General Discussion

Both Carolyn Koh and Laura Genender took part in the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta. Now that the game has launched, they give us their impressions of the nautical game in this Launch Day Preview.

“Gimme a 500 word preview of PotBS!” said Jon “Stradden” Wood. “I want to run it Tuesday with one from Laura.” Um, yeah, sure! I’d love to. Now

So… what is Pirates of the Burning Sea like? These are my impressions:

The World: It’s historical and mostly accurate. It’s Pirates! What’s there not to love for a history buff like me? I enjoyed the early wonder (and scariness) of sailing to the headquarters of the European nations – the motherland as it were.

Avatars: I love them in one aspect – the customization is really great and their clothing is fabulous. On another, some of the animation just annoys the heck out of me and doesn’t look as smooth and polished as it could be. I remind myself often that avatars are a late addition.

Avatar Combat: Don’t be looking at PotBS if you are looking for an avatar combat heavy MMOG. This was designed as Ship Combat from the get go (five years ago) with an avatar combat system added in about a couple years back. Most avatar combat is to be had on missions and if you choose to grapple and board a ship on the seas. Your skills are your attacks and actually having a choice of styles is rather fun.

Read it all here.

 Good review.  I agree the avatar combat was a bit lacking. But the approach they took made it somewhat interesting, the balance and all.

 The game shines in the ship combat, thats is what we all really wanted anyways. And they did it well.  Looks great feels great...overall good fun.

  The economic game is also a blast.  I really like the fact that you don't have to stay hunched over your projects to compete.  Labor stores up so you can just play and have fun for as long as you like and then when you are ready for a break, you can go and run all your labor out on your projects. It will be easy for players to help their guild in this aspect as well. Where everyone can have their projects that contribute to the guild, but not have to sacrifice fun(if they don't really dig crafting) inorder to do their part.  Just build your project and head out to have fun, then when the guild asks for your materials you can jump back to that port, run your labor out, hand off the materials to your guild and head back out for more fun.

Overall I think it is a good game, and it will do very well.  Good job FLS.

PIRATES! That's all I have to say about it, that and I wonder how many subscribers this game will bring.

Thanks for the previews.  I'm taking a wait and see attitude on this one. 

Is the land based game still laggy?  Also, avatar combat was very, very slow, to the point where I was yawning and nearly falling asleep during combat.  Did they patch the land based combat to make it quicker and more exciting?

Too bad the devs didn't put even half the required effort into the avatar system to make it fun. It is probably the worst avartar combat/movement system I have ever played.  The ship combat on the otherhand is very well done, but the avatar combat drags it down. I felt as if the avatar system  was something the devs put in the game, as a complete afterthought, and used the least amount of resources to pull it off.

As a total package I give it a grade of C,  an A+ for the ship based combat and an F- for the avatar system.

I along with many of my friends beta tested the game, and we all agree that probably wont see any of our money unless the avatar combat system gets a major redesign.

Thanks for the reviews. I'm keeping this one on my radar.  

I appreciated the review. I'd be interested in hearing a follow-up a month or so down the road, just to see if you both still like and dislike the same parts of the game. Right now, it sounds like avatar combat sucks and ship combat is as expected. Nothing in this makes me think the game is *fun*.

Potbs has had a good start, enough to win over opinions for the first few weeks of the honeymoon period.

Gameplay can become very repetative - its real test will be seen in re-newals after the 1st month.

Played closed beta & found that  to get rewards means investing a lot of  time - great if that's your thing.

Will attract more eve type players than wow types.

It doesn't sound like much has changed since the beta, sounds exactly like my thoughts back then. As an Eve player I was hoping for a little more from PotBS, however since the game is still new there's gonna be some more polish needed. I hope the devs can keep this game going long enough to give it the polish it deserves. There is a very good game at the core but with some more work it can be a truly unique and well done game. While the ship combat is slower paced and sort of Eve-ish it also is very different. My biggest gripe with PotBS wasn't so much the avatar combat which was a little laggy in beta but had some good concepts but all the instancing takes away from the immersiveness of the world. Also while this game may attract some of the Eve players the PvP in PotBS is nothing like Eve other than the slower pace and strategy of the fighting.

This is definately a game to keep an eye on and hopefully in a year or 2 it will get the attention and polish this game deserves and mature just the way Eve did after its release.

All I know is it is a number 1 seller at Gamestop,(Which comprises of GS EB and Planet X stores)  and many stores have already burned through there stock, that hasn't happend since WoW launched.  Go-gamer is already backordered and  most folks are resorting to D2d or the SOE digital for there copy.

 We will hopefully see a new server by the end of the week , but FLS will not be giving free moves..which sucks.