Pirates of the Burning Sea: First Impressions

I wanted to like this game – I still want to like this game.  It’s strange.  I felt bad about not liking it – beyond my own disappointment.  I thought about seeing what other people thought before posting my own impressions.  Then I decided against that because this is a blog – my blog, and should be about my impressions.  Good, bad or indifferent, my own opinions are valid as just that – my opinions.

First let me talk about why I wanted to like PotBS when it wasn’t previously on my watch list or agenda.  Vanguard lured me with the idea of building and sailing ships, along side a solid on-land gaming experience.  Before their hype over it, I’d never given sea combat a first thought, much less a second.  You know the story with Vanguard – it released, farted in my face so I left.  The thought of building and sailing ships however, did not leave.

My next hope of new worlds to conquer was Gods and Heroes.  I wasn’t so sure I’d like the setting but the idea of a more elaborate minion system – something I’d liked very much from GuildWars, was appealing. To Vanguard’s credit at least they came to the table, whereas Gods and Heroes put out a weak-sauce excuse, pulled the plug, and vanished like a thief in night.  With nothing much to look forward to I started paying more attention to other bloggers hopes and dreams of adventures on the high seas.
Depending on the target audience, what PotBS is delivering could be right on the mark.  However, if the audience is a mature gamer, with moderately high standards for quality, game mechanics and engaging interactions, uhm not so much on the mark.

The “It’s Good Enough” Part…

• The tutorial although not close to the best I’ve encountered, was certainly enough to get you going.  Both hand-to-hand and sea combat were covered in short order, and you were sent packing to get some quests in the local town a.k.a. starter area.
• Very common iconography was used for quest-givers, quest-completers and important points of interest on your map.  If you’ve played any recent MMO you know exactly what to do within this questing system.
• Customization of your character had many, many options.  I liked that I could change the colors on everything – not just my hair as in most games. One glaring omission was if you wanted to be of color, you got ONE face.  I tried changing the skin color of the other faces but no dice.  PotBS seems to be taking the, “they all look a like anyway” to the point of making it a reality. *rolls eyes*  I hope that I’m wrong and just couldn’t figure out how to do it correctly.
• I’ve never sailed a boat other than as a passenger.  I’ve never played a seafaring game.  Yet I was able to navigate my ship, fire and destroy the bad guys easily enough.  So I would say that those mechanics must have been implemented extremely well, since I did it with little effort or confusion.

That’s about where the good stuff ended for me.  Yes it’s BETA but hell it’s open now so I don’t expect any drastic overhauls before release.

The Not So Good Parts…

• The character models are fugly!  And for those not in the know, that translates to fucking ugly!  My female character had a man chest but with boobs. WTF is that about?  The models might even be uglier than Vanguard and that is saying something.  And the forcing them into those pretentious officer stances every time they stop moving gets old in three minutes.
• The questing, NPC, map mechanics and iconography are similar to WOW, EQ2, et al but done with much less quality.  LOTRO’s mimicking of them was a degraded version but this was just flat out sorry.  The mini map is too small  in comparison to the icons they were squeezing and overlapping on there. 
• Character animations aren’t much better than the models and the sword fighting looks sissy-fied.  While fighting, I felt like I was the Mad Hatter at a tea partying playing footsies with a friend.  It didn’t feel like hand-to-hand combat.  Nor did it conjure any strong emotions of fear or imminent danger.  On more than one occasion I had 2 to 3 baddies attacking me and I took almost no damage.  I put my back to a wall and just kicked their asses.  There was no excitement it was ho hum.
• I thought we’d already learned from GuildWars that players don’t like invisible barriers!  Is GW doing away with that nonsense in GW2 not example and reason enough, for no one else to put that in a game???  I see arches in front of a door but I can’t even pass through the arches let alone reach the door.  And you know what, I HATE when you create buildings with doors that never open and parade building after building that I can’t enter.  It wasn’t cute in LOTRO and it ain’t cute in PotBS.  It ruins the game experience and immersion.  I immediately feel like I’m on a Hollywood set, looking at a building façades versus being in a virtual world.  It’s not a world when so much of it is just window dressing, so please, stop that BS. This is especially annoying in this game because the towns are TINY to begin with that they could have at least done the interiors of every building.  They don’t require NPCs – just interiors would do.
• It's too heavily instanced, in ways similar to GW, except that this feels much worse, forced and static.  It's just the Caribbean, so I don't expect an expansive world but the ports/towns/cities are ridiculously small. None of the ports I've entered are as big as Ironforge.  Please imagine that - entering a city that is smaller than the Commons in Ironforge.  Heck, I think they're smaller than the Trade District in Stormwind.  Wait, correct, I don’t think they’re smaller than the Trade District, THEY ARE SMALLER.  This makes the game feel limited and as a player, I feel boxed in a corner.  With cities this small what is the fucking point of having to zone into the very few building interiors???  This implementation feels hack.
• The scenery and view from your ship is lackluster at best.  Even with the graphics turned up, they didn't bother to try and fill in the gaps between ports.  It's nothing but clumps of trees that aren't even detailed models.  No majestic views or lush landscapes to view along the shorelines - it's just sand and tree clumps.
• The general user interface is just…It’s worse and uglier than LOTRO’s so I don’t think I need to dwell on it as a whole, other than to say, it needs a do over. 
• Quest-giver interactions are really low-brow.  They need to clean-up the interface and make it look like it’s for adults not 5 year old or add some voice-overs like EQ2.  Even Tabula Rasa used VO instead of plain ole boring walls of text.
• Pirate ambiance is no where to be found in my opinion.  Sure I have the clothes, the ship and the stances but where’s the beef?  We should be hearing and feeling, the “Yar” and “Shiver me timbers,” of this world.  But I didn’t’.  There’s more pirate and seaside ambiance in Booty Bay, then the whole of anything I saw in this PIRATE GAME.  From where I sit, they forgot the “P” in pirate and just left me with, IRATE.

My biggest complaint is that for the very little landmass provided in this game, it should have been spot-on.  There is no adventuring really.  You won’t be sailing or wandering off to discover any lesser known places of this “world”.  As a result, I would have expected what was provided to be delivered with exceptional quality and a high degree of detail.

Perhaps none of what bothers me about PotBS is the primary focus of the game.  I’m am more than willing to allow that the on-land encounters – all of it, having an avatar, melee combat, cities, towns, interactions, etc., are just a side order.  It's possible the real game is the sea combat and trade only.  If that’s the case, then I can’t fully judge its merit because I didn’t get to do much captaining. However, I will caution that if I’m really expected to live my life on that ship ala an Eve Online experience, they have a high expectation to compete against.  As much as I’d like to have an avatar in EVE, the in-ship game play is flawless – visually, aesthetically, mechanically – everything about it screams and oozes DEEP SPACE.  I’m inspired and awed by what I see, the combination of which, provides strong RP appeal and opportunity even though I was never more than a static photo.  I didn’t get 1/2 of that feeling in PotPS – on ship, off ship, avatar or not.

Probably on the merits of being a sailing SIM this game is good enough as it stands.  On the merits of an MMOPRG for adults or mature gamers, I’m not seeing it – yet.  I’m going to conclude that game development must be so much harder than I can possibly comprehend, even though I’ve been on the SW development side of technology for the past thirty years.  I have to assume it’s just insanely difficult to do well, otherwise, I don’t understand the poor execution and delivery on the hype I’ve experience in the games that released in 2007.

I don’t understand what yard stick they are using to measure their quality and value against - it doesn't seem to be against the current leaders in the MMORPG space.  I don’t see how they expect to lure people away from their other games for more than a couple of months – if that.   As it stands now, the only possibility of me buying PotBS is predicated on the fact that I subscribe to Sony’s Station Pass, so there’s no additional monthly cost for me to play.  I just buy the box.  Even that being the case, I'm only "eh" on it still being worth my time.

I’d love for someone to reply with some corrections or pointers to what I could be doing for a better experience.  As I’ve said, I want to like this game.  I want something new to play, but they aren’t convincing me it’s worth the box price.  I think if they’d left it as just an on ship experience my expectations would have been different. The time they did put into the very little there is to do on land, could have instead been spent on final polish and detail of the rest of the game.  And as much as I think the avatar part of the game is complete weak-sauce, the instancing is just over the top. 

You can expect at least two follow-up posts:

1. This game is instanced in ways you haven't even imagined, and I don't it.
2. This is a good sailing SIM so if that's your thing there is good stuff here.

Comments

[Mallika]

I completely agree with your assessment of the game. Every single point (both good and bad) you mentioned is what occurred to me when I played, too. The major turn off was having to zone every five seconds -- that was a total drag. Do a quest? Zone. Finished the quest? Zone. Go to the city? Zone. Go inside a shop? Zone. Go deeper into the shop, where there's another door? Zone. Go back out? Zone, zone, more darn zones. My god. I thought EQ2 was pretty bad with zoning, but this is just ten times worse. (Oh, and yeah, I hated the UI too.)

By the way, there's been quite the stir from Vanguard these days, since SOE has opened up a month of free play (I think it's a month) for people who used to play but unsubscribed for at least two months. Just thought maybe, with all the updates and whatnot that people are talking about, you'd like to go see how Telon is doing.

I got the game on sale for US$9 (which included US$1.80 shipping to Europe) and have installed/patched/etc. I went in, but ... eh. I don't know, I am not feeling the magic. I've been trying to find something that has the polish of WoW but with a more crafty/housey side (I loved the crafting/housing in EQ2 but totally hated the combat/adventuring aspect, so I don't play anymore).

Nowadays I just fire up Oblivion on my PC. :P

[Russell Williams]

Hi, I just came across your first impressions of Pirates, and I thought I'd address some of your points.

1) Female characters use the same body structures as men - Obviously we'd love to have a different rig for both, but we also wanted a pretty in depth level of character customization, so we wanted to spread that content across both men and women. We were also limited in our ability to change those rigs because our characters are more real world than other games, specifically how the clothing drapes across them, which makes it pretty much impossible to do it algorithmically (as opposed to CoH). This isn't to say that I'm unhappy with how they look - the reaction has been relatively positive, but that's not to say there's not room for improvement. It's also possible that your graphic settings could be set unduly low (a bug earlier in beta) which can really impact the look of our avatars.

2) For the variety of faces of color, we had a new technique that we rolled in relatively late into the beta to redo the avatars, and between that and the amount of time required to polish up mesh collisions, we didn’t have the time to go in and expand out the faces. We have quite a few which will be going into the game very soon after release.

3) The swashbuckling combat is way too easy at reasonable levels right now. You can play until level 18 without really knowing how to use the system, which doesn’t help our players to really learn the strategy behind this combat system. We're changing that to better escalate the challenge earlier on. The worst part of it is that by training you on such an easy system, you then get in PvP and get pummeled in boarding combat by an opponent who has mastered the system, which is really no fun for either side. As for our animations, they've sort of spoiled me on other MMOs, as it now drives me crazy when there's no specific reaction to my attacks.

4) Invisible walls - Erm, yeah. We've been fixing a lot of this. It won't be perfect for release, but it won't lure you into going into places you should obviously be able to access.

5) Instanced - Guilty. Guilty!! /hides face. We built for breadth, but now that we've done that, we're building much more expansive areas. Check out Tortuga as an example of the direction we are headed and let me know what you think.

6) I'm assuming the complaint about scenery from the ship is the Open Sea. Because of the PvP aspects, it's a single process so there are a number of overhead restrictions that you wouldn't expect. If you're talking about in a combat encounter, then I've got nothing for you, because I think it's absolutely gorgeous, though again we built those environments to be pretty reasonable so that we could support 25 vs 25 fights on a mid level machine.

7) And the rest – Did you have a chance to play the role playing story arc missions? The PvP? The Economy? Those, along with the ship combat, are the strengths of the game.

Philosophical disconnect – We’re not using WoW as our yardstick. We don’t have 65 million dollars, huge teams, or a backlog of work to draw upon. And that’s why we didn’t build another fantasy game, because we knew we’d be a fly on WoW’s windshield. Frankly, if what you’re looking for is a game that matches WoW on this level, you may as well just stop playing new MMOs until Bioware comes out with theirs, or you’re always going to be disappointed.

What I can tell you is that our ship combat kicks ass. Period. And it’s a damn sight better than WoW’s. We have to do new and different things to differentiate ourselves because for all of WoW’s strengths, it’s not everything. I do think you’ll be happy with us going into the future, because now that we’ve finished the foundations of the game, we’re just going to keep polishing and expanding it.

[Saylah]

I appreciate what appears to be an employee of Flying Labs taking the time to reply on my blog!

Are you all thinking of doing Voice Overs? They would seriously improve the gaming experience. If not, then I'd suggest something that breaks down the wall of text quest content. For example, they are very long in Eve Online as well. However, they use bold text and font coloring to draw your attention to the key words and phrases so you can scan read if you prefer.

Maybe you're not targeting Explorers? If you are, then adding the polish to all of the ports and the Open Sea would add a good amount of ambiance. I wouldn't mind so much sailing along and seeing the ports just pop out of no where as these click-able structure is the blended better into the coastlines. Maybe it's just me, but I'd like to have the joy of sailing simply for the sake of, in addition to it being a form of transportation and PVP.

If the instancing is required to support the anticipated volume and mechanics of the ship combat okay, I can totally get over myself. But I'm never ever going to agree with developing interior spaces in towns/cities in that manner unless they are personal spaces like homes or guild halls.

I'm going to see if I can get to Tortuga. Not sure if it's accessible or safe for my level?

Your point about needing to wait for Bioware if I'm looking for something Blizzard-like was a stab in my heart! LOL Have I been that impacted by WOW?? I've played games that were on a smaller scale and certainly not the monster hit and bankroll of WOW. I think that it's less that then it is about something is breaking the suspended disbelief in PotBS. Could be the instancing, the issues I raised with the ports/towns or the open sea. Not sure but I'm going to really think on it because whatever "it" is, it'swhat is robbing me of feeling the pirate ambiance.

[Russell Williams]

Hi, yeah, I'm the CEO of FLS. Which means right now I'm pretty much useless as the people who actually DO WORK are focused on polishing up for release. It leaves me time to roam the web!

We're not interested in doing VO, mainly because of the problems that the EQ2 team hit when doing them. There's no question that they're cool, but I'd rather reserve the voice work we're doing for the vignettes we have seeded throughout the world. They're kind of subtle, so you may not have seen any, but you can be walking around and find two characters talking to each where previously they were saying nothing. You don't need to hear the conversation to play the game, but it provides us a chance to tell cool little stories that are more human and less "...and then, when you have dispatched the guard, you must take the egg and then..." Not that they're not cool, but you know, you choose your battle.

As for the enhancing the text so you can scan through it, we will. I personally hate it, because I really love the writing we've done for it, but there's simply no question that some people just want to scan read it, and we'll provide better support for them.

The question of targeting Explorers is a good one. We're really not. We'd like to, but the issue of instancing was thrust upon us pretty much by the nature of our genre (for the sea). Keep in mind that we originally built the game to be a single world for sailing, so realizing we had to go instanced was a bit of a rude surprise. But when we looked at it, it solved a hundred design issues, brought about a ton of cool gameplay, and was very clearly the right decision. Except that it wasn't going to be good for explorers.

Again, you choose your battles. Rather than be kind of crap at everything, we picked sailing combat, Organic PvP, and the Economy as our star systems. Those have to be great. The rest we strive to make solid, and to improve on as we go.

So, we know we need to do better for explorers. Because we can't do world exploration as easily, we've been working on alternative forms of exploration. For example, putting in more hidden triggers in the towns that let you open up secret areas. Let the player explore that, and feel like they've seen it, and then open up another area on top of that one that lets them explore more and reveal more layers of the story. We're also going to do a lot more in the Open Sea for things that you can run across and will allow you to access cool missions and areas that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Assuming that "developing interior spaces in that manner" means providing persistent instances by zoning, we're going to do more of a mixture. What you get without zoning is strange L corridors all over the place to make the chambering work, which also leads to places being bigger than they should be, which also leads to the city being HUGE to support those rooms. In addition, they're typically less detailed than our rooms are because they have to be huge. What we're planning on doing is more of a mixture between the two, making relatively simple persistent spaces do the corridor dance, and reserving zoning for larger, less commonly accessed spaces.

Which serves to illustrate a central point of this: we're somewhat used to a way of doing things, and if you're an MMO player, odds are you really like the current way of doing things because otherwise, you wouldn't be playing the current MMOs. But these aren't obvious good and evil tradeoffs. Personally, none of the MMOs have been the least bit immersive for me because the world doesn't reflect my actions. I personally loved the accessibility of CoH with its cool combat. But it wasn't zoning that killed me, or the random stories that wound up with me beating up everyone in the same warehouse, it's when I stopped a gang from stealing a purse, ran across the street to stop another gang, and looked back to see the original gang respawning. All of a sudden I wasn't a hero stopping crime, I was a guy who liked to fight who conviently tacked the name hero onto himself. But that's just me. Other people don't really care about that at all, since that's what the current MMOs offer, but they care about the other elements that aren't as enticing to me.

My argument is that the MMO label supports a much wider style of gameplay than what we've currently seen. It's also my bet, because we haven't seen any sustained hits since WoW. Maybe it'll work out for us (yay!) maybe it won't (rats!) - only the consumers will tell us that. What I am sure of is that doing things exactly like the current crop will result in, at best, people coming to visit your game for a couple of months, and going back to WoW.

As for what's robbing you of the pirate ambience, I have two possible answers:
a) You'll play the game again, and the stuff that was bothering you suddenly doesn't seem as important, and you'll love it. That happens to quite a few people who show up to play who also have a negative reaction to the instancing, but had a strong pre-disposition to play, and so got past it and learned to love it on its strengths, not its weaknesses.
b) Right now, as a pirate, you're pretty much an Errol Flyn (sp?) character, not Blackbear. The fact is, we want to provide multiple types of story lines for you to go through to define your character. You may be looking for something that feels more definitively pirate in that aspect than what we've currently got in the game. I have a lot of plans for this, but it's going to be a lot of content to provide it.

Tortuga is damn dangerous, but if you ping our community manager Aether, he can take your character on a brief tour of it to get a sense of the scope and what we're doing there. It won't address all your issues by any means, but I think you'll be a lot more excited about where we're going with things.

[Saylah]

Oh well, it might be a moot point for me to reply to Russell's comment now that I released it from my little configuration worm hole. I think my subsequent posts express my impressions and how I, as a player feel about the game in it's current form.

I do have some tidbits of information I found on the forums where some what I've mentioned will be enhanced in content patches. I'll do those as a separate post. *sigh* Sometime software is just a huge pain in the butt.