When I got home last night, my son was all smiles and grins. He’d finally passed the test of skill needed to join a prestigious online clan in Call of Duty 4 — having to kill ten opponents — real people, mind you, not AIs — in a specific death match, and to have twice as many kills as deaths.
So his night was spent learning the hand signals and call signs and sekrit words and playing maps for fun. And if he was doing that, then he wasn’t sailing the open seas as the Pirate captain, Scranton Ratskull. I had nothing better to do than catch up on the last few episodes of Jericho (AMAZING show, by the way — MUST WATCH. Can anyone NOT believe the American government would destroy half their own country if it matched their political goals?), and so after I spent a few hours copying my website to a new location, I installed Pirates of the Burning Sea.
In my list of needs, a new MMO sits just below “more hours in the day” and just above “a new hole in my skull”. It’s not as if I can refuse to even take a PEEK at new variations of the games I love, and PotBS is quite a departure from Word of Warcraft. And so Blanche DuBois, who ALWAYS depends upon the kindness of strangers, became a French freetrader on the Bonny server.
At the heart of PotBS is a slow, stately, sea battle simulator. Ever mindful of the wind, the condition of your hull and sails and the type of shot loaded in each cannon, you maneuver slowly around enemy ships — and not being too dumb, you are often outnumbered — and try to separate your opponents and having done so, blast them to splinters. Or more usually, slow them down and weaken them enough to grapple them and finish them off on board deck, hand to hand.
This is more than a little like EvE online. You have your hull damage — aft, forward, port and starboard — your guns, the need to keep at best range, destroying ships and looting cargo from the debris. You also have the depth to tactics, even more so as you try to use the wind, derelict ships and islands to force the enemy to sail where you want them to sail. An enemy tried to sail around an island with me chasing them — going against the wind — I turned away from the wind, sailed around the island the long way (but faster) and met him as he came around the point with my cannons blazing.
I guess the NPCs share something else with EvE — they aren’t all that smart, but they make up for it in numbers and having better ships. At least better than my level 1 boat.
Added to the sea adventure is an entirely standard land adventure, where you run around in port towns doing small instances and talking to NPCs with various punctuation marks floating above their heads, gathering quests and finally getting back onto the water. Not much to be said about that.
My son loved the game, but he complained about the lag. That is likely because he plays on Rackham, the second most populated server. Since the game wouldn’t let me create a French player on his account — just Pirate, like him — I chose the least populated server, Bonny, instead, and noticed no lag. I did however get disconnected several times during the night, and at one point it looked as if the server had disappeared completely. I eventually had to completely redo a quest I was doing when I got booted. They were planning on doing rolling restarts of all servers when I went to bed, so it’s possible they were dealing with problems like these.
The French players were fairly helpful to a pathetic newbie, right there with suggestions for how to talk to your trainer (the quest to talk to your trainer says to left click on him; in reality, you hit the ‘X’ key. Left clicking does nothing.)
This was only a very brief look at PotBS and I did nothing but the first few missions, so I have nothing to say about the trading, resource gathering, manufacturing, or PvP. So really, what *have* I seen?
The ship battles — first rate. The avatar combat — well, definitely not as complicated as EQ2 or even WoW, but that will certainly change with levels. The land game itself I know from reading elsewhere definitely doesn’t remain as simplistic as it seems at the start. Character customization is among the best, given that they only have to dress humans and men and women share the same bodies — and over at Mystic Worlds, I learned that women will get their own bodies at some point, so that can only get better.
I guess that’s the phrase that sticks with me after my first few hours of play — Pirates of the Burning Sea is an okay game with a fine sea battle simulator that can only get better.
At least it’s not another WoW-like grindfest. And that immediately gives it higher marks in my book.
8 thoughts on “A Glance at Pirates of the Burning Sea”
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I was in the PotBS beta and was damn impressed. But to be honest I like Voyage Century Online much more. I love fact that exploring is a viable way of playing the game, discovering not only places but animals and artifacts. I love a nonviolent alternative, but its a big bonus when that alternative is actually fun, heh.
Huh. Never heard of that. Here’s a link for anyone who wants to know more about this (apparently) Chinese import, similar in many ways to Pirates of the Burning Sea.
I just watch the last episode of Jericho and must say its nice finally knowing the story behind “Nuts”. On the other hand I really liked the supporting character they killed in the last episode and hope it can still be interesting without him.
PotBS
Do developers really think making players deliver cargo in real time is a smart design decision. I know EVE Online is popular but I think that has more to due with the player organized Corps then the game’s mining/shipping industry. I would think the shipping of goods between ports would be better if you could hire NPC frieght cargo ships to do it or have some other method of shipping goods while you were doing something else.
http://relmstein.blogspot.com/2008/01/threat-of-travel-time.html
Hi Tipa,
I would be surprised if the lag you’re experiencing actually is because of Rackham. It’s busy, but other players are on it with no lag, and it’s running inside our tested tolerance. Noting that you’re also disconnecting from Bonny several times, is it possible there’s a problem with your router and UDP traffic? I wouldn’t normally suspect this, since CoD (excellent game, by the way) seems to be running fine, but I thought I’d check.
Oh, and for Relmstein – Our travel times are dramatically faster than Eve, and so far players delivering cargo seems to be working out.
Hey, thanks for the note!
I didn’t know you used UDP — for those who don’t know the abbreviations, UDP is a kind of message sending where it is not important that the packet is received, and is often used by monitoring equipment and in the case of PotBS, apparently to update the client with position information from the server. The other common sort, TCP, guarantees delivery, but is slower as a result.
I’ll check my router. This sort of lag is unusual, but I used to have the same symptoms back around the Luclin era in EQ1, and that eventually went away when I replaced the router :/
Thanks again!
Gratz to your son Tipa.
What is it like having a teenage kid who is also into games? Does it make you the coolest Mom ever or do they just roll their eyes to heaven every time Mom starts on about how “things have all gone downhill since Elite on the BBC Micro”?
My own little ones haven’t progressed beyond Club Penguin so I don’t feel any threat to my status as the family gamer yet.
Well, I like to think it was me who made my kids gamers 🙂 But we typically like different kinds of games, so generally I’m not mucking about in his games embarrassing him, and yet we can still talk about games. It’s really nice, actually.
That is super cool