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Pirates of the Burning Sea: Launch Day Previews
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
Both Carolyn Koh and Laura Genender took part in the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta. Now that the game has launched, they give us their impressions of the nautical game in this Launch Day Preview.
“Gimme a 500 word preview of PotBS!” said Jon “Stradden” Wood. “I want to run it Tuesday with one from Laura.” Um, yeah, sure! I’d love to. Now
So… what is Pirates of the Burning Sea like? These are my impressions:
The World: It’s historical and mostly accurate. It’s Pirates! What’s there not to love for a history buff like me? I enjoyed the early wonder (and scariness) of sailing to the headquarters of the European nations – the motherland as it were.
Avatars: I love them in one aspect – the customization is really great and their clothing is fabulous. On another, some of the animation just annoys the heck out of me and doesn’t look as smooth and polished as it could be. I remind myself often that avatars are a late addition.
Avatar Combat: Don’t be looking at PotBS if you are looking for an avatar combat heavy MMOG. This was designed as Ship Combat from the get go (five years ago) with an avatar combat system added in about a couple years back. Most avatar combat is to be had on missions and if you choose to grapple and board a ship on the seas. Your skills are your attacks and actually having a choice of styles is rather fun.
;)
Read it all here.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
Good review. I agree the avatar combat was a bit lacking. But the approach they took made it somewhat interesting, the balance and all.
The game shines in the ship combat, thats is what we all really wanted anyways. And they did it well. Looks great feels great...overall good fun.
The economic game is also a blast. I really like the fact that you don't have to stay hunched over your projects to compete. Labor stores up so you can just play and have fun for as long as you like and then when you are ready for a break, you can go and run all your labor out on your projects. It will be easy for players to help their guild in this aspect as well. Where everyone can have their projects that contribute to the guild, but not have to sacrifice fun(if they don't really dig crafting) inorder to do their part. Just build your project and head out to have fun, then when the guild asks for your materials you can jump back to that port, run your labor out, hand off the materials to your guild and head back out for more fun.
Overall I think it is a good game, and it will do very well. Good job FLS.
PIRATES! That's all I have to say about it, that and I wonder how many subscribers this game will bring.
____________________
Have played: RuneScape, EQ2 (free trial), Last Chaos, Silk Road, Dungeon Runners.
Currently playing: RuneScape, Dungeon Runners.
The notion that graphics, or anything else for that matter, are anywhere near as important as gameplay/fun is so utterly ridiculous that anyone who shares such a view should be placed in an asylum.
Thanks for the previews. I'm taking a wait and see attitude on this one.
Is the land based game still laggy? Also, avatar combat was very, very slow, to the point where I was yawning and nearly falling asleep during combat. Did they patch the land based combat to make it quicker and more exciting?
Too bad the devs didn't put even half the required effort into the avatar system to make it fun. It is probably the worst avartar combat/movement system I have ever played. The ship combat on the otherhand is very well done, but the avatar combat drags it down. I felt as if the avatar system was something the devs put in the game, as a complete afterthought, and used the least amount of resources to pull it off.
As a total package I give it a grade of C, an A+ for the ship based combat and an F- for the avatar system.
I along with many of my friends beta tested the game, and we all agree that probably wont see any of our money unless the avatar combat system gets a major redesign.
Thanks for the reviews. I'm keeping this one on my radar.
I appreciated the review. I'd be interested in hearing a follow-up a month or so down the road, just to see if you both still like and dislike the same parts of the game. Right now, it sounds like avatar combat sucks and ship combat is as expected. Nothing in this makes me think the game is *fun*.
so...
Potbs has had a good start, enough to win over opinions for the first few weeks of the honeymoon period.
Gameplay can become very repetative - its real test will be seen in re-newals after the 1st month.
Played closed beta & found that to get rewards means investing a lot of time - great if that's your thing.
Will attract more eve type players than wow types.
It doesn't sound like much has changed since the beta, sounds exactly like my thoughts back then. As an Eve player I was hoping for a little more from PotBS, however since the game is still new there's gonna be some more polish needed. I hope the devs can keep this game going long enough to give it the polish it deserves. There is a very good game at the core but with some more work it can be a truly unique and well done game. While the ship combat is slower paced and sort of Eve-ish it also is very different. My biggest gripe with PotBS wasn't so much the avatar combat which was a little laggy in beta but had some good concepts but all the instancing takes away from the immersiveness of the world. Also while this game may attract some of the Eve players the PvP in PotBS is nothing like Eve other than the slower pace and strategy of the fighting.
This is definately a game to keep an eye on and hopefully in a year or 2 it will get the attention and polish this game deserves and mature just the way Eve did after its release.
All I know is it is a number 1 seller at Gamestop,(Which comprises of GS EB and Planet X stores) and many stores have already burned through there stock, that hasn't happend since WoW launched. Go-gamer is already backordered and most folks are resorting to D2d or the SOE digital for there copy.
We will hopefully see a new server by the end of the week , but FLS will not be giving free moves..which sucks.
The principle behind the avatar combat is great - managing balance and iniative as well as HP, it's just the execution is clunky. You can play most of the game without it and it's not that offensive in the few avatar quests that come up occasionally. I find it fine in boarding combat if a little chaotic.
Like the reviewers say, there are quite a few aspects of this game which are fun.
What wasn't mentioned are the dynamic PVP zones - created/destroyed by people doing PVE missions and sinking NPCs/other players. This is what sets the game apart from the others - one day the area around your Spanish home port is safe, the next day you're working furiously with your whole nation to flip it out of PVP. The following day things have gone so badly that it's now owned by the French and it's up to your whole nation to get it back!
This and the economy are what the game is really about.
I'm confused about this last part? Does that mean you can be PvE'ing and then suddenly your in a PvP area? Isn't PvP strictly consentual?
I'm confused about this last part? Does that mean you can be PvE'ing and then suddenly your in a PvP area? Isn't PvP strictly consentual?
No not strictly consentual, but you can avoid it. "Safe" areas can go unsafe but you can check where they are.
I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
"You have the right not to be killed"
I'm confused about this last part? Does that mean you can be PvE'ing and then suddenly your in a PvP area? Isn't PvP strictly consentual?
No not strictly consentual, but you can avoid it. "Safe" areas can go unsafe but you can check where they are.
I got pwned trying to leave New Orleans earlier after that become contested. Those guys hit me hard, when I finally decided to turn and fight my computer crashed. When I got back in I was back in Campeche... missing all my loot.
- CaesarsGhost
Lead Gameplay and Gameworld Designer for a yet unnamed MMO Title.
"When people tell me designing a game is easy, I try to get them to design a board game. Most people don't last 5 minutes, the rest rarely last more then a day. The final few realize it's neither fun nor easy."
Personally, I am very disappointed in the game. It has some nice points, the ship to ship action is fun, but they did not correct enough problems from the beta test. It is still far too easy to level in this game. And some of the skills are really lacking usefulness, which can lead to fotm templates.
I intend to wait for 6 months to see what they do with the game. I think the average subscription period for this game will not be very long.
eh, got me what the poster above was playing, but after about level 15 this game gets pretty dam challenging compaired to beta. Avatar combat while still not top notch is improved , no fight is now easy to win. Ship to ship combat is well top notch! finally all the animations are in
and it is just a dam riot to play 
Stories and more stories! If this game has one thing it has fun stories, if you play a game for stories this is top notch! if you a grinder then move along you will get bored. One story that got me good was going against and evil captain, he blows up his ship when I bored it, then I end up on an island were I meet another lost soul, we make a makeshift raft, get back into the water, find a fellow ship and I loose my dam leg! Allot more to that story but when I lost my leg I can't tell you how upset I was lol, I had the perfect look , but NOOO I have a stub wood one now 
Finally pvp combat is fun now compaired to beta, actually nicly balanced and lag in sea or land I havn't come by sense the latest update. Whatever it was, was fixed. I can go into towns or missions things load then it smooth sailing land or sea.
When it comes down to this game it comes down to one thing, if you love the era you will love the game if you don't you probably won't. I am happy to see the increase of population and also to see my local store sold out as well and on back order. It gives me faith that there are us old folks out there that just love the era.
As it is now, I love it and the latest dev statement on what they are working on now that the game is stable really has me excited I can't wait!
"The monster created isn't by the company that makes the game, it's by the fans that make it something it never was"
I'm confused about this last part? Does that mean you can be PvE'ing and then suddenly your in a PvP area? Isn't PvP strictly consentual?
No not strictly consentual, but you can avoid it. "Safe" areas can go unsafe but you can check where they are.
I got pwned trying to leave New Orleans earlier after that become contested. Those guys hit me hard, when I finally decided to turn and fight my computer crashed. When I got back in I was back in Campeche... missing all my loot.
That alone would make me quit the game. I despise forced PvP, and IMO, if it's non-consentual, ganking is the same as bullying.
I bet sailors in the early 18th century hated getting ganked too; like the pirates were "bullies" n' stuff. But hey! It's kinda like role-playing in that sense! You get to experience how pissy it was to lose a ship to a boat full of brigands in the Caribbean circa 1720! Sign a dude up!
This is so not the game for you, and may I recommend that you never play Eve Online either? The force PvP is a by-product of RvR mechanics. Eve has the same thing with alliances going to war against one another (in fact, one reason I came to play POTBS in beta was because I was trying to wait out a major empire war with my corp in Eve. I'm generally a carebear type).
That said, to PvP generally, you need to set your PvP flag to "on" while you are in port, totally voluntarily.
It is only when you get caught in the area around a port that is subject to contention from another national power that you can get drawn into involuntary PvP.
I have described this game as a simpler Eve in the age of sail. It really does depend on the player crafting to keep a society (guild) going, as you lose equipment at a hellacious rate in PvP. So you want the best ships and equipment possible for your level, but you'll burn through them fast.
Crafting supply chain is baroque, and no one crafter can make so much as a provisioning pack (necessary to building a ship) on one account, so the crafting encourages society-wide coordination of supply chain. Some people will love this, and some not. You will need one or more master shipwrights to more or less flog your crafters into coordination. That can produce some good RP too...:)
No one needs to craft, but a couple of hardcore PvPers in my society (The Highland Confederacy on Bonny, a lovely medium RP guild with a sense of humor [mostly] ) still do enough to craft their own ammo. They like it because you never have to gather resources. You build the iron mine, and it produces iron according to how many hours of labor accumulate. When you accumulate 3 days of labor, it caps until you work some of it down into more iron production.
Will it scale? That's my biggest worry. I am not worried about the combat being dinky on land/ship and tedious in parts of the ship combat (I'm used to the latter, at least, from Eve...:). Those dynamics please me well enough. It's whether the whole thing stands up as a model at high populations of higher level players, and whether the markets mature into something sane. Some tweaking will no doubt be necessary, and how will that effect the community?
There are some promised improvements I'm looking forward to -- the social mechanics are, to say the least, cranky and awkward. We need society warehouses, where we can exchange components without having to do person-to-person trades -- or perhaps, at least, the sort of guild-only auction they set up in LOTRO.
Like early SWG, this game is potentially a great base for RPers, since the culture behind the lore is so basic that even people who've just seen Pirates of the Carribean tend to fall into immersion fairly automatically, and I've seen just about *ZIP* in immersion griefing.
I didn't think I'd play this game past beta, and I'm mad to do so (I play LOTRO and Eve and have a life). But I want to see how it plays out.
Shava
This game seems quite similar to Sid Meier's Pirates apart from things such as trade and pvp obviously. Can you dance in it? I did quite enjoy that game especially the ship combat, so have just ordered game to fill the ever increasing gap till Age of Conan comes out - who knows this could be more fun.
ATB
Chrimwinster
No, there's no dancing, beyond a 3-second emote. And -- no offense to you -- but thank God there's no dancing.