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Why are Pirate-Themed MMO's seemingly doomed to fail?
sludgebeard
Member RarePosts: 788
I remember a time when Pirates of the Burning Sea was in Alpha, there was tons of buzz surrounding the game because of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies being out and it seemed like a decent Pirate-Themed MMO was just a few years away.
Then POTBS came out with botched Avatar Combat, a toned down PvP system, and just a general lack of fun and it seemed like a curse had been put on the sub-genre as a whole since then.
The Pirates of the Caribbean MMO was finally released but failed to grab many people out of the 14+ age range. Along with it came all these obscure Pirate MMO's like Pirates 101, Puzzle Pirates, etc. All trying to cash in on the younger audience rather than the mature one that had brought the POTBS/MMO fans in to begin with.
Since then we havent see anything Pirate related with even a MILD chance of success in the MMO market. Even the kickstarter craze didnt bring anything knew to the table, with both the spiritual successor to Pirates of the Caribbean Online, and Tides of Glory, failing to make even a fraction of their end goals.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/apez/pirates-of-the-high-seas/posts
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1407831032/tides-of-glory
Even the shortly hyped Kartuga Online didnt make it far out of the development gate...
So what is it? Are pirates and MMO's destined to be sailing in opposite directions, or are the big companies just not ready to take a risk on this potentially untapped market?
Comments
I understand, but its FUCKING PUZZLE PIRATES.
Its the proverbial Talking Parrot of Pirate MMO's.
PotBS was a great game. The map should have been 100 times larger.
When Uncharted Waters Online came out I was as giddy as a school girl. I jumped in my little boat and rolled out, got to Seville and was told I need a "permit" to go further.
Did the guys who made that game not play Uncharted Waters? The whole damn point was there were no restrictions. You want to go to the America's in a Latin? You tried and either did it or failed.
Voyage Century Online was good until people started sailing around in pink sharks.
The games do well, they just don't evolve or expand and are given corny lock outs that don't fit the player drawn to an exploration style game like Age of Sail games.
Here's why I think they fail: Arcade-style ship combat, where the ship handles like a toy boat in a bathtub is the norm. I think developers believe that making combat feel realistic, would be too difficult and drive away potential players, so they go for a miniature boat feel, which while easy to learn, is also easy to get tired of... They need to make the boats feel the way a true warship feels, like a mountain of timber smashing through waves and being blasted with cannon shot.
They also need to lose the idea that every player needs to always be a captain. Oddly enough, Puzzle Pirates with their nonsensical mechanics of doing tetris and jewel quest to perform tasks aboard ship, is closer to what is needed... players should crew ships, not captain them from the get-go. A ship in an MMO pirate game should come much later in the game, while gunnery, sail managing and other tasks on ships should be controlled by players and NPCs, not dismissed as extraneous.
There's a lot of gameplay potential in shipboard life and jobs, that these games where every person owns a fleet of ships which can all be solo-sailed, are totally missing out on.
I believe this is the industries view of high sea's adventure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaWU1CmrJNc#aid=P-MyR4kEG7E
....your welcome
I think Pirates as an MMORPG Sounds good in theory. But, for practical purposes there are a lot of obstacles that stand in the way of pulling it off. Every one wants to be captain of the ship. Regardless of what kind of ship that is. It would be difficult to assign any single player to less of a role than pilot, navigator and gunner.
I think the game that pulls off a pirate environment best in this way is EVE. If we are being honest...it really is a space pirate-esque MMORPG. There are merchants ships, raiders, defenders, territories. High security areas in which bad stuff can still happen (basically like ports and coast lines) and low security areas where the near lawless make their own rules (like the open sea). There is trade and diplomacy, conquest and riches.
I do like what I have seen in videos on Archeage for this. There is a heavy pirate aspect to Archeage from what I have seen. One side of it looks a little water world. The other looks team play based.
But, in any case. I think the idea of pirate game where being a pirate is the main thing is a hard sell. Because, being a pirate has little meaning if that is all there is. You have to be diametrically apposed to another (or several other) modes of play for it to be worth it. And, so it really only ends up working well as one potential role in a larger game. It works best as the exception, not the rule.
Because Pirate is a nice idea for a roleplaying class, but if its the ONLY choice then its just as dull as a game that would only allow Wizard, or only allow Fighter, or only allow Rogue, or only allow Cleric etc as a class.
In a single player game this might still work well, but in a MMO ? Fat chance.
WoW has Time Travelling Orcs, unknown years of unknown race and then BAM PANDAS BABY, dragons and gnomes and goblins and spiders and...
WoW can pretty much pull a pile of shit out of their ass and sell it because it is wide open fantasy. They actually did sell shit; if you remember Burning Crusade picking up animal dung for a quest.
Pirates is too pidgeon hole of an idea by itself. It's as if WoW was "Orcs: Kill Humans" (wasn't there a game like that... sounds vaguely familiar...).
Considering the 'pirate' was alone on the oceans for months at a time, I don't see how it translates well into any game. It was more grand-standing and showmanship and fear than actual pirating, fighting, or ship-cannonballing-action. Pirates didn't have tons (literally) of gold to buy ships whereas the governments did.
That leads to a conclusion. The best pirate game will be one about being an imperial army soldier. No mention of pirates! Your job will be to conquer new lands as an imperial soldier. And that way, the actual pirate-wannabe players can go out and intercept supplies, attack ships heading somewhere, etc.
If the gameplay is "Arrr! Sail out and fight head on with someone aye!?" It is just no. No different than two guys playing dress up and sword fighting while standing across a river from each other. Give the possibility for pirating but don't make it the game focus and I could see it doing well.
Ive got to hand it to you, you made a ton of really great points, most importantly the "Toy boat in a bathtub" remark.
Seriously as hilarious as you made it sound, they really do diminish all possibility of Nautical Themed warfare appealing to a mass audience by applying this method of cutting corners.
To me, a great Pirate MMO would have you making your own ship, collecting your own crew either NPC or Player run, and acting as a character aboard and the ship and off.
Theres no danger and excitement in watching a model of a ship being shot down in the ocean. Now the player and his crew being taken down with it? Now thats something more substantial. Even an injury system where your NPC's have to wait it out before they can fight at full capacity would be nice.
And also like you said, the collison and the weight of the ships is a big deal. For some reason every boat battle I see in a game works like this.
Shoot cannons and strafe until you can board, board the ship, win because you have more dudes. Thats not interesting or strategic!! Simply having more men didnt mean shit in actual naval combat, because there could be crew hiding below decks, there wasnt a certainty to the gun-fights because of poorly made gunpowder mechanics, it was alot more chaotic and random.
To be an effective Pirate you had to rule by intimidation and savvy, and to win battles you had to take BIG RISKS!
Even from the non-pirate standpoint of Royal Navys, like the British Lord Nelson's Navy, he had to disobey direct orders, sail towards a fleet with his ship alone and force them to run aground or face a bombardment head on. Thats strategy and thats Epic!
But again like you said, by making things actually intense and giving weight to the combat it could change the idea dramatically from what it is right now, which is basically Sid Meirs Pirates Meets MMO's. BORING!!
I think if I had to give an honest response to this question that I would say that there is simply not enough interest in the actual life of a pirate to inspire the average person to want to sit down and go through that life in an MMORPG.
With dungeons and dragons the interest is in exploration, spellunking, fighting monsters and finding treasures. All of these things translate successfully to an MMORPG because they allow the developers to build a lot of other things around those basic activities that will provide the player of games like that with a lot of interesting things to do.
With all of that said though, as we see, most players will circumvent as much of that tedious life-work as they can and attempt to reduce almost every D&D based title down to its raw essence which is fighting and getting phat loot.
Our interest with pirates then can be no different. It is a physical attraction and little else. We know, as a society, two things about pirates, fencing (i.e. sword fights) and walking the plank. These are the first things any little kid who has ever had a pirate outfit will role play and the concepts most commonly stuck to throughout all pirate based media with the exception of Sinbad the Sailor, and later Pirates of the Carribean, which both put a pirates in a more fantasy environment.
To try and make a game then that is based on a pirates life without having a strong, and I mean STRONG fencing system and a super strong reason for being there is an experiment in futility because without these two things no one is really going to care.
Make a game WITH a strong fencing system and you are still going to alienate half of your player-base because MMORPG players are traditionally non-twichy and will shy away from anything that requires any skill above and beyond the most rudimentary control system and the most basic of puzzle skills.
Also you can read these forums all day long and hear people talk about how they are tired of the "you are the hero" format of games but what you will actually be reading is bullshit because EVERYONE wants to be the hero deep down inside. The frustration comes from the fact that no game can produce a title where any one person actually gets to be the hero because everyone who would be left in that persons wake, as selfish as everyone is, would quit.
A good pirate story then, in such an environment, would be really hard to work out as any pirate story worth its salt features a certain boat with a certain Captain and a certain crew that all stand head and shoulders above all the rest. And we just can't have nice things like that in this world. In this world we can only have orcs. Orcs that move at different speeds and who "seem" to be better than one another at certain points in time, but orcs who all have that "little league" opportunity to get off of the bench and play as long as they hang in there, which is completely the antithesis to being famous such as a swashbuckler might be.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Puzzle Pirates, Voyage Century, Tales of Pirates, Bounty Bay Online and Pirate 101 all did rather well. I think even World of Pirates is still running after 8 or so years.
However, you should never let a tiny bit of basic research get in the way of a good knee-jerk 'fail' post.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Thinking about it a pirate only MMORPG is too narrow and offers not much material for a set-up, but the theme without getting pretty complex. If everyone play's a pirate it would mean the "mobs" would be traders and navy ships (the bosses so to say). Now you have a sea with hundereds of pirates robbing, plundering, pilfaring... Why would anyone even consider building up trade routes and settlements in that area? A Themepark game would also take away much of the freedom most people connect with pirates, since usually in Themeparks you are on rails, meaning you would be send from port to port with "quests" of robbing this traderoute, sinking ships of that nation and in the end find the treasure. Reals quests also go against the things people think about pirates. Quests mean you have someone telling you what to do. A pirate captain taking orders from a landlubber? Not really. So it is pretty hard to generate the setting themeparkwise IMHO.
What could work to some degree would be a sandbox type of game. Somehthing that brings the feeling of the Port Royale games to a MMORPG. You start out as a new settler in the new world and then embark on your career, making you chose if you want to be a trader and manufacturer, that builds up farms, mines and so on in different areas and sells his wares, a privateer hunting down pirates and sinks enemy nations ships or a pirate himself going after traders. Perhap san option to embark on land to explore the new world, finding hidden treasures in native temples and so on. But without an every evolving landmass this would have an end to it sometime, since the continent is explored after a while. NPC traders would have to switch routes if a certain route if overpirated to longer but safer ones, nations and players would set out bounties for pirates and privateers to encourage hunting. But this brings me to the downside of the concept: You alienate a huge chunk of players, since even I, who is oppesed to FFA, have to admit this would be a FFA setup, since as a pirate you should be able to go after trading players. It could be kept somewhat in check if pirate players would gain notoriety and could enter less and less ports the more they are known as a pirate, up till a point where they are only accepted in a few pirate hideouts, but if there are only pirates and no traders things would get boring, too.
Just my 2 cents
Ever since I took an arrow in the knee from a pirate, I don't have anything to do with them.
Seriously though, the whole Pirate genre just never interested me. As a sub game, maybe. As the whole basis of the game play, nope.
Hey? Do you know who shot you? I'd like to buy that pirate an ALE!
(haha it's sick isn't it?)