Pirates of the Burning Sea
Dec 10
Well I have gotten myself into the Pirates of the Burning Sea (PotBS) beta and been playing that a bit. Let me preface everything I have to say by saying, I really want to love this game. I have always loved this genre, even before the Pirates of the Caribbean movies turned it into a fad. I played all the pirates games of old and really love the concept of the open sea. It really was the final frontier of its day.
Having said that, I think PotBS could be a good game, but right now it’s really really rough. I fear it’s gonna be yet another example of a game released before it was ready. Sony is at the helm so of course this is to be expected.
The download of the game installer was simple and went without a hitch, however the darn thing took over 24 hours to patch!! This was due to the patcher being completely broken and SOE blaming everyone but themselves.
So for the first 24 hours (it actually was more like 27) I wasn’t able to play the game — I wasn’t even able to patch the game. This did nothing but put a sour taste in my mouth.
Once installed, I went to the character creation screen.. Tooled up an avatar, only to have the server crash before I could click play – which means the character wasn’t actually created.. Grrrr. I logged back in, created the character again only to have it pop up a window with “Generic_Character_Error” each time I clicked play! For fuck sake..
Long story short, there are some issues. They certainly need to be worked out and I hope they have the good sense to not rush the game out the door — however, seeing as who the producer is I can just about assure you they will push it out and run with it in the name of the bottom line. Even though in the end nothing hurts the bottom line more than shoving a broken game out the door.. *coughVanguardcough* Why can’t they learn this lesson? Game publishers seem doomed to repeat this over and over again and I just don’t get it. But that’s for another time.
I was eventually able to get in game and play for a couple hours. The game has promise. I very much like the attention to detail regarding ship to ship combat, the graphics of the ships look great. The ships behave as you would expect and have had some nice physics applied to make things seem more realistic.
The first person game play was a lot less impressive. The world is crowded with what appear to be low-poly poorly textured mediocre avatars with very little true character. I was completely underwhelmed on this front. I’m hoping these are the low-poly models they are using for beta and they will sport new stuff for release — I fear that isn’t the case though.
The game itself seems to have quite a lot of PVE content, however there needs to be more variety. Right now you basically have two types; ship to ship PVE in which you do traditional sea combat versus usually 3 to 4 times your number of ships and character to character PVE in which you show up on some beach where hordes of “pirates” are standing around waiting for you to murder them.
Fun the first couple of times, it gets old quickly — a little more variety with PVE will make this game a lot of fun. One of the PVE “missions” was what seemed like an interrupt, I was tooling along doing another missing when suddenly the town I was at was under attack. When I left the building the entire town was now an instance within which I was the sole hero. A little unrealistic considering the number of players that I had previously seen, but they pulled it off nicely.. I really liked this.. More of this sort of thing!
The “end game” or at least the long term game appears to be all PVP Realm vs Realm style. Since there are four factions; French, British, Spanish, and Pirates I assume you’ll be able to duke it out at some point. I don’t know this for sure, but it seems that way — Which is cool. I wonder if one faction could take over the world?
It also appears that you have to pass some sort of “captain” test which then opens up your “PVP Flag”? Not sure yet. But what I get from this is, if you don’t want to PVP you can’t get ganked EVE Style — All PVP is Opt-in. Which is cool I guess for those players who play games to have fun, and don’t want to be bothered by others. However, I do see how playing it more “EVE” style would also be fun and add a level of challenge to the world.. I wonder if they will have some non-carebear servers? (I hate that term but it works here.)
It should be interesting to see where this game goes. I like that it’s not your traditional fantasy style MMO with Elves and Magic. I’m seriously hoping that this game will open developers eyes to the fact that you don’t need “Magic” and “Elves” to make a game work. Of course if they release the game early and unfinished SoE and likely other developers will say that the reason it didn’t work was the obvious lack of magic and elves..
The irony is, evidently Disney is going to be creating a Pirates of the Caribbean MMO — which has (rumor mill) different playable races, zombies/undead and magic in the form of “voodoo”..etc.. So, yet another formulaic replication of World of Warcraft but with a wash on the graphics. *sigh* Come on folks.. Think OUTSIDE the box.