Exciting Privateer Configuration Discoveries

Last week, we decided to spend some time looking into the details of how some of Privateer's gameflow systems work. One of these was the Repair and Upgrade bay screen, which displays a unique render of your ship that can change based on your purchases. Four types of upgrades can make visible changes to your ship: sensors, engines, weapons and guns. The game stores these in a sort of 'paper doll' which pastes the appropriate graphic over the base image of an empty ship. Other upgrades, like turrets or repair droids or shield generators, do not alter the appearance of the ship. Righteous Fire does not add any new graphics to this system: the higher engine upgrades repeat their previous highest settings and the fusion cannons reuse the plasma gun art.

As we extracted all of the game's component graphics, we made a fascinating discovery: the Centurion had not the available two but four upgrade graphics for each of its weapons. That is, there were two extra 'outer' mounts capable of carrying torpedo launchers, missile launchers or tractor beams. This indicates that the Centurion was once intended to have four weapon slots instead of two which would have likely significantly impacted late game balance. The fact that these graphics made it into the final game further suggests that this change was made very late in the balancing process. Many 'cut' Privateer weapons and ships have been discovered over the years but very few are referenced in the game itself because the reality of shipping on 3.5" disks meant the team had to be very careful about every single bit. Freeing these six extra postage stamps would have been welcomed!

Additionally, we learned that the Centurion has only one visual engine upgrade, despite the base game allowing for up to three. This was likely another late change in the other direction, with the designers deciding to offer Centurion pilots more power than had been initially desired. Eagle eyed Privateers will also note that there's a hint of these late missile changes in the game itself: when mounting a launcher on your Tarsus you are offered the "port" or "starboard" slots while mounting one on the Centurion (or Galaxy) lists "inner port" and "inner starboard" as the options.

Interested in getting a closer look at Privateer's ship upgrade graphics? We've collected every single one here. One last fact: the reason the yellow car is part of the ship doll instead of the background was because the game originally planned to include an animation where your craft was towed into place. Like a lot of content designed for the game this was ultimately cut for disk space. Just think what Privateer could've been like if it had shipped a year later on CD-ROM!