Pirates of the Burning Sea

Verdict:

Pros: Fantastic naval PvP combat; ideal for casual players but equally suited to dedicated MMO addicts; pirates

Cons: Lack of graphical polish in land-based settings; still some significant bugs

Pirates are history’s great anti-heroes, regarded as on a par with ninjas when it comes to legendary cultural status. What makes Pirates so perennially popular? Could it be their love of theft? Their monumental boozing? Their ready supply of wenches? Their attempts to kill the music industry? Who can really say - all we know is pirates are cool, blowing ships up with cannons is cool and any game that features both of these elements in abundance is going to have to be pretty bad to turn us away.

Enter, after a long and painful development, Pirates of the Burning Sea from Flying Lab Studios, an MMORPG set in the Caribbean in the year 1720. This means plenty of hardcore ship-on-ship action, plenty of cutlass-related stabbings and more peg-legs, planks, parrots and wenches than you can shake a musket at. The easiest comparison to make is with Sid Meier's Pirates - only massively multiplayer.

The basics of the game are simple. You play a ship captain belonging to one of four factions, the Pirates, or the navies of Great Britain, France or Spain. There are three character classes for navy players, Privateer, Naval Officer and Freetrader, and only one class – that of Pirate – for Pirates, which is a combination of the navy three. This means playing as a pirate is ideal for players with less time on their hands, but that with navy characters, there’s plenty of scope and depth in the game for players who want to live their life on the open sea.

Characters begin at level one, and are currently capped at level 50. Along the way up the levels you can pick up skills that affect either your ability to sail a ship or your ability to fight on foot. Skills are arranged in ‘lines’ and you can complete a line of skills at quite low level if you want to, which, combined with the fact your overall character level carries no intrinsic bonuses, means that lower level players can compete effectively with higher level ones if they chose the right skills. As you level up you get access to bigger ships, ranging from small cargo sloops and fishing boats at the beginning to mighty First Rate ships of the line at level fifty. Levelling up is achieved by either completing missions – picked up in towns – or by sinking the ships of enemy nations when you encounter them in the open sea. You can also make buildings to produce or process raw materials in order to build goods, and these can then be traded with other players or, in the case of cannonballs, used to kill them. Ships are supplied fully armed and with a number of durability points, one of which is deductd every time your vessel is sunk. Ships can be upgraded using items installed in their outfitting slots, but if you sink you lose these, so dying can be costly. Anybody who has played Sid Meier’s Pirates, or even space-based games such as EVE Online or Elite will be familiar with the basic concepts at work here.

So now we know the basics the real question is, is any of it actually any good? The resounding answer here is yes. Parts of PotBS are good. Is all of it good, though? Dear me no.

The first thing that PotBS gets right is, thankfully, the most central aspect of the game: the naval combat. Upon engaging in a fight, either in the open ocean or in an instanced mission, you’re transported to the battle screen. In this screen you control your beautifully modelled and rendered ship complete with crew and, if you zoom in enough, your character on deck. The gameplay here feels smart enough to almost qualify as a simulator, but it’s well balanced and fast enough to also be fun for casual players. Although certain aspects such as gunfire are based on random chance the game does a fine job of allowing smart, tactically thoughtful players to shine. The AI of the enemy ships isn’t brilliant but does its job. Though it’s possible to gang up on larger AI ships in small vessels in order to strip them of their sails and board them, the AI will generally make this pretty difficult.

However, where the naval combat really shines is in PvP combat. I’ve been playing MMOs since the days of the original Ultima Online, and fighting against another player in PotBS is one of the most tense and rewarding encounters in online gaming. The slower pace of the naval combat means you have to think further ahead than you do in more traditional MMOs, giving the game a more calculated feel rather than reducing it to a breakneck speed clickfest. It’s the sort of sustained intensity that is usually seen in quality RTS or even driving games, as opposed to the instant rush of killing in an FPS. Like EVE Online, PotBS uses ships but here the combat feels more personal, as fights often end with broadsides exchanged at very close quarters, or even with boarding actions. There’s something uniquely satisfying about actually meeting the other player’s character face to face and stabbing him, rather than just blowing his ship to pieces from distance. Of course, the bloodthirsty nature of combat in PotBS reflects the true character of naval combat at that time – battles such as Trafalgar were incredibly brutal affairs.

The boarding actions themselves, indeed the whole system of avatar combat is something of a bugbear to the game however. Avatar combat as it is called is not especially pretty; characters look dated and to gamers used to the cut and thrust of World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs it might seem pedestrian, as it works in a similar way – just not quite so well. The system for this style of combat is rather entertaining: you pick one of three styles and can level these up to give a great deal of variation. However, the fact that all ship boarding actions seem to take place on one of three different ship decks and can often be frustratingly chaotic doesn’t help. This aspect of the game feels a little undernourished compared to the ship combat, but it’s at least serviceable.

PIECES OF EIGHT
PotBS uses a player driven economy which means that apart from some bare essentials such as overpriced ammunition and weaker versions of some key ships nothing is provided by the NPCs. You have to make everything yourself, or find somebody to make it for you. This process is complex, though not unrewarding, and the designers have thankfully spared us the sort of tedious player participation that Everquest 2’s diabolical crafting system required. You build a building to serve a purpose, it accumulates hours of labour, then you pay some money and those hours are converted to product, simple and hassle free. Given the scale of some crafting projects in the endgame this is a real blessing.

The endgame of PotBS is unusual and refreshing since, unlike most MMOs that tend to provide raids and bigger grinds for getting your character to his maximum level, PotBS is all about factional PvP. Ports can be conquered to limit supplies of goods, alliances can be made and broken and soon your objectives cease to be levelling up and getting better ships for yourself and become about sinking enemy ships, taking his cargo and conquering his ports. Port conquests are one of the highlights of the game as they pit 25 ships from the attacking faction against 25 ships from the defender, based on who was involved during the initial stages of the attack. These battles are huge and spectacular and would justify the cost of the game themselves if they occurred more often.

CONCLUSION
PotBS will appeal to different players for different reasons, but it does have some universally vexing flaws. For one it’s not as reliable as it needs to be right now. While crashes tend to take place at points where they won’t cost you a ship, they're still a pain in the proverbial cannonballs. Also certain aspects of the combat system, for instance spawn locations in a fight, are a bit rough round the edges and you can sometimes find yourself spawned into real trouble. That said, PotBS provides a brilliant PvP challenge for those jaded with the traditional style of game, and its naval combat is exhilarating and innovative, as is the whole setting of the title. Those with a dislike for Sony Online Entertainment, justified or otherwise, should bear in mind that they are only handling the billing and online distribution and are not involved in the development.

• Creative Zen X-Fi with Wireless LAN 16GB - Peripherals
• DFI Lanparty DK P45-T2RS PLUS - Motherboards
• Hyundai W240D-PVA - TFT monitors
• Intel X25-M Mainstream SATA SSD - Hard disks / storage
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky - Games
• LanCool Metal-Boned K10 - Cases
• Asus Maximus II Formula - Motherboards