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Sophisticated and Addicting Game that Needs Some Polish

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 25 / 26
Date: January 23, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Pros:
Naval Combat
Music
Character Creation
Economy

Cons:
Steep Learning Curve
Character Combat
Buggy Quests
Sporadic Technical Issues

As a proud owner of Sid Meir's Pirates! and also of Bethesda's title Sea Dogs, any game the offers me the opportunity to set sail on the high seas puts a piratical gleam in my eye. While some Pirate games are hit or miss (Pirates of the Caribbean anyone?), Pirates of the Burning Sea generally creates more clangs than empty swooshes.

The highlight of the game, and any pirate game in my mind, is the ability to fit out a ship and do battle on the high seas. Pirates of the Burning Sea does not disappoint, as the naval combat, while tedious at first, is actually quite fun. Sea battles also happen to be quite breathtaking, which adds to the overall immersion into the game.

Character creation is also a plus. There are many different ways to customize your character to add your own special touches. The ability to create a truly unique character gives one more pride of their avatars, and again, adds to the immersion in the game. This is a major difference from the popular World of Warcraft, where characters of the same race and gender generally look pretty similar.

One downside is the character combat system which is a little unwieldy in the beginning. Unfortunately, like many of the areas of this game that seem weak, the character combat could have used another few months of polish because it is mostly repetitive and hard to learn.

The economy model is probably the most well conceived part of the game. In Pirates of the Burning Sea, the players really do drive the economy. If you want to buy timber, someone has to sell it to you. Even more cool, certain ships can only be built by other players, and require a vast amount of diverse resources to bring into action. This creates opportunities very similar to reality by requiring the integration of various people and professions cooperating to make a large project happen. The economic structure in this game is so well conceived, it is not at all hard to imagine many players playing the game simply to test their trading skills.

The game is not without its share of problems. A couple of times, technical glitches occurred that caused the program to crash entirely. Also, there are numerous spelling errors and quests that simply do not work. One problem I have noticed more than once is that sometimes deaths during a quest will make it impossible to complete. These annoying technical problems and areas where the game lacks polish actually do a pretty significant job of detracting from what would otherwise be a stellar game. However, since this is a MMO, hopefully many of the technical issues and problems can be addressed in future patches.

In all, if you love Pirate games, you will want to give Pirates of the Burning Sea a try. Hopefully, this game will continue to be polished and improved in the months ahead and could eventually become a truly spectacular game.

Avast!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 28 / 32
Date: January 28, 2008
Author: Amazon User

(update)
Frankly, this is the best PvP game I've seen in years. If you are looking for a good PvP game, just buy this now. If you want a fun game to play alone and sail ships around the map by yourself, get Sea Dogs instead. Not that this game can't be fun solo, but the meat and potatoes comes from fleet vs fleet action and you're not going to be a fleet of 1. Join up, bring some friends / find some friends and you'll have a blast.

I'll stand by my 4-star rating as opposed to 5-star because frankly the first 10 levels are a bore and the avatar combat (swashbuckling) needs serious technical work before it will be any good, but the ship-to-ship combat is great fun and makes for the best player vs player action you can get today in an MMO, and I've played everything from UO to EVE to WW2O to Planetside to WOW and a bunch in between.

Also, don't think, "Meh, I'd be joining it too long after release. I don't want to have to grind XP in the newbie zones before I can have fun." This game isn't like that. At level 43 I have no problem inviting level 7 guildmates to my groups, both for PvP and PvE. They get a lot of XP by helping me sink level 40 opponents, I don't lose that much XP per ship and they're actually quite helpful, allowing me to kill faster and ultimately level faster and safer myself. Even a level 7 in a small ship can damage sails, distract the enemy and, if ignored, do some nasty stuff like sailing up to rake the enemy decks with grapeshot. A level 7 isn't going to take down a level 40 player in PvP but he's far from useless in battle.

There are 4 factions: Pirate, English, French and Spanish. They are involved in a 4-way war for control of the Caribbean. The game may be called "Pirates of the Burning Sea" but more accurate might be "International War in the Caribbean (Also Has Pirates)". The three major nations are all worth playing and actually have some completely different game mechanics than the pirates, so if you wanted to be a pirate OR if you wanted to be a British fleet officer facing pirates, this game is for you.

The game basically has 3 distinct sections:

* Open Sea
In the open sea, you basically have a toy ship which you drive around over the ocean between ports and look for other ships to attack. This is a simple but nice looking part of the game for navigating on the open sea without actually taking 4 real-time months to get places.

* Sea Combat
This is the real meat and potatoes for this game and I think they've done well with it. It's not a total "sea battle simulator" as Sea Dogs was. You don't have to manually aim your guns or time your firing with the sea swells, but you do have to deal with wind direction as well as managing your sails, maneuvering to keep targets within the general firing arc of your guns, the type of ammo you want to use (cannon balls vs armor, chains vs sails, grape vs crew, etc) and bleeding ship speed during hard turns. There are various skills and expendable items you can use during combat to help repair emergency damage to sails, hull, etc. There are also skills for increasing ship speed or weapon reload time at the expense of something else. You'll have plenty of things to manage without worrying about the sea swells.

Ramming works -- although it does no damage, you can block an enemy ship, force him to turn by ramming him and generally set him up to be boarded. You can also protect an ally by getting between him and whoever is shooting at him. Really, this is some impressive ship to ship combat. If you played EVE, I can tell you that POTBS ship combat is better than EVE ship combat.

* On foot
There is a "you" in this game. You aren't just a ship. You can dock with ports and run around but there's also a melee component to the game.

Hand to hand battles come into play during some missions given to you by the NPCs but it's also part of ship to ship boarding. If you pull alongside an enemy ship, you can attempt to board it and fight the enemy captain and NPC crew using your character and your own NPC crew.

This part of the game is not overly well fleshed out. You will be disappointed if you come expecting a full blown World of Warcraft type battle experience. It's more like a fun little meta-game they threw in, and it's not bad. It reminds me a lot of combat in City of Heroes, actually.

Back to ports, though -- ports are where you'll find another large aspect of the game: crafting. I was surprised with the depth and thought they've put into crafting, but I suppose it makes sense. What good is a ship if you don't have something to carry? Because what good is being a pirate if other people aren't carrying things you can steal from them? So even if you're a full blown PvP pirate, you have to appreciate the crafting game simply because it gives you something to take from other people. (Arrr, booty.)

To get started with crafting, you go to a port and create a Warehouse. Once you have a warehouse you can create resource structures depending on what resources are available at the port. If there's "Fertile Soil" you can grow crops (such a hemp, used in making rope, or maize, used in making cheese or growing livestock). If there's "Oak", you can set up a lumber yard for farming oak. Etc. These farms supply resources based on a real-time clock. So the person who plays 16 hours a day is not able to bring in more resources from a farm than someone who plays 1 hour a day because the farm is basically working 24 hours a day whether you're there or not. You just need to swing by periodically and collect your resources.

From this, you have the basis for an overwhelmingly player-driven economy. From the start, the game encourages you to use the auction house to look for player-made goods rather than the NPC store, which sells only very basic things and sells them at much higher prices than players are likely to charge for the same things. Don't buy your ammo from the NPC "Fence" until you've checked the Auction House for player-made ammo which is cheaper.

I do think they can do a bit more with NPC AI, melee battles and PvP, but I think they picked a good time to release and the game is pretty good once you get into the swing of things. Give it a day or two to get used to the interface and get yourself to level 10 or so and don't be afraid to group up with others and I think you'll be surprised at how much fun this game is.

Unless you celebrate "Talk Like a Pirate Day", pass

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 25 / 35
Date: January 25, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I pre-ordered this game and participated in the beta and have also been playing since launch. I really wanted to like this game, having loved Sid Meier's Pirates, both on the old Nintendo & the re-release that came out for the Xbox/PC etc only a few years ago.

The combat is not fun - it becomes tedious very quickly. There is no sense in sinking an enemy ship because the various professions/classes get bonuses by capturing ships (usually in the form of a pennant). You also don't get to salvage as much if you sink the enemy ship. What this means is that you'll find yourself boarding enemy ships EVERY TIME and this involves fighting the same unnaturally-fast-moving crew & captain over and over and over again. The combat system is limited to just pressing 2 over and over (assuming that's your primary attack) because you're guaranteed to win and there's no sense prolonging the fight by using defensive moves, etc. The ship battles themselves are sometimes fun when fought in groups, but when fighting alone they quickly become cookie-cutter fight sequences where you chase the enemy ship down, board, defeat the captain, and collect a minimal reward, all for 5 minutes of your life - if you're lucky & the battle doesn't go long because of unfavorable winds.

The economy is hyped by Flying Lab Software as being deep and entirely player controlled - it didn't impress me either. In general the ports that are nearest the starting point for each nationality are full - i.e., any resource that can be gathered already has dozens of dozens of people creating and selling that resource. In Bartica for example there are regularly 20 people standing around in the room praying somebody buys their wares. In order to make any money/combine resources into more valuable units you have to do some sailing to a distant port w/ alternate resources - and this sailing takes a very long time, you can spend 15 minutes just getting to the next port all the while dreading an enemy encounter (as it would suck up more time you could spend making money).

I always liked playing French in Sid Meier's, so tried that out for a while. Nation chat was filled with French (and I don't speak French), so that didn't last long. I didn't last long as a Pirate because I don't speak "lulz we g4nk3d that f00l". The Spanish chat was better because I speak Spanish, but I found myself far more comfortable playing British and I have a feeling that as POTBS grows it will always be skewed toward British/Pirate because of language & cultural barriers - this was already the case on the Blackbeard server where the British/Pirate populations were moderate whereas the Spanish/French were light.

Other annoyances include a poor chat system, duplicate quests, annoying load times between the town and buildings within the town (the economy tutorial forces you to suffer this load time over a dozen times, which is asinine), and character customization. They did do a decent job allowing you to customize your character w/ various colors and clothes - as long as you like being a human the same height as everybody else.

Anyway, as I said in my title - unless you celebrate "Talk Like a Pirate Day" and can't live w/o a game like this, I suggest that you pass - there are plenty of better games (especially MMORPGs) out there.

A Voice in the Chorus

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 13 / 15
Date: February 07, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Add my voice to the chorus of those that 'really wanted to like this game.' I am a hobby pirate historian and own several other pirate games, computer and board. My only other MMO reference/experience is World of Warcraft; so, I'm using that as a point of comparison. The game offers a number of aspects of play, character based and ship based, as well as an economic facet; I will comment on each.

The character based aspects are limited to movement around ports, visiting shops and such, movement in missions and boarding actions. Do not expect WoW's ability to move around and over nearly everything, no swimming, no jumping over things. Missions tend to be instances, think Guild Wars rather than real MMO. The swashbuckling/sword fighting system borrows from other MMOs in the use of skills, and while in my opinion is a good feature, is still a little cumbersome in its management of readily available mix during actual combat.

Ship based activity borrows much from Sid Meier's Pirates! and adds another set of skills to be learned as you gain experience levels. Ship movement is intuitive and allows for grappling, repairing and changing ammunition. Ship to ship combat is still instance based rather than true MMO, which may be a reasonable compromise, but...

The economic aspects of the game offer the ability to build industry and produce goods, not really sure that this fits with being a pirate, but chalk it up to a concession for playability. The downside is that while you can produce items, demand seems to be limited in the extreme.

Bottom line time. There are aspects of the game that I found entertaining; however, the initial release is buggy and still needs refinement and a few more features to make it worthwhile. Others might say that every other MMO that has come out has faced the same challenges, and I would argue that I should not be expected to pay full price just to help out with the later stages of what amounts to a beta test. For myself, I cannot see myself paying a monthly subscription to play this game, and that makes me sad, because 'I really wanted to like this game.'
P-)

Pirates, ships, guns and swords....what more could you want?

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 9
Date: January 26, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Reading the above comments, I can pretty clearly see that the majority of reviewers likely come from a world of warcraft or everquest experience. This game is meant to be different from the get go. The economy has more depth than the two combined and you get to start it from lvl 1 if you so choose. Which other game does that (aside from maybe EVE online)?

Ship combat is very cool, its beautiful, fun, and full of danger. Most games with PvP are kind of care bare, in that if you die, you only lose a small amount of experience, or maybe damage your armor. In this game, you have a reason to try as hard as you can to not be sunk. In PotBS, you actually care about your gear.

There are 4 nations to choose from, and quite a few classes to choose from. Many of the skills have overlap, but this helps for player balance. The swashbuckling combat is kind of odd. The players do move too quickly and it quickly becomes a big cluster of similar looking characters, though I'm sure this will all change in time.

This game has more depth by FAR than most MMO's out there, is certainly less care bare, and has a much cooler PvP system. All in all, I feel its quite good and can only get better with time! Try to remember, most MMOs ,even the ones people consider "perfect", were far from it at launch!

Good luck on the Burning Seas!

Creative New MMO

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 13
Date: January 26, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I picked up the pre-order after playing in Beta. The game is like cyber-crack for me. The graphics are beautiful and make me feel like I'm on a vacation in the Caribbean. It has wonderful lighting and color; I can feel the sun on my face - everytime I play it's like an escape.

The sea battles rock! I get to captain my own tall ship, how cool is that? With a wind direction factor {effecting your speed and manouverability}, skills, and different types of shot, the battles are strategic and gripping. I like to play with my camera down on deck which makes the battles even more hectic and immersive.

I don't find the avatar combat to be all that much less interesting than WOW's, but people are pretty down on it anyway. It's not as fun as the sea battles, but it's a nice contrast to them (and I do find it fun).

The story arch missions are fantastic. The writing is the best I've ever seen in a game, really.

Also, the music is phenominally good.

The camera could use some love, as could the UI. Improving these would make the the immersion factor stronger.

Ignore the nay-sayers

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: February 05, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Ok 1st and foremost, the game still has bugs. Some people won't be able to play, so do your research on system specs etc..

Now

1. Ship gameplay gets 4.5/5 for me, it's fun, it's engaging, it looks pretty darn good. The only downside for me is the enemy and NPC AI. This will improve over time.

2. Swashbuckling gets 2/5 right now. It has a lot of potential, but at the moment little things throw me off... Females NPCs have a male death sound byte, there's quite a few bugs, ship combat is iffy... I see this as being fun and maybe some what fixed within 6 months, and it has the potential to be perfect within a year.

3. Graphics overal 4/5 While the graphics don't stand out, the overall atmosphere is nice. Pirate towns are run down with drunks aplenty, British ports are well put together and tidy. Ocean graphics far surpass the land based areas of the game for now. But for me the visuals are more than sufficient for now. I do have high hopes that they will add more diversity to the towns and more fluid movement to the PCs, and FLS said they are working on that.

4. Customer support 5/5, FLS has been amazing. There were quite a few hiccups at first, but the Devs have been there for almost every problem, and while they don't always fix the stuff right away, they do provide fairly accurate time-lines to fixes and sympathy. Can't ask for more than that.

In the end it's a good game, with the potential to be great within a few months, and near perfect within a year.

Give it a shot, and don't have your hopes too high. You won't be dissapointed as long as you don't come in expecting Crytek graphics and a MMO experiance comparable to one that has been out for years with most bugs fixed.

Not much new here, needs a LOT of polish.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 9 / 17
Date: January 26, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Seems to be a clone of Sid Meier's 2005 Pirates except with online play. But it lacks the things that make online play fun.

Pros:
-Colorful world, sounds are nicely done and sound authentic.
-Player toons look great, large selection of cool colorful period outfits.
-Sunsets over the ocean look great.

Cons:
-World has a cartoony look. Everything looks a bit too clean for an 18th century pirate world.
-Steep learning curve.
-The quests are nearly identical. Same jungle maze layout you loadscreen to.
-You can't explore the world. Can't walk or swim in the ocean, jump off the dock or even cross the rivers except via one bridge. Cannot see your ship from the seaport and walk onto it, must wait through load screen to get on. Very gamey feel. Seaports all look the same.
-LOTS of load screens throughout.
-I have a recently built system (C2D 2.67, 680i mb, 8800gt 512mb gpu, 4gb ram, updated drivers) but the ocean artifacted so badly, flickering between green and blue, could not play more that 30 min without getting a headache. E-mailed customer support, no reply.
-Games years older, like 2005 Pirates! and Sea Dogs are more fun than this.

Conclusion:
Really wanted to like this, pre-ordered and all. Still awaiting a good pirate mmo.

Really great

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 12
Date: January 26, 2008
Author: Amazon User

In a world full of orcs and elves, Pirates of the Burning Sea is a breath of fresh air. The game shines on Ship Combat. It's taking a lot of criticism for it's avatar combat, but I think it's really different from other MMO's. You have to think. You have to be intelligent. Flying Lab has added "balance" to typical MMO combat and the difference doesn't really show through until you are past level 10. Knocking your opponent off balance and gaining initiative are really important here. PLUS!!!!! there are no rats to kill. No inferior rat pelts, and semi inferior rat pelts or ratty warthog pelts. Give it a try. I defy you to not get hooked!! Vive Le France!

Tharr be pirates

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: February 02, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Pirates of the Burning Sea (PotBS) is a Massively Multiplayer Online game where you are the captain of your own ship sailing the Caribbean circa 1720. There are three main gameplay areas in PotBS. They are,

1. Swashbuckling - This is your avatar. You walk around the towns gathering quests, selling goods to merchants, using the Auction House, and engaging in swashbuckling quests.
2. Open Sea - Used to travel around the Caribbean, sailing from port to port and avoiding or engaging in combat with other ships. This is not your real ship view but a much quicker way to sail around. When you do engage another ship in combat you will go into ship combat mode.
3. Ship combat - Undoubtedly the main focus of PotBS where you fire broadsides into your enemy, grapple, and board.

Quest come in two forms, Swashbuckling and Ship combat. With the swashbuckling quests you use your avatar and fight with sword and pistol on land. There are three styles of swordplay you can specialize in, Fencing, Florentine, and Dirty Fighting. While they vary slightly the principals are much the same, the differences being mostly aesthetic.

With the Ship combat quests you attempt to sink or board enemy ships. If you choose to board you will go into swashbuckling mode on the deck of the ship and engage in swordplay against the enemy captain and crew.

When starting the game you can choose one of three nations, France, England or Spain, or choose to be a pirate. The three nations play the same with the pirate play style differing. If playing one of the nations you can choose to be a Naval Officer, a Privateer, or a Freetrader. Naval officers get the biggest ships, Privateers play closer to the Pirate class, and Freetraders are the "crafters" of PotBS.

I chose to make a Freetrader as my first character and this review will focus on that aspect of the game. Other classes will provide a different experience. While all classes can "craft", Freetraders get to build the most advanced structures and recipes, and get benefits to trading and other skills focusing toward trade.

Crafting. There isn't really crafting as such in PotBS. There is no need to harvest resources like in World of Warcraft, and there's no crafting mini game like in Everquest 2. Instead you find a port with the resources you need then build the structures you need such as factories and warehouses. Each player can have a maximum of 10 factories. Labour is earned in real time in your factories. So when you have enough labour stored, you can immediately make items provided you have the resources and the recipe.

The end result is to build ships but no one player can be fully self sufficient. Ships require lots of different parts and you can only hope to provide a small amount of the parts required. For instance, I decided to be a weaponsmith, building cannons for ships. Firstly, I needed a port that had iron deposits. Then I built my warehouse. I had to buy a deed from the auction house in order to build my iron mine. Then another deed for a forge so I can turn the ore into iron ingots. Of course, I also needed limestone to make iron ingots. So now I can either buy limestone from another player via the Auction House, or I can start another production line. I found a port that had limestone deposits, built a warehouse, built a limestone quarry, and mined limestone. Now I load the limestone into my ship, sail back to the other port and make my iron ingots. I also bought a deed for a Weaponsmith factory so I can make cannons and cannonballs. Making cannonballs requires black powder also, which you get from mining sulphur and combining that with another product etc etc, so you can see how complicated making an item can be. And that's just cannons and cannonballs. Ships require hulls, sails, masts, cannons, anchors, fittings.....the list is endless. It's quite costly setting up your factories, so you will need to run quests to earn money to begin with. Factories also have a weekly upkeep. Unfortunately for me I don't appear to be selling much and the cost of keeping my factories open is eating up most of my profit.

Freetraders aren't good at ship to ship combat, so if you want to focus on the player versus player (PvP) side of the game you would make one of the other classes.

Pirates play somewhat differently to the other classes. They are the only nation that can actually claim a ship as a prize and captain that ship. This gives you an incentive to constantly level and attack other ships. Their skills are also heavily focused towards combat.

The Good:
The period. I love the 1700s, the clothes, the ships.

The ships. Ship models look great, and the ship combat mode looks beautiful, with waves breaking over your bow as you sail into battle.

Economy. I like the player driven economy even though I don't seem to be making any money.

The Bad:
Load times. Every time you go somewhere else you zone. You zone into the tavern. You zone into the shop. You zone into quests. You zone into ship combat. You zone into ports. You'll spend a lot of time looking at a loading screen.

Swashbuckling. It needs work. It also loses its appeal after a while and gets boring if you're winning and frustrating if you're losing.

The open sea. I guess this part of the game is unavoidable, but you'll spend a lot of time sailing to a destination. You can spend 15 or 20 mins staring at a miniature version of your ship while you sail to a distant port. If you're a freetrader you'll want to avoid combat for the most part so this can be dangerous as well.

Your avatar. All characters are much the same. There are no character "classes". This means there's no real reason to ever group in order to do swashbuckling quests. There is no tank/dps/healer type setup. There is no musketeer that is a ranged specialist. There is also no world to run around in. There are no dungeons. The only land is the towns where you conduct your business. If you grab a swashbuckling quest you zone into and instance of that quest. While I understand that this game is not a MMO such as WoW or EQ, the whole avatar quest and combat gets boring after a few levels and seems like a worthless part of the game. I just can't help thinking that this could have been a much stronger, more important part of the game. As it stands it just seems to be worthless fluff to appeal to the masses.

Summary.
I have a love/hate relationship with PotBS. The ship models and combat mode is visually spectacular. There's a lot of satisfaction in setting up your factories and watching the goods you've made sell. But the amount of time spent travelling from port to port and staring at loading screens could deter most casual players. I pre-ordered the game and played 15 days before official release, but I don't know if I'll play beyond the 30 days included time. For PvP lovers there may be a lot in it for you, but if you're not into PvP I don't think there is much to keep you interested in the long term. Except pirates.

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