Free-roam Friday - Let's discuss free-roaming and open-world games

My all-time favourite open world game has to be Pirates!, specifically the original 1987 version for Commodore 64. Over the last 30 years, I have spent countless hours within its beautifully pixelated version of the Caribbean. In fact, recently I have had an itch to hoist the mainsail once again and dive back in, so it's been on my mind these days. I just need to find the time.

Pirates! is not only an absolutely brilliant game but also a wonderful and memorable experience that any gamer should experience at least once. You start off as a privateer for one of the European nations that were colonizing the Caribbean at the time. You can also choose the year when your story begins and this determines the kind of Caribbean that you find when you first sail out -- the earlier your starting point, the more dominated by Spain the area is.

Not much more is predetermined, however. The world around you is alive, with the diplomatic relations between the major nations evolving dynamically and unpredictably, different from game to game. You have to constantly adjust your plans based on those changes -- that is, if you want to take part in these colonial conflicts. You don't have to, but ignoring them completely and becoming a fully rogue pirate will make the game considerably more difficult.

Still, in the end, what you do is really up to you. You can for instance make it a goal to gain as many titles from as many countries as possible, which you can accomplish by helping the four colonial powers in their war efforts against each other. Or you can forget the wars and seek to find treasure, including some legendary Inka ones, by gaining possession of pieces of maps that can guide you to those riches. Many of those maps can be acquired from some pretty seedy characters in the murkiest corners of the saltiest seaside taverns, but only if you have the necessary coin. Your family is also missing, so you can spend your time looking for them. Again, some peculiar characters in rundown port taverns will be of help there, giving you information about some notorious pirates who may or may not know something, and who you then need to hunt down. Or, you can just concentrate on the good old pirate life, attacking ships, sacking towns, and perhaps even hunting down the legendary Silver Train and Treasure Fleet. Or, you can try to find a suitable wife for yourself and make her fall in love with you (sorry, no female pirates or same-sex romancing here), the more beautiful the better of course.

During a normal game, you end up doing a little bit of this, and a little bit of that.

As in life, there is no real fixed ending in the game, but as the time passes your character gets older, and with age the game starts to become more difficult. You will start to have trouble convincing free sailors to join your crew. Likewise, it will become more difficult to prevent mutinies among the crew that you already have. And even more importantly, your body starts to deteriorate, making sword fights harder. In the end, you are kind of forced into retirement by the fact that the world around you simply is no longer as easy to deal with as it was when you were younger. When you make the final decision to retire, your career and game ends and you live the rest of your life happily in prosperity... or not, determined by your accomplishments during the game.

But the point is, you can't really do everything, as you just don't have the time. There is also no singular goal to pursue, either. You do what you feel is most important, that speaks to you. And by necessity, you leave other things undone. This, for me, is the ultimate freedom in a free-roaming game.

The gameplay itself is a collection of a range of game mechanics.

There is the open world map that lets you sail across the Caribbean (you need to take wind patterns into account) and hike on its various land masses. While doing so, sometimes you come across other ships and you can make the tactical decision to leave them be, to exchange news, or to attack them. If you choose the last mentioned, a tactical real-time combat ensues where you need to manoeuvre your ship based on the prevailing winds (which can change) to gain an upper hand in the battle and to aim and time your cannons accurately. Your strategy will also be determined by your ship -- there are nine different ship types and while your fleet can have several ships in it, you have to choose one for the combat and it's usually good to have at least one fast and agile combat ship in your fleet, together with cargo ships where you can transport your plunder.

These battles typically end with you boarding the enemy ship (or them boarding yours!), and a sword fight ensues. The fencing is tactical, testing your cunning as well as your reflexes. You have half a dozen attacks and half a dozen parry manoeuvres at your disposal. Before the fight, you can choose your weapon from three different swords, your choice based on which type of a strategy you want to pursue. As you fight, your ship's crew is also fighting the other ship's crew in the background, and that fight influences your man-to-man sword fight with the enemy captain. The better your crew does, the easier it is for you to make the enemy surrender, and the better you do, the higher your crew's morale. And the other way around, of course. If you lose the battle, you are typically captured. Which means that you get older while doing nothing else than rotting in a jail somewhere. Not good.

You can of course also sail your ships into towns, of which there are about fifty, depending a bit on the era that you selected at the beginning of the game. These towns are more or less historically accurate. Once there, you can typically visit the governor for some diplomacy, to ransom some prisoners, and of course to check out his lovely daughter, if he has one. You can always go to the local tavern where you can hear the latest news and rumours (sometimes very important), hire some new crew (it's a constant balancing act between too many mouths to feed and too few men to threaten bigger ships and towns), and meet some shady characters (maps, information, whatnot). You can trade with the local merchant to buy supplies or to sell goods that you have plundered (or you can also just play as a trader and buy where things are cheap and sell where they are pricey -- the game is not called Traders! but it could be). You can also get your ships repaired, which is a good idea to do if you have taken a broadside or two. When in town, you can also choose to divide your current plunder among your crew -- and you actually need to do this periodically or the members of your crew become increasingly unhappy and the likelihood of mutiny increases, which in turn will lead into internal conflict and sword fights against the mutineers. However, when you divide the plunder, the game advances and becomes more difficult. It's a neat little balancing mechanic.

Instead of visiting them, you can also attack towns, either by sea or land. If you attack by sea, you will need to navigate your ship into the harbour while dodging the town's cannons. If you attack by land, you do so through a land-based strategy game where you need to use the environment to your advantage. Either way, once you get into the town, you end up with a one-on-one swordfight with the commander of the town's forces, while your crew battles the city's soldiers. It's similar to the swordfight that you have when boarding enemy ships.

If you manage to successfully raid a town, there is a possibility of it surrendering completely. When it does so, you decide which colonial power should gain its control. It's a great feeling when you have accomplished the conversion of a large area of the Spanish domain into, for instance, Dutch control. But it's pretty difficult, too. And sooner rather than later, there will be a number of fierce pirate hunters at your heels. They are pretty serious threats, too. When that happens, you may want to lay low for a while. Maybe go find that long lost sister of yours of whose whereabouts you have recently heard rumours about. Let things quiet down.

I had (pardon me) a pirated copy of the game back in the late 80s, so I didn't have the map that comes with the game. So for me, the game has also always been very much about exploration. Every time I started a new game, I started it by tracing the outlines of the Caribbean onto a paper, and then as I found each town, I marked it onto my map. The reason I had to do this from scratch every time was because between games I would typically lose the map that I had drawn earlier. And besides, the towns would be slightly different in different eras. Now, the result of this is that still today I can pretty accurately point where the fifty or so Caribbean towns featured in the game are. And because of this old habit, I still draw the map when I start a game, even if I now also have the actual map that came with the game.

Speaking of stuff that comes with the game, the manual, which I also didn't have back in the day, is over 80 pages long. While I do like the modern trend of teaching players as they play the game, there is certainly something to be said about good manuals as well. Like so many manuals of the era, the one that comes with Pirates! does not only tell you how to play the game, but also fleshes out the world and the era that the game takes place in. It's by no means necessary to read it (I played for over 20 years before finally even seeing a copy) but it's a wonderful little book and certainly enhances the experience.

The game's designer, Sid Meier, also made other great games. I loved his earlier Silent Service. You may also have heard of this little franchise called Civilization that started a few years later.

If you decide to try Pirates!, you have multiple versions to choose from. The original 1987 game was widely popular and therefore ported to pretty much every system out there that could handle it. It was later followed by Pirates! Gold for PC and some other systems in the mid-90s. In the early 2000s, a remake was released for consoles. There is also an iOS version, I think.

Still, I would highly recommend the original Commodore 64 version. The game play is largely the same across the different versions (the early 2000s version has a new dancing mini-game, but it's not very good). But in my opinion, the mood conveyed by the graphics of the original C64 trumps all later versions. It's more realistic, more gritty, more real than the game's later more polished and quite cartoony incarnations. With the C64 version, I can smell the salt.

If you have never played Pirates!, do yourself a favour and give it a try. I had played what you would call open world games before it (Elite and the Ultima series come to mind) and I have definitely played and enjoyed many since, but I can't think of an open world game that I would love more, that would be so perfectly designed and so wonderfully balanced between game mechanics and the sheer immersion in its choose-your-own-story mechanisms. It's an absolute treasure of a game.