The material below was prepared during the development of the pirate life simulator game Corsairs Legacy to help popularize maritime themes in general and pirate games in particular. You can follow project news on our website, as well as on our YouTube channel and via Telegram.

One downside of Early Access is the risk that developers may delay releasing new content—or add it in relatively small amounts. Cases like this are one of the reasons players can lose trust in the system. Fortunately, this does not happen all the time.

On September 7, 2021, we interviewed Aureliy, the developer of Tempest: Pirate Action RPG, who created his game from scratch. In that interview, we also asked a number of questions about the development of the game itself. You can watch the full version of the Tempest interview on our YouTube channel, or read a short version on our website.

He shared his opinion on Early Access from a developer’s perspective, and then we asked him to break down the situation specifically using Tempest as an example.

“Early Access took place roughly between the third and fourth year of Tempest’s development. From the fourth to the fifth year, there were DLC planned, as far as I remember.”

We also clarified an important point: earlier, Aureliy had stated a clear position that he did not plan to work on DLC for Tempest: Pirate Action RPG.

“I didn’t plan it, but the company did. My opinion didn’t really matter much on that question. In fact, we added a lot of things to Tempest during Early Access that people usually ship as DLC. We expanded the game as much as we could. Three maps—and later we reworked boarding too, not as DLC, but as part of the core game, so there was no ‘Buy this and get first-person combat’ kind of thing. We avoided that for as long as we could.”

As an example to compare the amount of content, here is another quote:

“The Tempest: Pirate Action RPG DLC included one more map with quests and new ships.”

However, after the release of the first DLC, Aureliy left the Tempest project at HeroCraft and decided to move on. He spoke about this in detail during the interview, and you can also read more about it on our website.

We hope you found this material useful!

Learn more about Corsairs Legacy – Historical Pirate RPG Simulator, and add it to your wishlist on the game’s Steam page.