Hearts of Oak: Conquest of the Seas is a non-commercial PC game being developed by PiratesAhoy!, and is to become the historical seafaring game to end them all! Fun, realistic gameplay on land and at sea, set during the Age of Sail, will provide extensive free play, exciting scripted storylines and intense multiplayer scenarios.
If you can see it, you can sail to it (though there isn't much to do, for now!) This is a very simple demonstration of dynamically loading a large world without using loading screens.
The islands themselves are just for testing, and we will import full Caribbean islands in a later build.
Was there a downgrade in graphics? Visually, this looks horrid, but I'm excited to see more news and tech demos from this game.
Don't panic, it's just a different build to what's been shown off before. We already have the St Albans back now, and we will add more period-accurate character clothing later on. The islands will be replaced with Caribbean locations and populated with better scenery, too.
We've changed focus to build on gameplay before graphics, so while the first couple of releases might look very rough, they will start to look better as we import more of our content and fine-tune the visual effects.