What is Golden Tides?

What is Golden Tides?

Hi. We're Psychedelic Games, and we're making Golden Tides.

The short version: Golden Tides is a pirate-themed 4v4 adventure MOBA. Matches take about 20-25 minutes. You pick a hero, crew up with three teammates, and fight across land and sea to grab treasure before the other team does.

The longer version is what the rest of this article is for.

Note that Golden Tides is currently still in development. A lot of the details might and probably will change.

The Basics

If you've played League of Legends, Dota, or Smite, you'll recognize the bones here. Skill-based combat, hero abilities, items you buy with gold, team coordination that actually matters. We're not reinventing what a MOBA is at its core.

But we've thrown out a lot of what you might expect. There's no lanes. No towers. No minion waves. No jungle that's the same every single game.

Golden Tides is open-world. The map is massive. There's islands, dungeons, open ocean, and a lot of room to play the game your own way. And a chunk of every match takes place on your ship, which is something we'll get into later because it's kind of a big deal.

How a Match Works

Every game of Golden Tides plays out across three phases, and each one feels pretty different from the last.

Phase 1 starts on an island. Both crews spawn on opposite sides and hit the ground running. You're exploring, fighting NPCs, earning gold, leveling up, and hunting for a treasure map that's buried somewhere on the island. The enemy crew is doing the same thing. You might run into each other. You might not. Depends on how you want to play it.

Once a crew finds the map and delivers it back to their ship, the island phase ends and everyone sets sail.

Phase 2 is where Golden Tides stops feeling like any MOBA you've played before.

Your whole crew is on your ship now. One person's steering. Someone else is on cannons. Someone's firing harpoons or dropping mines behind you. The enemy ship is doing the same thing, and you're either chasing them or running from them depending on who has the map.

Ship combat is chaotic and tactical at the same time. There's skillshots everywhere. Positioning matters. A well-timed harpoon pull can completely flip a fight. A bad mine placement can blow up in your face. It's genuinely its own thing, and we haven't seen another MOBA try anything like it.

Eventually you reach the next island, and that's Phase 3. The treasure is buried somewhere on this island. There's a boss guarding it. Both crews are fighting each other, fighting the boss, and trying to secure the treasure and get it to a delivery point. The delivery point is on a another island.

The crew that delivers the treasure wins. That's it. That's the game.

Playing Your Way

One thing we care about a lot is player agency. There's a lot of ways to approach Golden Tides, and we don't want to force you into one of them.

You can farm PvE. There's NPCs all over the islands, and killing them gives you gold and experience. If your crew wants to power up safely before picking fights, that's a valid strategy.

You can hunt the enemy crew. Player kills are worth a lot, and if you're confident in your combat skills, you can play aggressively from the start. High risk, high reward.

You can focus on objectives. Ignore the other crew entirely, find the map first, and get out. Let them come to you.

You can mix and match. Different phases might call for different approaches. The "right" way to play is whatever works for your crew in that moment.

We've seen a lot of MOBAs calcify into rigid metas where there's basically one correct way to play, and if you deviate from it, you're trolling. We're trying to avoid that. Golden Tides is designed to reward creativity and adaptability, not wiki-memorization.

The Heroes

We've got a growing roster of playable pirates, and we're planning to release a lot more next year.

Each hero has their own kit, their own personality, and their own playstyle. Some of them are pretty out there. Here's a few examples.

Captain Ashar Sharp is a shark-man assassin. His kit revolves around stacking Bleed on enemies and then punishing them for it. His passive gives him bonus movement speed toward bleeding targets, so once he smells blood, he's hard to shake. If you like hunting wounded prey and finishing fights quickly, Sharky's your guy.

Helios is a frost mage. He controls space with slows and roots, stacking Frostbite on enemies until they're frozen in place. He's got a self-heal where she encases himself in ice, which makes her great at surviving when things go wrong. High control, high skill ceiling.

S.H.U.D. is a giant undead tank with an anchor. He throws it, pulls it back, and drags anyone caught in between toward him. He's also got a team protection ability where allies can tether to him and transfer damage they take onto his health pool instead.

Chef Ernesto is a support who heals his crew with soup. His frying pan is a boomerang that damages enemies and heals allies it passes through. His ultimate dumps a pot of food on the ground that revives dead teammates.

Firebreather Baha breathes fire. That's his whole thing. He's got a resource called the Chug Meter that he refills by drinking from his gourd, and then he spends it by breathing fire on people. He can also spit alcohol on the ground and then ignite it. Very simple in concept, very satisfying in practice.

Blackjack is an assassin with a grappling hook. She can go invisible, she can silence people, and she has a five-dash ultimate that applies stacks of Lacerate to everyone she hits. If you like slippery, high-damage characters who punish bad positioning, Blackjack is there for you.

We've got tanks, damage dealers, supports, and some heroes that blur the lines between those roles. The goal is for everyone to find a pirate that clicks for them. That feeling when you discover a character in a game that just feels like it was made for you? We want everyone to have that.

Gold and Items

Golden Tides has an item system. You earn gold by killing NPCs, killing players, completing objectives, sinking ships, and finding treasure. You spend that gold at shops to buy equipment that makes your hero stronger.

The itemization is streamlined compared to some MOBAs. You can hold three items at a time, and each one can be upgraded once. Items give you stat boosts like attack damage, ability power, cooldown reduction, life steal, or damage reduction. There's also consumables: health potions, invisibility potions, wards, respawn camps, and some weirder stuff like a barrel you can hide inside.

Gold also functions as your experience. As you earn gold, you level up, and each level gives you stat bonuses based on your hero's role. Tanks get more health. Damage dealers get more attack damage and ability power. Supports get ability power scaling. The system is intuitive once you're in it.

Ship Stations

Since we keep talking about ship combat, here's how it actually works.

Your ship has five stations, and each one does something different.

The Helm is where you steer. The captain can blow gusts of wind to speed up, drop anchor to pivot in place or hit a burst of speed to chase or escape.

The Front Magic Table is your skillshot sniper station. You've got magic bullets for poke, a harpoon that pulls your ship toward whatever it hits, and a sniper shot that stuns enemy ships from long range.

The Front Side Cannons fire cannonballs, put up shields to block incoming fire, shoot frost shots that slow enemy ships, and launch knockback shots that push enemies off course.

The Back Side Cannons are similar, but one of them has a healing shot that damages the enemy ship and heals yours.

The Mortar drops things behind you. Cannonballs, shields, oil slicks that slow enemies, and naval mines that explode on contact.

Every station requires someone to man it, which means your crew has to coordinate. You can't do everything at once. Someone has to steer. Someone has to shoot. Someone has to watch behind you. If your team is disorganized, it shows. If your team is clicking, ship fights feel incredible.

No Pay-to-Win

We should say this clearly: Golden Tides is free-to-play, and our monetization is cosmetic-only.

Skins. Emotes. Banners. Ship customizations. That kind of stuff. Nothing you can buy gives you an advantage in a match. No heroes locked behind paywalls. No items that make you stronger. We think competitive games should be fair, and we're not budging on that.

Who Is This For?

If you've played MOBAs and you're looking for something that actually feels new, we think Golden Tides is worth your time.

If you've bounced off MOBAs in the past because they felt too rigid or too intimidating, we're trying to make something more approachable without losing the depth that makes the genre great.

If you like pirates, ship combat, treasure hunting, and games you can play with your friends in 20-25 minute sessions, this is exactly what we're building.

And if you're just curious, stick around. We're posting dev updates, we'll have playtests coming back in 2026, and there's a Discord where you can hang out with us and the rest of the community.

That's Golden Tides.

Thanks for reading. We're just getting started.

— Anomie