This week, Pirates of the Burning Sea finally launches in a fiercely competetive arena. Aside from the standard orcs and elves fare that traditional MMORPGs offer, anyone wanting to live a virtual second life these days can also choose to be a Jedi, a space pirate, a Spandex-clad superhero/villain, a citizen of the future battling invading aliens, or even a cheesy pirate. In the face of such formidable competition, how does POTBS stack up?
The PotBS Vault staff pooled our collective experience with the game to bring you this collaborative review.
The very first choice you have to make in creating your ingame character is Nation affiliation – British, French, Spanish or Pirate. Although technically not a nation, choosing to be a Pirate nevertheless prevents you from becoming a citizen of the other three. If you choose to be a national, you then need to decide whether you want to become a Navy Officer, a Privateer or a Freetrader. Pirates do not get to have careers, but they do play an interesting role in almost everything. Whatever choices you make at this stage are permanent. You cannot change nations, nor can you drop your chosen career to train in another one.
Initial avatar customization allows you to choose from a wealth of options. There are 8 female and 14 male faces to choose from, 15 different hair styles, and for male characters, there's another 15 different beard types. The chances of encountering an identical twin in the game are somewhat lowered by the large selection of clothes, hats, jewelry, and footwear which can be further customized with a substantial color palette. You can also start out with an eyepatch or a glass eye, but alas, no gold-capped tooth. There are no sliders for avatar height nor weight.
I love the fact that once in the game, it’s relatively easy to change your look by visiting an NPC tailor. There are also various missions that reward you with other types of eye-patches, coats, and feathered hats, plus the much-coveted pegleg and hook arm, status symbols among pirates.
The sound and animation work well together in PotBS to create towns that are alive and sea combat that is something definitely worth seeing. Instead of taking the all-too-common route of injecting every possible layer of 3D tech into every object, the devs went for a world that looked realistic and not like a plastic toy still in its blister pack.
Land mission environments are channeled paths and a bit repetitive, which currently detracts from the imagery and scenery present in them. Beach and coastal scenes look really nice with the frothing water rolling up and the dilapidated ships on the coast, but after you've seen the handful of basic environments, you find yourself wishing there were more. I came across a few really exotic and well done mission environments but, having only played to 20, I wasn't able to tell if they were specific to that mission or if they can be revisited. One environment was a massive skull cave where you fought ships outside of it and then later entered to finish the quest. It was one of those environments where you put off killing the last guy just so that you can look around and check everything out.
The character animations are a mixed bag. Running and some other basic animations seem awkward and you wonder how that got in there when you see some of the sword strikes, dodges, and parries the character does in combat. I was impressed, though, with how my character looked in battle. She jumped back to dodge an attack and had swings that looked like she was putting genuine effort into it. It made combat more fun to watch while playing than most MMOGs.
The sea and ships really show off what these guys can do. The lapping waves, the creak of the ship, and the reflections in the water add some great detail to the environment. Once you're in battle, the real fun begins. Attention to detail was paid across the board here. Zoom in and you can see that bar shot whipping in circles as it hurls towards your opponent. The crew climbs and descends the rigging, fires the cannons and even ducks when firing or getting hit. I've even had a man blown completely overboard from a nasty broadside shot. On top of all that, watching your enemy's mast snap and fall into the sea or seeing a ship sink is just plain fun. They didn't cut any corners here and the sound, graphics, and animation work together beautifully.
The game is set in the Age of Sail and the developers tried to make it as true to the period as possible. While the writers have taken liberties with history, the characters are nonetheless real. For example, William Kidd, the privateer who in real life was hanged for piracy in 1701, lives on in the game in 1720, having escaped from death when the rope broke at his hanging.
There are many interesting story arcs in the game which will delight players who like to take their time in reading the quest text. Unfortunately, if you are simply interested in “grinding” mission after mission for experience points and levels, then it all translates to nothing but the usual delivery and kill quests.
One common criticism is how no matter what nation you play, you always start out with the same set of missions, albeit with a different flavor. This diminishes the game’s PvE replayability quite a bit. However, the developers have revealed in a recent interview that this issue is being addressed in the first post-launch content patch.
Once in a while, you come across a mission that’s a little different from the rest. You enter a house to speak to an NPC, you hear loud noises outside, and when you exit the building, you zone into a private instance instead of the public port you’re expecting. It’s still the same town, but there are pirates wreaking havoc outside and you have objectives you need to accomplish before you can zone out. This is the kind of mission one hopes to see more of, not just in this game but in all MMOs, rather than the cookie-cutter UPS or murder-by-proxy ones.
All missions are instanced, and while this doesn’t bother me personally, some people say that it ruins their immersion to have to watch a loading spash screen before and after each mission. What bothers explorer-type gamers like me is the fact that instancing limits exploration. Although the game was clearly not built for it, the developers are trying to improve this aspect by redesigning the towns to make them bigger, more unique and more interesting.
Player-vs-player gameplay in PotBS is rather unique. The Caribbean starts out as a peaceful place, but players can generate unrest in the majority of ports by sinking enemy ships around the port, or doing missions for a rebel agent NPC in that port. Unrest throws the area surrounding the port into a PvP zone, allowing players to attack players of other nations. Further unrest throws the port into contention, and a 25-vs-25 battle is set between the invading nation and the defending one.
I had the chance to get some PvP in during the pre-order period and it was good to see that I found myself faced with a range of different strategies and tactics, both in the sea combat and boarding combat. As a level 17 fighting level 20 opponents, I found that I was easily taken down... until I knew what I was doing. Once I had a handle on the different approaches to combat, I found I was surviving against my enemy a lot better and even winning a victory or two here and there. This provided new challenges and goals for me as I was starting to now equip both my character and ships with gear appropriate for player vs player combat. A feature that I found very convenient was the PvP toggle that you can turn on and off at any port. Turned on, you can battle players outside the PvP hotspots so for those that enjoy a more free-for-all form of pvp now and then, the option is there to easily enter that mode and go looking for a fight. A lot of people seemed anxious for port contention to be turned on, so I would not be surprised if within hours of release players were already creating areas of unrest and conflict around the ocean.
If there’s anything in the whole game that was done to perfection, it has to be ship combat. On the most basic level, it’s rather simplistic. You use the WASD keys to raise and lower your sails and to turn your ship right and left. The minimap shows you when your ememy is within range of your cannons and all you have to do is hit the spacebar to fire. But the beauty of ship combat lies in the strategy you need to employ in order to win. For example, if you know that your ship is faster and more maneuverable than the enemy’s, but he has bigger and better guns, then your best bet is to stay away from his deckguns and try and hit him from behind. Knowing your enemy, your own strengths, as well as how to use wind direction and the surrounding landscape to your advantage can make a big difference in ship combat. You can also use different types of ammunition to accomplish different things, ie. damage the sails, harm the crew, or blast the ship’s hull.
The relatively slow pace of ship combat does take some getting used to. I remember logging in and trying it out for the first time – an hour later I logged off with a sore left arm because I was hitting the W key too hard, trying to get my ship to go faster. But once I got past that, it was an amazing experience.
Fighting itself is rather interesting. Aside from the regular attack moves that do damage, you also get preparatory moves that lower your opponent’s balance and gain you initiative. When the proper level of imbalance/initiative is reached, you can then execute a finishing move, which deals a greater amount of damage. As in most other games, you mash buttons to execute the moves.
Avatar combat animation is just beautiful. On the downside, the lack of avatar collisions makes for some awkward moments in situations where you encounter many enemies. Boarding combat is one of those situations. Having a dozen of soldiers run through each other damages the immersion and leaves the impression that more work is needed here.
The PotBS economy is totally player-driven. Almost all the items you use in the game – ships, outfittings, consumables – are made by players. The complexity of the whole system can be a little daunting to the uninitiated, but there is an early Economy Tutorial mission arc, easily available from the Auctioneer at every starting port, which provides enough information and materials to get you started.
The major industry is Shipbuilding, although you could carve a niche for yourself making ammunition and outfittings too. A whole lot of items go into making ships and not all of these are available in the same locale so players will ultimately have to transport their goods across the sea, at times through pirate-infested waters.
The game also uses a blind-bidding auction house system of trading goods which can be terribly confusing to those coming from the WoW school of auctions, but which supposedly works well in stabilizing prices by reducing the downward price pressure caused by undercutting.
When you put something up for sale, you specify the minimum price at which you want to sell your item. A buyer coming into the auction house will only see the total number of such items for sale and the last 10 prices paid for that item, but not your asking price.
To buy an item, he will then make a reasonable offer and if it happens to be equal to or higher than your minimum, he wins the bid and your item gets sold. Otherwise, he gets a message saying that the item is not available at his bidding price. If there were multiple sellers whose minimum prices are met with the bid, the one with the lowest price will get the sale. The system can be quite frustrating but it creates an educated consumer, if only by necessity, one who knows what a “reasonable” price is on any particular item.
Pirates of the Burning Sea is not just a "pirates game". It's an entertaining, challenging, and engaging MMO that lets you play pirates, or oppose them if you wish. Its main attractions are its robust PvP system, a well-crafted ship combat system, and a well-thought out player-run economy. There is room for improvement in the other aspects of the game, but one major advantage that PotBS has that doesn't count towards any review score is its developers' openness to the community, which in turn has spawned a passionate player-base that makes active and positive contributions to its growth. And this we believe, bodes well for its future!
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