemy fleet, so you know, there’s various things.

You can shoot from afar, or you can come in close and board, your troops will start jumping across to the enemy ship. Then there’s you with your blunderbuss, it’s a good idea to start blasting away at the enemy crew. There’s a chance they will surrender, but if they don’t what you end up with is the ship, and you can decide to loot it. It’s all done in real-time, so your crew will start taking stuff off the ship, but you might still be in a battle, so at any time you can tell them to stop looting. If you’re feeling a bit lucky, even if there are lots of ships attacking you, you might decide to risk getting as much loot off the enemy ship as you can before you get sunk.

GameWatcher: In the trailer the character’s ship gets attacked by a ridiculously huge shark. I assume it’s been fun getting creative with all the horrible sea-monsters in Warhammer Fantasy?

James Carroll: That has been really nice. One of our 3D modelers, who designed the shark, he didn’t realise we’d put it in the game. He said to me that he played our last build, and as he attacked this other ship he turned around and suddenly this great big shark reared up out of the sea at him, and completely freaked him out. And I said “good, that’s exactly what we want to see!” It’s not safe, even when you just come out of port. Right now we’re trying to find a balance with that. Say the Kraken, the giant squid that comes around, we don’t want it to pop up all the time so that you’re just like “oh yeah, there’s the giant squid again, alright”. Each monster has its own territory that it covers, and they swim around in there. You don’t know exactly when they’ll come at you, you might sail for ages and not see anything. Then you see the tentacles start coming over the edge of the ship.

GameWatcher: How about the narrative? Is there a set story in the game, or is it more of a freeform thing?

James Carroll: There is an overarching campaign with quest stories, but it is an open world so you can sail of and trade, build up your fleet and get new ships as you go. Mark (co-founder Mark Carroll) and I have always been big fans of having options; we played a lot of Sid Meier’s Pirates when we were young, and that does it fantastically. You create your own story, and I like that. So that’s what we’ve done here. When you make your character you choose whether you’re from Bretonnia, or the Empire, and there’s a plan for a Chaos campaign which would be totally different. The Bretonnian campaign adds different things like different nationalities and races treating you differently, depending on who’s at war with your nationality, things like that. The Chaos campaign is just all-out carnage, with you just trying to sow as much madness as you can before they send a huge fleet at you, basically.

GameWatcher: Can you manage your crew, hire new specialists, things like that?

James Carroll: Yeah, the crew gain experience. We’ve tried not to put too much in there in terms of little mechanics you have to deal with for your crew, but yeah, you can hire sharpshooters, you also get things like the different wizards which you can swap around. If you need to take a guy to a distant port a long way away and you know you’re going to be attacked, you’ll maybe hire some extra firepower and so on. Yeah, and getting a nice sharpshooter is very fun. Having this guy with a rifle up in the crow’s nest, picking off anyone who gets too close.

GameWatcher: Does this take place in a specific area of the Warhammer world? You mentioned 50 different ports to sail to in the initial press release, I wondered if all the races from the tabletop game would pop up.

James Carroll: The initial plan is to cover all the human ports, round the coastline, but you will see and interact with other races who can become your allies. I’ve been having fun animating Skaven rat ogres at the moment, these giant rats charging around. And the orks, the ork fleet… it’s bonkers, I can’t wait to show people. It’s like Mad Max on the high seas. They have war wyverns as well, for aircraft, and goblin doom-divers – goblins strapped to kites. So that will be really interesting.

GameWatcher: Awesome. So as you explore you might just encounter a pirate ship from another race?

James Carroll: Yeah, fleets and individual ships will be sailing around, you can look through your spyglass and get some information about nearby vessels. You might see a trader, and then see that it’s carrying treasure. They’re all off doing their own thing, so you get the sense of this living, breathing world.

GameWatcher: Do you just have the one ship that you can upgrade, or can you buy new vessels in port?

James Carroll: Yeah, you can upgrade your ship or change to a different kind of ship as well. There are very cool race-specific ships – there’s one called the Dwarven Nautilus, which is basically a submarine. But those kind of ships… we’re not sure, at the moment we’re going to have a campaign game and then a skirmish game, and the plan is that you can play human and chaos ships in the campaign, and in the skirmish game you can pick different races, factions, different ships. But you will be able to get a Dwarven Nautilus as an ally. Again, they’ll have personalities, so you might tell them to attack a ship, and then find out that they’e spotted a vessel full of gold and gone off after that, leaving you in the lurch. The Dwarfs are pretty interesting, they’ve got war balloons and gyrocopters, so they’ve got much more of a steampunk feel.

GameWatcher: What are your plans in terms of a release schedule? You’re aiming to launch in 2016, is that early in the year, or later?

James Carroll: We’re hoping for an early 2016 launch, and we’re going to go Steam Early Access at that point. One of the things we learned with Victory at Sea was that we really liked getting the community involved, and the community for that game was really supportive and positive. I think they end up being an important part of what we do. We’ve never done Early Access before, and we think it will be a really good opportunity to get the community excited and involved, make them feel like we’re actually listening to them.

With Victory at Sea we tried to listen and take on board what the fans said. Obviously you can’t please everybody, but you do your best. Whenever we bring out an update for Victory at Sea, people say “thanks so much for listening, taking the time to take all this on board,” and it makes it all worthwhile in that respect.

GameWatcher: And presumably you’ll have learned some valuable lessons from Victory at Sea that you can bring forward into Man O’ War.

James Carroll: Oh, definitely. Nothing beats a bit of constructive criticism. That’s what we liked with Victory at Sea, people came up with some really good ideas. You think “oh, that’s great, I’m going to suggest that to the team.” And that’s what we want with this game. I think people… like my brother and I, this is the sort of game we wanted to play when we were young, and to have the opportunity to actually make it, we want to do our best with it.

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Many thanks to James for speaking to me. Man O’ War: Corsair is set to drop on Steam Early Access sometime in early 2016.