Well – I’ve been pondering a long time whether to write this or not, but well, with the NDA being lifted as the game went into Open Beta some time ago – here goes. Please note that I’m not reviewing or previewing the game, it is more my own random thoughts and impressions from the beta.
I’ve been involved in the beta (closed) for
Pirates of the Burning Sea, being made by Flying Lab Software (FLS), for many months – and at the time I got into it I was psyched and continued to be so for many months, but lately, as the closed beta drew to a close and Open began (with the subsequent lift of the NDA), I wanted to draw up my experiences and impressions.
The game, for those who do not know, is about 4 factions or nations if you will; Pirates, French, British and Spanish fighting for control over the Caribbean territories. Each faction has a number of ports, most ports are captureable by other factions and those ports contain resources used for the economy. So basically what you have is a battle between the factions playing out on the waters.
Each of the actual nations (British, French, Spanish) have 3 classes: Freetrader (economical focus), Privateer and Naval Officer. Each comes with its own skill set (50 sailing and 50 swashbuckling IIRC), and has access to a shared pool of ships and class restricted ships. The pirates have only one class, pirate (duh), and he also have access to a sailing/swashbuckling pool of skills like the other 3 classes. However where the other nations classes must buy or produce ships a pirate can capture ships, and can sail all ships in the game (although class restricted ships make him PvP enabled)
Combat is based on Ship vs. Ship or Avatar vs. Avatar (AVCombat).
Anyways, go look it up for more information about actual structure
There are simply too many aspects for me to go into them all, so I’ll just focus on some of the main ones in my view.
Any game with Pirates and Sea must have ship combat, and PotBS has it. It is the bread and butter in my view of this game. I absolutely love the ship combat, the tactical aspects, and the pace of it. The pace is much slower than many other MMOs combat out there, but still a lot can happen quickly.
The ship combat was what attracted me to this game, and its potential is very high. However, here the game runs into its first problem, which is a problem that plagues pretty much all MMOs – namely balance. FLS is having problems balancing the classes, their skill sets and the ships against each other.
This is causing issues to say the least. However balance problems is nothing new for anybody who played a MMO before, and I must admit – that if I choose to play this game, it will solely be because the Ship combat is so wonderful to play and looks darned good in my view.
As for Avatar Combat, then I absolutely hate it, and I wish FLS never introduced it into the game. It feels disconnected from the rest of the game, and while it has some very good ideas, I simply feel it is badly executed and I avoided it as much as I could in the game. Unfortunately FLS has seen it fit to introduce it more and more via boarding (PvP and PvE) and port conquest combat, along with PvE land based missions.
This is one of the main reasons I have for not wanting to buy the game.
This leads me to the PvP aspects. I’ve never been an avid PvP’er, but when I do, I PvP for the fight itself, and not the outcome. That means I relish the good fight over causing grief and hurting my opponent. This is not the game for that in my experience. One of the elements which attracted me to the game was the prospect of “Realm vs. Realm” warfare as introduced so brilliantly by Dark Age of Camelot (until Mythic ruined it themselves, but that is a different story). And this game looked to be able to deliver some of that – with France, Britian and Spain dukeing it out with the Pirates harrashing, but alas, it doesn’t look to be this.
Throughout the beta I’ve seen the game go more and more towards gank or be ganked type of PvP and gameplay.
Although the game is heavily instanced (max 6 vs max 6 in “ad hoc” PvP and 24 vs 24 in port combat IIRC), gank squads was the mainstay PvP when I stopped playing. This caused me to absolutely love the port conqest combat (24 vs 24) but hate the ad hoc PvP because if you weren’t in a gank squad yourself, you might as well stay out of the PvP areas.
You see, the ad-hoc PvP areas are created by bringing a port into “contention”. Then a red circle spans out from the port for some length and PvP areas are created. While this sounds good in theory (well, did to me), they are too small due to the map being too small (but it couldn’t really be bigger), which come live and more players will mean these smaller areas are swamped by the gank squads, killing most solo PvP.
In the closed beta we were few players, and it was possible to find good fights – but as the player base grew, these good fights was forced to yield to the players who just wanted to sink the opponent. And such players hate to loose, and thus they’ll bring a gun to a knife-fight so to speak – thus gank or be gank was born in this game as well.
Now gank squads are nothing new either, but in a game where you can’t really hide like in EVE, and is heavily instanced, it is murder in my view.
The large port contention fights though – they were fun. Really fun. Having a battle of 15-24 ships fighting with other similar force – pure fun.
However, this also leads to another balancing problem FLS have; population balance. If a nation has significantly more players then another nation, they effectively can strangle the nation, because PvP has an effect on the game map. And while on balancing, FLS are having problems balancing the classes and their skills and the ships, meaning they are still doing major reworks to the game this close to launch.
Another area I feel is potentially good. The economy is somewhat complex, and it has good ideas, as there is no resource grinding. A port has resources, for instance a port can have oak. This means everybody (with some requirenments) can put up an oak logging camp in that port and harvest oak. No running around finding the right mine, or waiting for it to spawn or something. Buildings gather labor in hours to a maximum of 3 days stored, and that labor is used either for harvesting or producing. Clever enough.
However – for some indefinable reason, I just couldn’t get myself to dabble with the economy much. It was just dull to do so – but sure, a potential to make a large amount of doubloons is there for those willing to spend time doing it, but for me – it was good idea, but boring.
I’ll also touch on the PvE aspect. PvE in this game is purely a grind. A grind to get to specific levels fast enough to be able to sail specific ships. You see, another thing which first attracted me was that level should play less of a role in this game. And while it indeed does, it is just not enough to warrant such a statement. Combat mechanics are not affected by level – that is good in my book for such a game as this. This means that a 6lb cannon with common round shot will do the same damage if fired by a level 1 as by a level 50. What is affected by the level however is the amount of skills you have and the ships you can sail. And here comes the catch 22. If you have a L50 you can sail L50 ships. These carries way more guns and are way more deadly then a L1 ship (of course), and then we are back at the same ole same ole. Also skills – a L50 will have more skills, which can augment his ship and damage. And lastly the outfittings are level dependant up to a specific level.
So level still is a huge factor. I know FLS is talking about wanting small ships to play a role, but based on the combat I’ve tried in the many months of beta, it doesn’t look to matter much unless you want to run away. Sure a smaller nimble ship could take out a ship of the line if the one captain was insane and the other very skilled – but all things equal. More guns and more armor wins the day and that usually only comes with level. Also – FLS are talking about 1000 missions per nation, however currently those missions are all but carbon copy of each other, just with another name and location. So “Spanish” missions are the same as “English” missions, except in another town with another name. Also the AVCombat missions are devastatingly boring, not helped by the combat itself. Other then this there are a few varied missions; Escort, Kill tasks, Escape, Pick up stuff and so on – however they all feel very similar still. And this unfortunately only further makes the PvE seem like a grind only there to level.
Lastly – there is absolutely no exploration in this game, so “BARTLE” explorer types (like me) will have to find other things to do.
Linear Mode
