Tidefall: Public Playtest | Build a Maritime Empire from a Single Vessel
Pushing the third Playtest (first time here) for Tidefall, a persistent browser MMO where you build a maritime empire from a single vessel across a real-time, handcrafted world. Trade, piracy, exploration, naval combat, shipbuilding, guild warfare. A PBBG built to a standard the genre rarely sees. No registration needed.
Disclaimer: All coding, game systems, and map design are 100% human crafted. Professional cartographers have been commissioned to expand the world to 25x its current size. Game banner art and icons are AI assisted.
ABOUT TIDEFALL
Tidefall is a persistent real-time top-down browser MMO with idle progression. You start as a single captain with one ship and build toward a fleet, expanding your influence across a handcrafted ocean world through trade, gathering, exploration, combat, and piracy. The long-term goal is yours to define: dominate through guild warfare, build a merchant empire, become a feared pirate, control key trade routes, or simply explore a world that keeps expanding around you.
This is an active playtest and your feedback directly shapes the game. Play for 15-60 minutes, no registration needed, and tell me what you think, here, or in Discord.
Play here (No registration required): https://www.playtidefall.com
Discord / feedback: https://discord.gg/Y4bMAA5t2c
THE DEVELOPER
I built Genleo: The Land of Eratica in the early 2000s. Tidefall is my return to the kind of game I've always loved making: persistent, progression-focused, and built around a world that feels alive. This time, I'm pushing the idea further with real-time sailing, exploration, trade, and conflict playing out directly on the map. My hope is that Tidefall can show the kind of quality, scale, and depth that PBBGs have always had the potential for, but rarely the resources to reach.
WHAT'S IN THE CURRENT PLAYTEST
Persistent real-time ocean: Sail directly across a shared world map, discover routes, visit ports, and watch your vessel move through the world in real time.
Fog of war exploration: The ocean stays wrapped in parchment fog until you sail through it. Discovery is persistent, so every voyage slowly charts your own map.
Three coastal cities: Visit early ports across the Reach, each acting as a hub for services, storage, trade, crafting, and future regional progression.
Eleven progression skills: Fishing, Logging, Mining, Cooking, Smelting, Smithing, Carpentry, Crafting, Shipwright, Navigation, and Gunnery. Server-side XP and timed activities mean your crew keeps working while you're away.
Shipbuilding and drydock: Commission vessels from standard blueprints or custom designs, manage construction projects, and refit your fleet over time. Build ships toward trade, speed, exploration, or war.
Naval combat: Engage hostile ships using real-time reload timers, ammunition types, cannon loadouts, and damage across hull, crew, and rigging.
Realm-wide Exchange: A global player-driven market with listings, depth, fills, and claims. One shared liquidity pool now, with regional trade routes planned as the ocean expands.
Crafting economy: Gather, refine, smelt, smith, cook, and craft your way into better equipment and ship components. Cannons are crafted items that can be fitted to your vessel and used in real naval combat.
Inventory and storage systems: Manage stacks, move goods between containers, split items, merge materials, and build up the supplies needed for crafting, trade, and construction.
Fleet and character progression: Develop your captain, skills, vessels, ship upgrades, and long-term standing as you move from small coastal work into deeper waters.
Built for browser play: Tidefall runs directly in the browser with a responsive interface designed for both desktop and mobile play.
ON THE HORIZON
Player-owned islands and forts: Long-term plans include claimable islands and fortified locations that support ownership, defence, storage, status, and a more permanent place in the world.
Guilds and player companies: Guild systems are planned to grow from basic membership into shared inventories, ranks, permissions, objectives, progression, rivalries, and organised activity across the sea.
Regional trade and shipping: The current Exchange is global, but the future plan is regional trade where goods need to move between ports by player or NPC shipping, creating real logistics, risk, and opportunity.
Port development and settlement upgrades: Players and guilds will eventually be able to invest in ports and settlements to improve services, storage, defence, and long-term regional presence.
Piracy, infamy, and privateering: Piracy is planned as a real playstyle, with infamy, consequences, bounties, lawful privateering, smuggler ports, and reasons for players to hunt or avoid dangerous captains.
Dangerous waters and hidden discoveries: Sea risk zones, hidden coves, landfall discoveries, and rare encounters are planned to make exploration more rewarding and memorable.
Fleet expeditions and larger world events: Future updates will add larger cooperative voyages, multi-step objectives, seasonal events, world spectacle, and reasons for players to work together across the realm.
More ships, factions, and regions: The world map will keep expanding with new ship classes, new starter regions, major factions, resources, ports, routes, and long-term progression goals.
Founding Crew cosmetic
People who play these playtests and leave feedback will receive a permanent Founding Crew pennant, a unique ship badge at launch.
I'm especially curious whether the idle loop feels satisfying yet. Does it give you enough to engage with, enough to wait for, enough to plan around? That's the thing I'm still tuning. Brutal honesty welcome.