Fortunately for you landlubbers, I spent some time with this game during the open beta test. So rather than just whisking you off to some obscure official website with mere tidbits of information - I can provide you with the information that you really want to know: ‘is this game worth my hard-earned cash?’

So let’s get to it shall we?

Pirates of the Burning Sea starts off just like any other MMORPG: creating a character. After choosing a side (Britain, France, Spain or Pirate), you choose a class, gender and then get to mold you character to look however you want it to.

Of course with this game being titled Pirates of the Burning Sea and all, choosing a faction was easy: Pirate it is! As a pirate all you can really be is a pirate, so there’s no difficult class selection process either, which meant extra time for character design! Yarr! The other factions do offer three different classes for you to choose from: Freetraders for the more economically-inclined player, Naval officer for those who want to protect their country and Privateer for the pirate who wants to plunder and pillage for his or her nation’s best interest…

As you might have gathered by now, the four sides on this Burning Sea are hardly allies. In contrary, they are deadlocked in a constant four-way struggle for control over the Caribbean and the battle lines are drawn by the players themselves! As you start out the game is mostly like any other MMORPG, as you get to accept quests and fight NPCs over loot. The main difference being that many of your battles take place at sea (although swashbuckling, with three different fencing styles to choose from, is common too) and depend more on actual strategy than levels and skills. As you start hitting higher levels however, you’re bound to run across contested areas… these are areas which have become unrestful due to the actions of opposing nations - and therefore allow for open PvP for many miles of sea surrounding it. As the unrest reaches it’s peak, nations can compete for control over the port and seize it if successful. An ingenious idea, although it also means you won’t see any PvP outside contested area’s.

The only ‘nation’ that cannot capture ports is that of the Pirates, although their ports cannot be captured either. These brethren of the sea instead plunder ports and gain PvP rights well before any other nation does in contested area’s. This is offset by the fact that Pirates gain less loot from sinking ships, be it players or otherwise - and they’re free kills for anyone in open PvP zones as well (nations can only fight one another after unrest in the region rises even further). The overall goal is of course complete control over the Caribbean, which can be attained by scoring ports, which is done by attacking ports from other nations. Contrary to what you might expect, pirates do compete for control over the Caribbean as well… as they gain just as many points for successfully raiding an enemy port as other nations do for capturing one. The side that eventually manages to hit the magic point limit will win the overall battle, after which all the ports will be reset to their original owners.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. As you start off, those kinds of PvP battles are still a long ways away… because your tiny starter vessel won’t even be allowed to compete in PvP battles. So initially your goal will be to gain levels and money through questing to eventually buy a ship deed (or take over an enemy vessel by boarding it, if you’re a pirate) and construct your ship in the shipyard. To get there you’ll first need to take on some basic beginner missions as both a ship captain and master swashbuckler, which is the easiest way to gain money (others are trading and taking down ships on the open sea). Flying Labs introduced an interesting element to the quest lines of each nation and class combination, as you’re presented a lengthy quest series with a much more involved and engaging storyline than your average MMORPG, but only if you bother to read the quest descriptions.

Sea battles are intense and quite unlike anything you’re used to from regular MMORPG’s. It’s immediately obvious that this aspect of the game is what Flying Labs has put most of their attention in. Aside from having direct ship control, you need to factor in wind speed and direction in order to gain the best possible speed as well as fire your cannons properly. Meanwhile you can command your onboard crew to focus on either sailing (speed), gunnery (firepower) or maneuverability. An interesting detail is that you can actually see the ship crews at work as you’re sailing, and not just your own, but your enemy’s (and allies, because you’ll often fight alongside NPC allies) crews as well. Of course sea battles aren’t just limited to lining up your guns and sinking the enemy ship. You can also opt to annihilate it’s crew to reduce efficiency on all fronts, destroy it’s sails, or board it and engage in a swashbuckling contest for control over the ship!

Unfortunately this swashbuckling aspect of the game was tacked on later during development - and it shows. Character movement seems laggy and while the idea behind the swashbuckling combat is interesting it just hasn’t been sorted out properly yet. Initially you’ll find yourself spamming initiative gaining skills, so that you can then proceed and spam damaging skills, which is essentially a guaranteed kill. I’ve never gotten close to dieing in swashbuckling combat, although I hear that at later levels and in PvP it gets a bit more intricate. Essentially the idea behind the swashbuckling combat is that you use initiative strikes to lower the enemy’s defense and increase your chances of hitting, then smash him with either straight damaging attacks or special moves that suck dry your initiative bar. Sounds nice, but doesn’t yet quite work as advertised - and overall just wasn’t as fun as regular melee combat in other MMORPG’s.

To proceed on a more positive note, we’ll delve into the economic side of things. The economy in PotBS is entirely player driven. This means that any ship deed, clothing, ammo, etc. you buy in the auction house was crafted by another player first, who gained their resources from yet another player. Any player can start up their own resource gathering and manufacturing plants, albeit limited to only 10 slots per player, which means you cannot possibly create everything in every item category (of which there are about 20) all by yourself.

This opens up the manufacturing and trading world to Societies (Guilds). Members of societies can work together to craft more items and vie for control over the economic market. Powerful trading societies can cause unrest in a region more efficiently than any amount of swashbuckling (flood a region with cheap items and unrest will skyrocket) - and profit from it too! Prices for ships, weaponry and ammo will rise dramatically in contested areas, meaning that any daring freetrader that makes it to port will be handsomely rewarded. All in all a pretty in-depth system that should be interesting for the more economically inclined player. It’s sort of like the open economy of EVE Online, except a little less hands-on and a bit more controlled/limited.

Technically Pirates of the Burning Sea is a decent game. The stylish graphics certainly look good, although characters do seem to be a tad too low-poly and shadow effects on clothing seem to be off quite a bit. Towns are a particular strong point of this game, featuring lively NPCs who roam about, dance, drag women off on their shoulders or shout out basic lines. When you’re in a pirate town, you really do feel like you’re in a pirate town… atmosphere is abundant. The sheer lack of music in towns and the open sea does tend to suck some of the atmosphere out of the game however, especially when you realize that every other MMORPG does have constant background music adding to feel of the game.

Unfortunately this very atmosphere is slightly ruined by the way the game handles zones. You’ll be seeing a lot of loading screens. Every quest and battle in the game takes place in it’s own instance, although sea battles can be joined by - a limited number of - other players if you shoot flares. Sailing the open sea might sound exciting, but the Caribbean feels mighty small on the open sea map, with only a few dozen ports, hundreds of NPCs everywhere and ships that sail incredibly fast. The only way to engage in a battle here is to sail up close to another ship and fire at it, but then you’re transported to an instance and the battle ensues there, secluded from the rest of the world. This makes the game feel rather small and not quite as epic as it should have been, particularly when you consider the fact that the largest battles you’ll ever see are 25 vs 25 (that’s less than Guild Wars which offers up to 64 player battles).

Another aspect of the game that seems troubling is it’s repetitiveness. While the sea battles are awesome and as you gain better ships, upgrade them and improve your captaining skills they become even more fun, but swashbuckling gets old very fast. And questing tends to involve a fair bit of swashbuckling (although you can avoid it most of the time). Quests for sea battles kept changing, ranging from escorting ships to sinking spies, paying off debts, commandeering enemy vessels to even a race against the clock (and an enemy fleet) to hoist treasure into your hold. Meanwhile every quest on land felt the same… fighting in the same environments, against the same opponents and with the same moves. This might change later on in the game, but early on it can hardly be called interesting.

Overall Pirates of the Burning Sea is a fun game. It shows a lot of promise - and is certainly something you’ll want to look into if you’re a dog for some good old sea battles. However you’ll have to accept the fact that swashbuckling isn’t a whole load of fun, most of the game is instanced and that if you’re looking for the ultimate experience in player freedom, economy and PvP - then EVE Online is still the better game. If that doesn’t matter to you, then by all means - give the game a go when it releases on the 22nd. Otherwise you might want to try and get your hands on a 3-day friend’s pass first, or wait it out for a couple of months to see if future patches improve things.

Rating: Try before you buy

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