By Capt. Maverick
Arrrrgh matey, play be a dirge to go along with some of me pain. As I be a pirate in need of some change ‘afore me mates make me walk the plank. Ye see, I be a’likin’ this here game, Pirates of the Burning Sea, but me mates seem to be thinkin’ tis not a true MMO, but more of a single player game with the possibility of some multiplayer action. But “hang on” says I, for there be more to this game than meets the eye.

I’m going to let Soulrift discuss much of the MMO aspects of the game as he is our staff MMO specialist, but let me start out by saying that Pirates of the Burning Sea will bring a lot of gamers to the sea for the ship-to-ship combat action, then they will get bored and drop it and that will be the end of it. And if that describes you, that is a shame because there is so much more beneath the still waters of Pirates as you continue on in the game. There are swashbuckling melee fighting adventures and also exploring through a huge number of port towns that will appeal to many.

You will first start out by choosing a nationality; Spanish, French, or British. Of course there is also Pirate. Then you choose an occupation within that nationality but if you choose pirate, that IS your occupation. If you choose any of the other three countries to represent, you may either be a Naval Officer, Privateer, or a Freetrader. Of course you may also choose either male or female for your character. Then you will start the customization of that character, which seems almost limitless.

From there you will be flung into a tutorial and then into your home port where you will start questing and leveling up. Now this is were some people will start to get a little bored, but keep it up. There is some variety to the quests though there is not as much as many might like to see. For example the ship battles; it is a little difficult to give a huge amount of variety to sailing ship battles because there is not that much variety. Usually it is the side with the most ships, the most cannons, and uses the wind the best that will win the day. But these are the quests that you will learn how to do these things and so learn what you can.

As you continue in Pirates of the Burning Sea, you will also construct your first warehouse and start manufacturing your own products. You will also not only offer these products for sale in the auction houses but you will also be able to ship these products throughout the Caribbean waterways in your own boats. Pirates are the only faction that can steal boats from any other faction by damaging it enough to force the other side to abandon the ship. The problem with that is that you will take it over as is and have to repair it and then start working on upgrading it. The other problem with capturing a ship rather than having a deed to it is that if you have a deed to a ship and it is sunk once in a quest, you can salvage that ship. This can be done a number of times depending on the ship and deed. The starter ship I had allowed that for a damage level of 5 while the first ship I received a deed to had a damage level of 7, which means that it could be sunk 7 times before I would loose it. This is a lesson I learned when I lost My Jamaican Sloop that I had put special guns on, special planking for armor, nice sails for great speed and a great rudder system for quick turning. In other words, I had my ship all tricked out, when out of the blue I was assailed upon by four British warships and sunk. My beautiful ship, the GameSHOUT Too sent down to the briny deep…nothing is sadder than a Captain loosing his ship, well other than loosing his parrot. Now there was one thing I could have done I learned, and that is I could have saved enough to have bought the deed to a Jamaican Sloop and applied it to that ship and that would have given me the damage resistance I needed.

That leads me to another point, and it is a sticking point for both Soulrift and I so I will not belabor the point for long but once you buy or steal a ship and have it in your dry-dock, it’s yours. It would be nice to be able to sell it or trade it or even give it away. The only way to get rid of it is to scuttle it, or sink it and that seems just such a waste for all the work it took to take the ship in the first place.

Pirates of the Burning Sea does have some beautiful environments and the port towns do vary nicely form town to town. Each one has its own character and style. Many of the pirate towns have a sort of run down feel but some have real style. One is even built mostly out of ships and docks over water and this I found very intriguing. The player models are done very well too and as I said it seemed that there were almost an endless number of customizations. The NPCs sometimes left a little to be desired though…you couldn’t seem to go 10 steps without seeing a man with a wooden leg and another pirate carrying a lady over his shoulder. I did notice however that there were a lot of graphic glitches that I couldn’t shake even with our most powerful systems. You could run down a street and the NPCs would not so much appear as sort of liquefy in from the sky like they were falling out of the sky into place, and often there were quite a few jittery movements of players and NPCs alike. Often the lag would be so bad that other players would freeze and then appear suddenly in front of you frozen, and repeat the sequence as you both “stutter-ran” down the road.

The audio however I quickly fell in love with. I love to sail the islands and have done so frequently and hearing the water splash on the side of my boat, the wind constantly blowing, the seagulls cawing, and the waves crashing on the shore were just some of the sounds that I was completely satisfied with. I was also pleased with the cannon fire and when the balls and shot his your and your opponent’s ships, the unmistakable sound of the wood breaking and splintering apart was very well done. The voice acting was well done as well and of course I am one who loves a good pirate conversation. I believe that the audio of a game can really be a benefit or a detriment to a game, and it really was a benefit to Pirates.

So though Pirates of the Burning Sea in my opinion has some work to be done to truly be an MMO, as a single and multiplayer game, there are some very nice qualities here in Pirates that I think should not be discounted. This is just our first look and we plan on coming back at Pirates of the Burning Sea in 90-180 days and doing a follow-up to see if some of these issues have been worked out, and in the mean time I will be playing on the Kidd server and see what fun can be had and hope you will join me in this mad romp through the briny deep.



By Soulrift
There are certainly a lot of MMOs out there, and Pirates of the Burning Sea is certainly one of them. The game is split into three major segments: the non-combat part where you wander around town and do stuff, the land combat part where you fight hand-to-hand with other scallywags, and the ship combat part where you sail around unloading broadsides on other ships. I’ll talk about each in turn, but I’ll start with the overall structure of the game.

While playing, you basically have two choices: to quest or to go out and explore. Unlike traditional MMOs which treat the two as essentially the same, Pirates of the Burning sea is entirely based on instanced combat. As a result, quests instances are triggered by harbormasters in towns and battle instances in the open sea are triggered by engaging other ships you find there. In all cases, an encounter is preceded by a long loading screen and insertion into a custom instance, just for you and, if you happen to have any, your party members.

There are problems with both approaches, however. On the open sea, you have no way of locating your party members: no arrows pointing to them, no names floating on the horizon, not even a dot on your map. This makes it especially difficult to find your party members when they get attacked on the open sea. Battles on the open sea are indicated by a floating banner describing the two factions at war. However, there’s no indication of which players are in those battles. So if there are two nearby “Pirates vs English” battles, you don’t know which one has your friend and which one has some random stranger. Likely the stranger’s battle will be closed to you, but it’s possible it’ll be open and you’ll be out of luck guessing which one to enter.

Questing isn’t much better. The majority of questing revolves around grinding fairly similar quests with slightly different scenarios: different number of ships, allies, perhaps you have to capture instead of destroy, sometimes you have to run away, but the game plays out roughly the same each time. Ship to ship battles tend to be long and very uninvolved: you have to have the side of your ship facing your enemy, so you just end up sailing in circles endlessly pressing the spacebar to fire until a ship sinks. There weren’t many abilities you could use to turn the tide of battle, and while certain tactics like shooting sails or crew or hull are available, they tend to produce essentially the same gameplay and end result. Also, battles are long and boring. While waiting the 18 seconds for your guns to reload, you can’t really do anything. Finally, there isn’t really any advantage to being in a party, aside from being able to bring more guns to bear. There aren’t any party-related skills that form the backbone of most other MMOs, skills such as agro management, healing, or supporting.

Melee combat is more engaging than ship battles, but not by much. Melee eschews the normal concept of auto-attacking in favor of button-mashing skills. There are a number of gauges that respond to these skills, but some, such as balance, refill almost as fast as you can knock it down, making it a questionable strategy in battle. Generally, you just keep hitting ‘attack’ until your enemies are all dead. Again, a total lack of support skills makes grouping essentially irrelevant.

Another issue that really upset me was the way Pirates of the Burning Sea handles ships. In Burning Sea, you can have multiple ships in your dry-dock and switch between them as needed. However, once a ship is in your dry-dock, you can never take it out. This means you can never sell ships or give a ship you’ve outgrown to a friend who’s just getting started. You can’t even sell it for some cash or resources. Pirates can capture ships they defeat in combat, but again, they’re just stuck in your dry-dock. The result is that you have to go out and get every ship you sail for yourself, and you can never give or trade them with other players, rendering the entire ship acquisition process into an essentially single player endeavor.

There might be more to the game’s economy system than I saw in the time I spent playing the game, but nothing I saw enticed me to delve further and discover the game’s deeper mechanics. This is either due to an absence of anything more to it, or a failure to convey their presence to players at lower levels. Unfortunately, the result is an MMO that felt more like a rough single player game with no storyline or campaign. Coupled with slow progression and endless quest grinding, Pirates of the Burning Sea doesn’t make my “must play” list, despite its novel approach and content.