The piracy MMO is finally out of the docks!
An MMO about pirates seems like such a good idea, it's a wonder that it hasn't been attempted before. And, for the most part, the recently launched Pirates of the Burning Sea lives up to the promise of its premise. A lively world of multiplayer mayhem across the beautiful Caribbean, complete with treasure maps, rum factories, saber duels, colorful parrots and all the other clichés you'd expect from the setting. Great ship combat and an intricate economy make for another an attractive feature, but the game may run aground owing to a lack of in-game help and a completely chaotic dueling system. The game's been up and running for a short while now and while we're not entirely ready to pass our final verdict, we thought we'd dive in and offer up some early impressions.
Again, the concept is great. Think of it as a sort of Sid Meier's Pirates! online with an incredibly sophisticated economic model and a full-on PvP system where players can fight for ownership of the ports around the Caribbean. Eschewing (most of) the Hollywood clichés, Pirates of the Burning Sea takes a much more historical approach to the swashbuckling concept. That's, of course, excluding the tremendous popularity of huge-breasted lady pirates.
Players can take up service in one of three nations -- Britain, France or Spain -- and opt for careers as enlisted naval officers, unofficial privateers or profit-minded traders. If none of those careers appeals to you and you'd rather strike out on your own, you can opt to play as a Pirate, beholden to no nation and able to set your own course through the game. The game takes place across the entire Caribbean in the year 1720. Each of the European powers hopes to gain the edge over its rivals, while the Pirates merely want to profit at the expense of the general welfare. The class and nation you select largely determines your overall role in this conflict but there are ample opportunities to seek out your own fortune in the service of your country.
Though it departs from the traditional MMO setting, Pirates nevertheless follows many of the standard conventions of the genre. Giant floating question marks direct players towards NPCs who are ready to hand out quests that reward players for defeating other NPCs by offering wide varieties of cool loot. The missions are generally combat-oriented, forcing players to duel with local crime lords in their opulent mansions, or escort wealthy merchants through a gauntlet of plunder-hungry pirates. So far, so good.
On the other hand, there are some obvious flaws in the presentation that seem like they ought to have been corrected. The interface itself is rather inelegant, both in its appearance and in the way it sorts information. The quests are listed solely based on their distance from you, leaving you to manually dig down into such important details as their difficulty, type or general location. The economic interfaces are equally obtuse, partly because of the amount of information presented.
Pirates also tends to fail to orient players towards important information. After a series of brief tutorials which consist of a single splash screen showing controls followed by a playable segment where you're not really given much direction in how to use those controls, the player is plopped down in their home port and forced to rely on vague descriptions by NPCs to figure out how the rest of the game works.
This is particularly disappointing in the case of the game's more important systems. The economy, for instance, still isn't very clear to us, despite its obvious importance to the overall game world. The game also fails to reveal the importance of claiming prizes during a battle, which is something that we fortunately just started doing out of sheer vanity. It's a good thing too, because those prizes are incredibly important but you'd never know because the game never mentions it.
If you can manage to work out the intricacies of ship combat however, you'll find yourself rewarded with a rich and satisfying tactical system that really allows players to flex their strategic muscles. The whole experience takes so many factors into account -- shot type, wind direction, facing, sail state, crew morale, sailing point, line of sight, and so forth -- and combines them with class specific abilities that the captains can call upon to tweak their ship's performance. There are dozens of ships here, from speedy schooners to massive ships-of-the-line, and each can be outfitted with a variety of components to make them faster, sturdier and generally more awesome.
We've had no end of fun mixing things up in multi-ship battles, using chain shot to slow an enemy ship down, then getting behind her to take out her rudder and then pounding her mercilessly with grape shot until her crew was so depleted that we could attempt a boarding. We also just like slamming bronze shot into the hull over and over until they just sink. Adjusting sails to take advantage of the wind and trying to find good grappling positions and trying to screen off more vulnerable ships in our escort group; all these techniques and tricks are part and parcel of the experience when you take to sea in Pirates.
And as an added bonus the AI is generally pretty good. Ships seem to know when to use specific tricks and how to gang up on opponents. The only real downside is that the friendly AI seems not to know much about the right of way rules on the ocean so you'll occasionally find yourself colliding with your fellow escorts when they could just as easily have given you a wider berth.
As good as the ship combat is, the sword combat is just terrible. They've tried to build some unique elements by including meters for initiative and balance that determine which attacks you can use and how effective they are. But trying to set up attacks so that you can more effectively use the skills you've got is a freaking mystery. You can learn a bit more about it in the manual, but the game never really gives you any clues that you've got opportunities to use unique attacks. In the end it's just too unwieldy trying to keep track of how to use yellow prep attacks to reduce balance, soften them up with orange attacks, and then smash their balance with more yellow attacks before landing a massive red attack that might actually kill them. It's bad enough in one-on-one encounters but when you've got over a dozen enemies in a big pile during your boarding actions, it's a just a chaotic, button-pressing mess.
The economic system also has tremendous potential but, again, seems underserved by poor documentation and orientation. Players need buildings to take advantage of the raw materials offered by each of the ports, and each of those raw materials needs to be processed and made into a useable good that's stored in a warehouse. There's a tremendous opportunity for real supply and demand trading, from pints of rum all the way up to new ship types. Unfortunately, the game doesn't seem to do as much as it could to orient players towards this gameplay. The auction houses in our servers aren't really offering much of anything at this point, leaving us to assume that most players are still trying to figure out how things work.
Still, the economic model definitely has potential both in terms of creating a real economy and in terms of creating motivation for players to capture ports that produce a rare type of resource. Like the economic system, the game's PvP options haven't really been explored in depth yet, but the potential is there for players to engage in large fleet actions to gain control of certain ports for their home nations. The pirates, of course, exist merely as a destabilizing, predatory influence that accelerates and profits from this type of action. We're still not entirely convinced that it works in practice, but the theory behind it is interesting enough.
While the interface is a little stodgy, the ship graphics are definitely a high point for us so far. Watching sailors climb up and down the rigging and seeing tiny specks of cannon shot hurtle across the water add that little touch of life that keeps the player from becoming too detached from the drama. Of course, we'd love to be able to direct these battles from the decks of our ships but you can get in close enough to see the guys working the cannons and that's almost as good. The scenery also deserves special mention. While it's not as lush as say, Crysis, the whole tropical environment benefits from a first-rate color palette and some superb lighting effects. The character models and town architecture are generally quite good but they're not the real stars here.
Pirates of the Burning Sea has tremendous audio, from start to finish. The sounds of the sea are so authentic that I honestly thought during one particular battle that there was a seal under my desk. The sound of waves and rigging and broadsides really helps to put you in the right frame of mind for the game, while the excellent score provides a great sense of drama to your ship fights and port calls.
So far, Pirates of the Burning Sea definitely has our interest up. The trouble is that the game makes the player responsible for uncovering the basics of many of its important systems. We certainly don't want too much handholding, but none at all is tough to handle, particularly if you're new to the genre.
We'll be back with our full review in a couple of weeks. Until then, swash those buckles!
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