Pirates of the Burning Sea First Impressions - So You Want to Be a Pirate?

Suddenly pirates are back in vogue, it seems, thanks in part to movies such as Pirates of the Carribean (and its two upcoming sequels) and games such as last year's acclaimed Sid Meier's Pirates!. Now pirates are looking to invade the online role-playing genre with Pirates of the Burning Sea, from Seattle's Flying Lab Software. And as we recently discovered, Pirates of the Burning Sea will take the traditional parts of online role-playing games, such as creating a unique pirate avatar to wonder around various Caribbean towns and ports, and it will combine them with realistic naval combat that seems like it's inspired by the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

Set in the raucous 18th century Caribbean, during the heyday of piracy, Pirates of the Burning Sea will let you sail for the major powers of the era (Britain, France, or Spain), as well as for yourself as a, well, pirate. The game will feature both player-versus-player combat and player-versus-environment missions, which will let you build a career as a dread captain on the high seas. The game itself seems to combine the town exploration of a traditional online role-playing game with the stylized world map and travel of Sid Meier's Pirates!, with a real-time ship-combat mode that's almost out of a historically based wargame. As such, it's certainly very different from the traditional online role-playing games, with their foci on fantasy worlds and races, not to mention swords and sorcery.

The first parts of Pirates of the Burning Sea are fairly conventional. You'll create a unique avatar by customizing your appearance, and then you'll find yourself in a starting town, where you can walk around, enter various buildings, and interact with players and non-player characters alike. We saw a couple of towns and admired the architectural detail, from the ramshackle pirate town, to the orderly European-administered port. If you're a naval officer of a European power, there are admiralty offices that you can visit to receive the latest orders, as well as to access navy equipment. There are also churches, taverns, shipwrights, and everything else that you might expect. You'll meet NPCs who have stories and secrets to tell (such as a priest with a pirate past), and these characters can then send you off on various quests. There are plans for two major story arcs, one dealing with your career as a pirate or naval officer and one presenting itself as something of a serial arc, with plans for a new chapter to be released once a month.

When you get a mission or when you just want to sail away, all you have to do is head for the docks and jump aboard your vessel. The game switches to the world view, and it's very similar in appearance and functionality to the world view seen in Sid Meier's Pirates! The goal in online role-playing games is to make sure that you're always doing something, because dead time can be lethal to a game's success. So instead of forever sailing from place to place, Pirates of the Burning Sea will give you a stylized 3D world that you can quickly sail from port to port in so you don't spend most of the game at sea. The idea is that you'll spend most of your time in port, where you can socialize with other players or spend your time in combat conducting a mission or engaging other players.

And it's the naval combat in Pirates of the Burning Seas that makes it vastly different from that of most online role-playing games, where the emphasis is on speed and where you can battle hundreds of monsters a night, easily. If you could illustrate the combat in the game, it would probably be best described as "stately," as the key to victory is to use the wind to maneuver your ship to deliver broadsides to the enemy. The attention to detail is impressive enough to satisfy history buffs. There are more than 20 types of ships, each with its own unique handling characteristics in terms of the wind. Cannons can shoot 12 different types of ammunition, from chain shot (to shred enemy sails) and grape shot (to shred men on deck), to good old-fashioned cannonballs (to puncture enemy hulls). Guns themselves have firing arcs, which put the emphasis on maneuvering. Smaller ships can dance around bigger ships, but bigger ships can deliver devastating broadsides. Currently, ships fall into three classes: scout, hunter, and dreadnought. Scouts are light, fast, and stealthy; hunters are the frontline "tanks"; and dreadnoughts are lumbering capital ships.

Avast, Ye Mateys!

While your character can gain experience levels and learn new skills, the idea is that a low-level player can still have a decent shot against a high-level player. You can't sink all your experience into building an übership with a massive amount of hit points. In fact, the ships are going to be fairly equal to one another. The difference is going to be between the skills that a captain has at his or her disposal. Higher-level captains obviously have more skills, and that can affect the performance of your crew, from being able to load faster and aim better, to buff and debuffs that you can use during battle. And, in the larger battles, tactics will rule. The game will support approximately 50 players in battle, so it's all about maneuvering to use other ships to shield you or maneuvering around to expose different sides of your ship to attack. While one side is getting battered, you can have your crew repair the other side. And if your ship gets shot out from under you, don't worry, because you'll start again at port, and you can immediately requisition a new ship from your "garage," including the one you just lost.

Unfortunately, the battles for now are limited only to ship-to-ship combat. While the avatar portion of the game takes place in third-person, there aren't any plans for avatar combat (aka dueling) at launch. Instead, the designers feel that getting the most important features of the game down first are imperative, but there are plans to later on add features such as dueling, crafting, and resource gathering. Meanwhile, there will be other activities available at launch, including two types of regattas where players can compete. The first is a straightforward race, but the second is a combat regatta where the course has been designed so that players will have to come into range of one another during the competition.

One of the really interesting aspects of the game is the conquest mode, or how players will be able to battle for control of ports. Each faction can attempt to conquer ports for its side through a variety of means, some even nonviolent. For example, let's say the British faction wants to gain control of a certain port. Individual players or groups of players sail to the port in question and start trading with it. That will start bending the port toward your side. Then you can conduct missions that will further your faction's influence in that port. Finally, once the port is open, the battle for the port will culminate in a wide-open player-versus-player showdown, where dozens of players on both sides can battle it out in a modern-day Trafalgar, with the winner taking control of the port. Every six weeks, the faction in control of the most ports will be declared a winner on the server, and the world will "reset," though the winning faction will start with an extra port or two more than the others. Additionally, the most valuable player from that faction will find a giant statue of him- or herself in one of the towns. The members of the winning faction will also get loot and recognition for their troubles.

Graphically, we have seen few games that do realistic ocean-style water effects as nicely as Pirates of the Burning Seas. From certain angles, it looks indistinguishable from that of real-life, especially when you see how sunlight glints off the ripples in the water. The rest of the game looks fairly sharp, and there's plenty of detail to discern on the decks of ships. And the game should sound pretty darn sharp, too, considering the sound editor has an Academy Award for his work on Master and Commander. Most interestingly, though Pirates of the Burning Sea deals with the Age of Sail, the game will be powered by Steam (as in Valve Software's online distribution system), which has been used to date mainly for Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source. And while Flying Lab does envision a retail package, the company feels that Steam is particularly well suited toward online role-playing games.

At this point, Pirates of the Burning Sea looks like a promising game, and we're curious to see how gamers react to its unique gameplay. Still, as we noted in the introduction, pirates are popular once again, so this is as good a time as any for a pirate-based online role-playing game. The game is still in pre-alpha at this point, but Flying Lab envisions conducting a beta test this fall, with a launch scheduled for sometime this winter.