Pirates of the Burning Sea (MMO)

[Sir Lucius]

Teaser 1 (http://youtube.com/watch?v=V-aWiBvCzeE)
Teaser 2 (http://youtube.com/watch?v=Xu2Jpx_64os)
Trailer (http://youtube.com/watch?v=pqcUOGV7O5A)
Interview (http://www.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=534)

Official Website (http://www.flyinglab.com/pirates/index.php)

I only recently took notice of this game, and I did a quick search but only saw quick mentions about it. I would like to discuss the game in greater detail because I believe it may have a lot of potential.

The most detailed guide of known information can be found here. (http://www.whitewolfclan.net/pobs/review.htm) It is a fan made site, so everything is pretty objective (or at least not spun like an official site would do). There are some good examples of screen shots over there, but you may not have time to read it so I will go over some of the highlights as they pertain to martains:

+ Unlike Eve online, you are not just a ship. You have an avatar that goes out and has avatar based adventures.

+ Character creation is as robust as City of Heroes. You can also buy new fancy hats and what not later if you want to change your attire.

+ You can be aligned to a Nation (France, Spain, England) who may or may not engage in PVP with each other depending on circumstances, but not from the same nation. Or you can be a pirate, which I believe is much more free for all.

+ Ships have durability points, so if it is sunk you do not lose it forever, you just lose a durability point. It's sunk when you run out of points though. The lower level ships have a ton of durability while the higher ones have less.

+ There are 50 levels, there are no stats. A level 1 has just as much health as a level 50, and their base attacks do the same damage. There are no magical swords or +1 boots.

+ Even levels you get sailing skill points, odd levels you get avatar skill points. The advantage of higher level is commanding more powerful ships, and having more skills.

+ The market is player controlled, all items in the world are crafted by players. All crafting is done from labor you manage. There's no such thing as pushing buttons for crafting skill ups.


I'm probably missing a bunch more, but if you read that white wolf link there is a lot of good info. Release date says June 2007, I would expect more August 2007.

[Dg3Nr8]

ARRR

[jackrabbit]

I'm very interested in this game. It's something new that's never been tried before (on this level, at least) and there are no elves, orcs, or (I presume) magic.

[Sir Lucius]

2.13 Is there magic in the game?

No. There are none of the spells, magic wands, +3 helmets, or any of that stuff you may have seen in other MMP. Pirates and sailors do have all kinds of superstitions and ghost stories about life at sea, and we may explore those in the game, but we're not going to do anything that you'd consider magic as offered in fantasy games like World of Warcraft or Everquest.
from http://www.flyinglab.com/pirates/faq.php

[Shadowrat]

it certainly looks interesting. especially if there is some kind of real strategy involved in the ship combat, rather than just trade shots until someone goes down.

The idea that you are a pirate on a ship is cool. Probably the weakest part of eve was it just felt so sterile without having a little guy to walk around.

[Paladin]

Could be fun. I'd play if there's enough of a group. It'd be cool to have a whole floatilla of Martian ships plundering the high seas.

[Orion]

I'll definitly be giving this one a try. but to pirate or not to pirate? that is the question.

[Patton]

TO PIRATE.

I'll play. :D

[jackrabbit]

yeah, if Tai has any say in the matter, there is no other choice.

[Shadowrat]

He'll likely make a better drunken pirate than a drunken priest.

[Patton]

Oh man. I should not have read that preview. I am definitely interested.

[Shadowrat]

woot!

User Content Program: 3D Ships
One of the most exciting aspects of our User Content Program is the opportunity for Pirates of the Burning Sea fans to make their mark on the game by actually modeling 3D ships that they would like to see in game. We already have an extensive collection of user created ships in our game, and plan to have many more before launch.

[Creole Ned]

Can you make ninja pirates? What about robot ninja pirates?

I am skeptical about this game but salute the developers for at least moving away from high fantasy. If there's a beta or trial I'll have a look. Overall, though, it's not something that really excites me. But then, I preferred Space Mountain to Pirates of the Caribbean. :)

[Shadowrat]

No you didn't. Pirates of the Caribbean is the best theme park ride ever! Space Mountain is a good roller coaster, but PotC is an EXPERIENCE. "ARRH THAR BE STORMS AHEAD!"

I also liked 20k leagues under the sea ride, but i hear it's gone now.

I do have my reservations about this game though. I applaud the developers, but this is an independent effort. We've seen upstarts come out with one high concept mmo after another, and usually they are dismal failures. What was that sci fi one from a couple years ago? the name escapes me now. Or Horizons? that failed to deliver anything. Even if the game does deliver pirates, it will likely take years before the servers are really stable and the game actually works.

[Creole Ned]

Yeah, Pirates of the Caribbean is actually a richer experience (say, 10 doubloons worth vs. 5 doubloons) but I'm such a sucker for roller coasters, especially ones that race you around in the dark and end in a 70s disco light show with steam.

And I agree with your point about PotBS (although looking at it, how can you not like that acronym?) Indie developers don't have the money to do everything they want. Heck, you can see tons of shortcuts even in WoW and they had a budget of about a zillion million dollars. Will they be able to balance what they can do with what they can't and still create a deep, fun and yarr-worthy experience?

Time will tell. :pirate:

[Patton]

I'm of the opinion that server capacity and capability is to the point where only incompetence is the limited factor in their performance. We shall see. I'm still excited about the game. Server problems will ruin it, but my interest isn't based on the fear of a game doing something wrong, but the hope that it does what it hopes to right.

[Sir Lucius]

The lead developer is a goon. Here he is answering some questions (anything quoted is something he was responding to):



Sounds like it'll result in a stunning in-game slideshow for fleet battles.

It's not all that bad, actually. I got a little chop when I spawned 50 AIs to test the port conquest battle room yesterday, but it wasn't too terrible. It was definitely playable.

But more importantly, we have 1.5 devs working full time on performance. We're not going to ship something you can't play.


By the way, what's the skill/advancement system like? I haven't found anything definite on it, besides a blurb talking about "levelling up", and 90 different skills or so. How bad is the grind? Will Korean poopsockers own all, or are there safeguards to make sure that normal people with jobs can still contribute meaningfully?

I hate grinding. So here's some of the way advancement supports casual players:

* You can level through the entire game via missions. You can totally go out on the open sea and attack merchants for fun and profit, but you don't have to.

* Building new ships is a massive undertaking, and likely to be stupid expensive. But there are 'fallback' ships that, while not exactly competitive, are fine for fights against NPCs. You probably don't ever want to take one into PvP, and you'll be struggling some in harder missions, but we never leave you without a useful ship.

* The economy is based on labor accumulation, rather than cooldowns. Sort of like cooldowns you pay in advance. And there are no level restrictions on production or manufacturing. You can, given startup capital, build a high-end shipyard business on day one. And, because labor accumulates over time, you can be competitive in the economy even if you only log in once every few days.

* We've just revised the way XP gains work in groups with mixed levels, so that you can reasonably group with higher level friends and make progress.

* There are ... 45 captain skills per career (except pirates, who have 55 captain skills available), organized into 9 'chains' of 5 skills each. You gain a captain skill point every other level (swashbuckling skill points are at the even levels). And the final skill in each chain has a level restriction of 15. That means that by level 15, you can have an 'endgame' skill. So leveling up makes your available set of skills larger -- you have a bigger 'toolbox' -- but you aren't automatically more powerful because you have a high-end skill. Everyone who's at least level 15 potentially has that same high-end skill.


What is the ship combat going to be like? Will it just be someting like "click on ship, watch your ship shoot that ship" or will it be more like navyfield? How is the ship damage done? Are sails and other equipment on the ship damageable? How about crew? Can ships be boarded and taken over?

You fire each battery individually (where a 'battery' is all the guns on a given deck and facing; the 104-gun has 12 batteries total, including 2 batteries of swivel guns). You load each battery independently, so you can have chain shot in one battery and grapeshot in another. The target of each battery is determined by the shot type; chain shot is aimed at sails, grape is aimed at the deck, and round is aimed at the hull.

Your ship can take five kinds of damage: armor damage, which is applied per-facing (so you have independent damage on each of port, starboard, fore and aft); structure damage, which you start taking when you run out of armor, and which causes your ship to sink when you lose it all; sail damage, which will make your ship handle more slowly and drop your max speed (as well as causing masts and spars to fall down, which looks pretty awesome); crew damage, which reduces your ability to board, and causes your entire ship's performance to degrade; and gun damage, which can reduce your available guns in a given battery.

You can board ships and, if you're a pirate, take them over. In fact, tuning and polishing boarding combat is what I've been working on for the last three weeks. Pirates can seize ships for their own use; nationals can seize ships in exchange for commendations, which can be traded in for a variety of rewards. Pirates can also strip a captured ship for supplies and materials.


edit: will swordfighting primarily involve insults?

Just yesterday, I was told that I wouldn't be able to get our sound content designer any studio time to record more insults this week. This makes me sad.


This is good to hear. Regarding my earlier comment, though, is there any sort of scaling support right now for really massive engagements? I can't help but think that a significant Goonfleet/swarm presence in-game is pretty much a given at this point.

We have technology limits. Or rather, you do. Because you will not like the game's performance if there are more than about 50 people in a fight at once. So 'massive' engagements will probably turn out to be a large number of separate fights nearby.


So I guess if you're doing Q&A I've got one.

I think I can gather the general thrust of what swashbuckling skills would entail, but the other skillset--Captain skills or whatever? What sorts of skills are there? Are they like passive improvements to your ship, or activated abilities? And if activated, what sort of skills we looking at?

Feel free to not answer if this is NDA of course

Bah, I am the NDA. Or rather, I get to decide if I want to share design info with you, being like, the lead designer and whatnot.

Captain skills are anything that isn't directly related to stabbing people. They cover a pretty wide range of things. There's ship management skills, passive skills that improve your performance, skills related to your status in your career... Here's some examples, pulled directly from the game text I wrote:

All Or Nothing Shot (privateer): "Attack. Increased damage shot that causes you to suffer a large reload penalty."

Drink And The Devil (pirate): "Toggle skill. When your crew, drunk on watery grog, believes you're as mean as the devil himself, they are too afraid to question your orders, and their performance increases dramatically at the expense of their morale."

Shipwright (merchant): "Passive skill. Enables the use of advanced Freetrader shipwright recipes. Find a Freetrader recipe trainer to purchase these recipes."

Dockyards (navy): "Passive Skill. The Crown arranges for you to keep an additional ship berthed in port."


I have the feeling it won't really run on my 2.2Ghz Athlon XP, but maybe I'll be lucky.

My work machine, which runs the game just fine, is an Athlon 2800 with 2GB of RAM and a GeForce 6800 GT.


I guess I will throw a question out there if you are answering them. Could you go through the entire game and not pilot your own boat? Also are there boarding actions?

Nope. You're the captain of a ship.

Edit: Oh, and yes, there are boarding actions. That's what we (we meaning 'the design team') have been working on polishing for the past few weeks. Combat against a swarm of enemy crew and their captain is a much different and more frenetic experience than a simple 1v1 fight.


What does the morale of your crew do, and what kinds of things affect it? Running out of rum?

Morale is the limited pool of 'crew energy' you spend on skills. It's basically like mana in a fantasy game. The more you ask your crew to do, the more morale you use up. If you're asking them to do something long-term, like Drink and the Devil does, it caps your maximum morale. Drink and the Devil (as the most extreme example) reduces your max morale from 100 to 10.

[Sir Lucius]

So basically while that's running you can use simple skills very very quickly, but complex ones won't fly 'cause they're more costly than your new morale cap (I guess in RP terms they're too busy quaking in their peglegs to figure out complex orders)?

In simplest MMO terms (which is where this system began, long ago): you have 100 mp to spend on skills. While you have DatD active, your max mp drops to 10. Good luck using any of your other (expensive) skills!


Pirates are always PvP if they're sailing a captured ship of the line, or similar high-end national ship. They also have larger PvP+ areas. But they're not generically PvP+ everywhere.


I don't want to spam up the thread with 10 answer posts, but I suck at the quoting, so I'm kind of just going to cherry pick.

Pirates can build ships, the same as any other character. Only Navy players can turn a ship deed for a ship of the line into an actual ship of the line, so a pirate shipbuilder would need a naval customer to buy his ship.

Adventurers = Freetraders. We keep dithering on the name, because 'merchants' sux and that's really not what they are. They're probably the career with the most survivability in the game -- lots of ways to avoid fights, escape fights, and survive fights. They also get all the economic benefit skills.


If you are still doing Q&A, is PotBS going to be single shard like EvE, or multiple shards like every other MMO?

Mutliple world instances. We don't have infinite space and totally distributed playing areas the way Eve does.


And do the combat areas have a hard cap on the amount of people in them? If there's a 'soft' limit based on client and server lag I can see that turning out just as bad as it has for EvE, if it's single shard.

We're planning hard caps on population in battles. The port battles -- the big fleet engagements -- are capped at 25v25. We'll raise that cap if our performance tuning justifies it, though.


In fact, the length of most battles if probably going to seem pretty strange to most people who play MMOs. Most MMO PvP is over in minutes (other than say, EvE fleet pvp), and I can imagine a common PotBS fight to take a lot longer. Just rushing in to get a few shots then board with no regard to the weather gauge is going to get you raped.

Rushing in = instant death. Guaranteed. You will get raked over and over again, your crew will all die, you will be dismasted, and your opponents will laugh at you.

PvP battles seem to run between 5 and 45 minutes. It really depends on how evenly matched the sides are, how many people are in the battle, and how skilled they are. Very skilled players in a 1v1 duel with similar ships can take a long time. Huge fleet engagements with a lot of competent players can take nearly an hour. But honestly, you don't notice the time passing. We regularly get people saying 'OMG that battle took 20 minutes, and I didn't even realize it!'.


I'm not a fan of instancing

The map of the Caribbean looks set. Are the instances going to be chunks of that map or just replications of that map for each shard?

That's not how instancing works in our game. The world map is a single, continuous, persistent area. When you get into a fight on the world map, you're taken to a private instanced area for the fight, leaving a 'battle marker' behind on the world map. Other players can join that battle (given a set of rules that control who can join and when) by 'attacking' the battle marker. When the battle's over, the survivors return to the world map.

If you mean world instances -- the scale of the game world dictates the number of players we can support simultaneously, as well as elements of the game's design. There are technical limitations, but our actual server population targets will be significantly lower than the technical limitations.

Eve could do their single world because one, space is really really big, and two, their world design scales infinitely. You can always, if needed, open a new route to a previously undiscovered cluster of systems.


As it stands now, it will be available through digital distribution only (through Steam, I think).

We're going to have digital distribution, but we won't be doing it through Steam.


So does the world map function as a sort of stylized RPG overworld with exaggerated proportions for ships and land masses?

Essentially, yes.


Related to this, is pretty much everything that isn't the world map instanced? How does this instancing policy relate to areas where the player is represented by their avatar?

We use 'instance' to mean 'temporary zone we open for a specific purpose, and close again when we're done with it.' Ports, for example, are not 'instances', because they're persistent shared spaces. Missions usually take you to an instance. There are persistent avatar spaces -- all the ports -- and there are instanced avatar spaces, including most avatar combat environments.

[Andri]

The setting does sound like a lot of fun. But I'd probably get boarded and plundered every time I dare take my ship out of the noob area. I'd probably still be lvl 1 and dirt poor after 6 months of playing, and able to survive only under the protection of the great Capt'n Tai. That is, if I had not died of a heart attack. I am really not made for hard core PvP. :(

[pogozorro]

This looks freaking awesome.

[Creole Ned]

Inka, you could stick to the PvE side and just die from scurvy instead. :bg:

[jackrabbit]

after reading that, I'm really pushing for this game to look and play as good as it sounds.

[Shadowrat]

hmm. This is one of my pet peeves, overly dramatic skill descriptions.

Drink And The Devil (pirate): "Toggle skill. When your crew, drunk on watery grog, believes you're as mean as the devil himself, they are too afraid to question your orders, and their performance increases dramatically at the expense of their morale."

I admit it's a novel idea, and it would be cool if it somehow had an effect akin to always seeing my avatar with dramatic evil looking shading, and my crew looking visibly scared and trembly in my presence, but i suspect it's more like i click it and it goes "dong" and if i bother to look at some charts, i'll notice that a number has changed to 10.

I can't remember specific examples, but it's always disappointing when the description is: you summon the power of a thousand denizens of the netherworld to unleash an unholy barrage of soul sucking power on your opponent!
but in practice it's more like: you shoot something green at your opponent. it resembles the red thing you shoot. he has no visible reaction to it.

[Andri]

Inka, you could stick to the PvE side and just die from scurvy instead. :bg:

There is a PvE side? Wouldn't you be attackable every time you leave the safe harbor?

[Patton]

Read the preview!

[Andri]

I did. :(


Sorry, I am a visual person. I don't get strats and game mechanics by reading about them.

[Sir Lucius]

on pvp
How free is the pvp? Will you be able to gank targets of opportunity, or will it be limited to instances or somewhere in between?

It's in-between. Ports that become unstable (through combat nearby, PvE missions, economic missions, and some other mechanics) open up a Pirate PvP area around them on the world map, in which pirates can attack and be attacked, but the nationals can't attack each other. When the port is very close to tipping into the 'contention' state (which means that in 24 hours it's going to be under attack by an enemy fleet), the PvP area becomes open PvP in which any nation can attack any other nation. Additionally, a much larger area becomes Pirate PvP.

We've also just added a WoW-style PvP switch (although with some rather more careful rules for when you can turn it on and off), and we're adding benefits for leaving your PvP switch turned on.

[bridude]

This looks freaking awesome.

aye

[Sir Lucius]

more Q&A from the lead dev:


How much can you personalise your sailor such as sex, race, looks and clothing?

Our model is City of Heroes.

How much can you personalise your ships? I heard there was a tool to design, but how far can you go? Is it limited to colours and shapes like taberds in WoW or can you go further with it?

You can make your own flags and sail patterns with your Favorite Image Manipulation Software. They have to get a minimum rating from community voting, and then get approved by FLS staff. And then you can use them in-game, hand them out to friends, sell them, whatever you like.

How are the keybinds? I found WoW to be fairly awesome for movements and theres a lot of personalisation for keybinds.

If it's attached to a key, you can rebind it.

This question is kinda dumb since you own your own ship, but is there any 'player housing', and personalising furniture and inviting fellow pirates over for a game of pirate poker?

Not for release, although we have already designed the feature for immediate post-release. Not just housing, either, because housing is stupid in a game where you don't need to sleep. Taverns, estates, theaters...

interesting. So even with 10 hours of play a week, it should take you about 8 months or so to be maxed out in skills. So yeah, there is a definite newbie stage, but everyone will quickly plateau and be on relatively even ground.

By level 5, you'll have access to ships that, in groups, are a threat to nearly every ship in the game. By level 15, you'll have access to one of the 'top-end' skills. By level 30, you'll have access to ships that are competitive with any ship in the game.

Actually I some how missed this on page two, but it's still really neat. The loss of permanent pvp areas like eve is well worth it if you can take a place like jita (as an eve example), into anarchy. Or conversely secure a lawless region enough to make it stable and safe.

It will, for reference, be hard as hell to put newbie areas into PvP. Possible, but hard*. And the starter port for each nation is positioned so that it can never be in a PvP zone.

* Except for pirates; their newbie zone will probably be PvP half the time, if not more. Their starter port is still safe, though.

Basically just want to know about general PVP outside of port battles

Unstable ports create areas of PvP around them in the world map. While you're in the Pirate PvP area, you're attackable by pirates, and can attack pirates (if you're a pirate, it's basically open PvP). While you're in the Open PvP area, you can attack anyone of another nation.

You can also flag PvP+, basically like WoW.

If you're a pirate, and you're sailing a ship you shouldn't have -- like a naval Ship of the Line -- you're attackable anywhere, even in 'safe' areas. You can't attack pre-emptively though. The person attacking you is flagged PvP temporarily as a result of attacking you.

There may be missions and special events that flag participants PvP+ while they're in the mission or event.

...

PvP in the game is great. People love it more than any other part of the game. Simultaneously, beta players complain it's too hard to get into PvP. We want to put the opportunity in front of you as soon as you want it.

The switch doesn't give you the ability to turn PvP off if you wander into an unstable port area. It just lets you turn PvP on in the otherwise 'safe' areas of the world. And gives you some benefit from having done so.

Do the products from each of these follow you around magically? Or do they need to be handled logistically?

Only personal items -- stuff you carry on your avatar, like your sword -- 'teleport' with you. Anything else, including basically every product of the economy, must be transported by ship. This is the cardinal rule of our economy: nothing can ever move except in the hold of a potentially vulnerable ship.

And also, is there ever a chance to lose your plots due to land/ports being in contention?

No, although operating structures in a port owned by a foreign nation is very, very expensive, and you may not be able to use local markets if they hate you enough. We never put a merchant completely out of business through port conquest, but we make it really unpleasant to operate while an enemy controls your port.

From that article I also got the impression that you own patches of land, and you can't build anything on these, you just capture(?)/get them with whatever property is on it.

'Land' is basically virtual. We don't try to actually represent the terrain around a port. We discussed and partially designed that about a year ago, and decided we'd rather ship the game sometime before 2010.

And I might've missed this, but will you be able to land and explore your land in avatar-view?

Not in the sense of 'stop off anywhere you see land and wander around'. Definitely in the sense of 'go to a specific place where there's content and land there to explore'. We have some pretty amazing ancient ruins, jungles, and island coves, full of story and mission content.

Follow up question to that then, your avatar don't get any gear that makes you more powerful right? How are story content and mission content carried out on land? Any examples of a specific thing you might need to do at some Ancient Mayan ruin?

You can carry personal gear that makes you better at stabbing people in the face. But you can't carry any personal gear that makes your ship better.

And no, I'm not going to spoil any specific missions. But there's lots of stabbing people in the face. And robbery.

What occurs if a player winds up getting overwhelmed and killed mid-mission while exploring some Aztec ruins?

For most avatar combat environments, there's a respawn point in the environment somewhere, where you can recover and try again. I dunno if that's universally true, though. If there's no respawn point, you get sent back to the nearest friendly port. Which is usually not that far away.

Other players can also revive you post-combat; our model is swashbuckling adventure movies, and you're not actually 'killed', just overwhelmed and knocked out. Your allies give you a stiff drink of rum (or whatever) and you shake it off and keep going.

[Tai]

I am already working on my double planked hull design.

They need to add weather.

[Avalon616]

Is it just me, or when you click on the link for the official website (http://www.flyinglab.com/pirates/index.php), the guy on the right looks suspiciously like Hugh Jackman?

[Tai]

Hrm, I'm going to try for the beta when I get home.

[Fitty]

I saw this on TW so I figured this thread deserved a bump.

This is gonna be an awesome game. Cant wait

Direct from the Pirates of the Burning Sea web site, Flying Lab Software has announced a publishing partnership for their giant online pirate party with none other than Sony Online Entertainment of Everquest, Planetside, and....Vanguard fame.

Pirates with be published in partnership with SOE's Platform Publishing, which allows Flying Lab to keep control over development, the community, support (thank god) and server operations, while SOE handles billing, the game launcher, retail distribution, localization and marketing. I could have just cut and paste that lot from the Pirates community site, but you know I love typing for you people.

Basically it comes down to this. Flying Lab keeps creative control of the game, period. They don't need SOE to approve their content. Once again, thank God.

Pirates of the Burning Sea » Home (http://www.burningsea.com)

[Tai]

I am still waiting for my beta invite!

[jackrabbit]

Same. What's the damn holdup?!?!

[Tai]

Hurricanes?

[Tai]

I'll keel haul you Postal.

[Creole Ned]

Avast, scurvy dogs and parrot lovers, Pirates of the Burning Sea is having a stress test this weekend and FilePlanet is letting anyone with a registered account (including the free ones) take part (http://www.fileplanet.com/promotions/potbs/index.aspx).

[jackrabbit]

perfect timing. :mad:
Assholes. Where was this 4 months ago when I had nothing to play?

[Tai]

Yes, my level of hate would be reduced if we could continue playing after Sunday, but I'm not downloading it just for two days while the servers are being stressed.

[jackrabbit]

I tried leaving this to load twice, got one failure at 2 gigs and one complete zip with a corrupt file. Even if I managed to get it today, after grabbing the 4 gig file, I'd have 18 minutes to play before it was closed.

[Creole Ned]

Well, the test stressed you, so it kind of worked.

[Tai]

Help!

[Creole Ned]

I (and probably a hojillion other people) got invited to the open beta yesterday. I forgot to download the 4.5 GB worth of game before beddy-bye so I'll do that late tonight and if all goes well, I'll be able to wear a parrot on my shoulder sometime tomorrow. :pirate:

[Postal]

I will try to reload this on my new computer if they let me. I'll try to join you for some pillaging this weekend. Well at least till I get bored with the game. :)

[Tai]

ug, i just spent 45 minutes creating my pirate character, and the login server didn't respond so it lost all the info. There's something that needs fixing...


Edit: I am Tai y Bejarrano, Spanish Privateer.

[FoeKilla]

initial impressions?

[Tai]

I enjoyed the character creation system. Lots of options there. I logged out as soon as I got the character created. I didn't want to do anything without friends.

[jackrabbit]

I signed up as soon as the beta was announced. I wonder if they are doing phases and I can expect an invite later, of if I'm out of luck.

I'm sort of torn. At one point I thought this might ween me off my WoW addiction, but now I think I'm clear of the Methadone Phase.

[Creole Ned]

I just like trying different MMOs to see each devs' take on things. Plus this one has a theme that's a little off the beaten track.

Two of the three MMOs I've subbed to I never even expected to like or play, so you never know.

[FoeKilla]

I grabbed the 5gb installer, then waited for even longer than that took to dl for the updater and then spent about all of 8 miutes before I decided I think this is poop.

icons are too small, the tooltip text is too small, I can't find an adjustment for mouse scroll speed, character control is clunky, ship control is worse, ship fights are boring, graphics are on par with Tribes 1.

please inform if they dramatically change char/ship control and the ui. until then, my swashbuckling days are done.

[Tai]

will do. There's a queue to get in now too not surprisingly.

[Creole Ned]

icons are too small
NOOOOOO!

I forgot to download it again last night so I'm grabbing it now before heading out to run errands. I'm sure it will stall shortly after I leave.

I'll probably give this a look-see sometime in the evening.

[Creole Ned]

I have now completed the tutorial (without dying) and Blart Tortilla has a treasure map and is ready to kick (and gather) booty.

While I agree the icons are a bit too small, the tooltips seemed fine. I couldn't see a way to change the rotate speed when using the mouse to look around and it seems awfully slow by default. Kind of annoying.

Still, it's got a bright, clean look and ship battles are certainly a change of pace. Yarr and all that.