Pirates of the Burning Sea looks f***ing kick ass

[Astromarine]

anyone on now? let's do red tide :D

 

[Sovard]

Boy, was I late to this party.

I "signed up" for the Beta, or is there a more direct route?


Edit: Nevermind, I should know better than to post without reading the past few pages.

 

[Sovy Kurosei]

where do you see evidence of dumbing down?

He is saying don't dumb down your game and not saying that you are dumbing down your game.

 

[Müg]

still downloading the client...

Errorcode, your team created a beast that cannot be fed. My connection and torrent programs are crying out in pain

 

[errorcode]

where do you see evidence of dumbing down?

He is saying don't dumb down your game and not saying that you are dumbing down your game.

ahhh...gotcha.

I don't think we'd intentionally dumbdown the game for the action crowd. The Ship combat is where we want it to be and we love the pacing and flow of ship battles. Swashbuckling...personally i don't think we've got it "just right" yet. I think we have a system that feels swashbuckly, but we need to refine it and get it to flow better and feel more natural. I don't think that would be a dumbing down were we to tweak the swashbuckling combat to flow better, just a natural progression of trying to make it a fun and interesting part of the game, on par with our ship combat.

i promise no NGE moment like star wars pulled though.

 

[Sovard]

Well, there has to be one angry cunt out of the lot of us, right?

Let's start with the beginning. So, the whole few hours of the world that I've seen look to be first draft. The team was probably still figuring out how to do stuff at first, and while work progressed, they never went back with their newfound knowledge to improve all of the old stuff.

Everything is a tiny gladiator pit with objectives. There is a wide open sea with instanced towns, battles, etc. So, basically the ocean is a lobby. A very shitty lobby that you must navigate manually. You can't easily go from Chatroom: Grenville to Chatroom: New Orleans. Interesting.

All in all, it's like an unfinished mod of some other game. Like the team hasn't quite committed itself to model and mission diversity yet, only getting it on it's feet and checking code. The boarding/swashbuckling is just bleh. The ship combat is a step in the right direction, but still doesn't feel right. You go from trying to whittle away at ships to blowing them to absolute shit. There doesn't seem to be a good middle ground.

The only thing the game has going for it right now are the warehouse/deeds portion of it.

Anyway, good luck with it. It's now in a stage where it's too late to rewrite the gameplay. I wish you just needed some typos fixed instead. If you would like suggestions, feel free to ask. I refrain from providing them upfront as I know from experience that very little of what needs to be done is even possible.

 

[errorcode]

i'm curious as to what you'd want to see in mission diversity (since thats the only area that i can do anything about.

 

[Sovard]

So, right now every mission that involved combat just sort of plopped you at one end and the enemy at the other.

Well, I'll start with the land-based missions first. Has there been any thought to ambush missions? Having someone you've worked for betray you to keep you quiet. More of a "fight your way out" as opposed to a "kill the captain". Then, of course, you get the option to escape (which leaves an embittered enemy) or face the guy. Both options opening up new quests.

A proper assault rendition of land combat. Having to complete varying objectives to break through the enemy fort. Maybe running a powder keg up to a wall, dropping the drawbridge, raiding the enemy armory, freeing some fellow pirates and attacking from within... you get the idea. I'd like to see land missions turn into something that can get tense and blowup into a full blown fight. Rather than starting off in the separate corners of your boxing ring and slapping it out.

On to ship-based missions, I suppose. Since people tend to just crank out these huge monsters of ships and blow everything to shit, I'd have a few skill-based missions just to offset things. For example, performing a certain mission in a Frigate wouldn't do, as it is a shallow area, or requires some finesse. The first part (perhaps separate from the other) would be to capture an enemy ship. From here, things open up. Do you ride into an enemy port and bullshit your way through it? Do you blast the captured ship with your own munitions to have them rush to welcome you with open arms, then raise all kinds of hell? Etc. It would specifically depend on the mission, naturally.

Overall, it's all too brute force. There is no finesse to any of the missions. I don't envision a seafaring game such as this to be so straightforward. We need some guile and tact to the missions. Preferably with a choice as to which. Let the naval officer fight through, the privateer pull a fast one, and the freetrader make off with what he came for (and save his own ass.)

Anyway, bounce some ideas around your office and try to knock the socks off of some people. I don't think you have too long left before release.

 

[DarkSign]

An honest assessment from someone I know who has played the game a long while:

OK, so here's the view from level 29. (plus some assorted levels on the non-Blackbeard servers)

1.) Avatar combat gets better.

In later levels, you've got much more strategery to figure out, as well as a lot more combat options. Things become somewhat more twitch as you start working your "draw people away from the pack and CC" them strats in boarding, and start managing the cooldowns on your ever-increasing list of skills. Those defensive skills you used to never touch become pretty dang important.

2.) Ship combat stays the same. Kind of.

Because the sloop and xebec classes just don't cut it anymore past 25 or so, you're putting in with some heavy frigates that have terrible acceleration. It's tough to get the corners/block the bow/board like it was in earlier levels. Wind management becomes KEY. If you can trap your opponent(s) into the wind, that's a big part of a win right there as you can cruise right up to their stern and unload into their structure. Wow, that sounds nasty.

Anyhow, you'll find yourself having more shootouts instead of jockeying to board, which may or may not be fun depending on your tastes. Unless you've got skills like desperation fire or such to speed things up, it can get pretty tedious.

3.) Grinding... gets horrible.

Sorry Drew. There's no other way to put it. The grind past 20 becomes almost intolerable. By this point you've seen all of the instances avatar combat (avcom) uses, and the jungle and beach ones are GODAWFUL overused. The NPCs are in static spawnpoints and will be in the same spawn patterns. With only a very few exceptions (and refreshing they are,) they will be in the same positions and your goal will be to look for a foozle that spawns in one of about three or four places. You will find yourself sending silent prayers that the foozle is in one of the close-by ones. Overall, the avcom missions feel like the proof-of-concept for CoH's instancing system.

Ship combat missions come in about five varieties, and you will become absolutely sick of every one of them in pretty short order.

4.) "Preparing to Play"

So a lot of the grind and such could be avoided by PvP, right? Well, kind of. PvP is a raw loss-generating activity - unlike, say, UO where the economy doesn't actually -lose- anything, it just gets transferred; when you lose in PvP a LARGE sum of money heads straight to the toilet. While open sea is good for experience, real money comes from missions... and missions get old. It's a case where you seriously have to do missions to support a PvP habit, since they're the primary faucet of currency for the entire economy.

How much money are we talking about? Well, let's say you want to be competitive and keep full outfittings on your ship. Six slots of large outfittings will run you around 18-30k, depending on your level. All of that heads to the shitter when you die. A ship deed, with three "deaths" on it, can cost you upwards of 50k for the 30+ game. Pirates can capture stuff, sure, but there's a great deal of time involved in finding the ship you like... and if you haven't set up an elaborate positioning of spares, one death will set you back a couple of hours trying to find another one.

A mission at my level can net me between 1000-2000db, and take between 15 and 45 minutes to do. So, each time you die, that's about 5-6 hours of missioning. (again, assuming full outfittings)

Sure, if you have a good economic system going this can help somewhat, but remember that the faucet where the money to buy your econ-produced stuff comes from, again, missions. So if you're not a top-of-the-line economy guy, you'll still end up being part of the faucet. And the top-of-the-line economy folks probably won't be doing intensive PvP, if I were to make an unquantifiable statement with no basis in fact.

In the end, since I'm interested in PvP, I spend a lot of time "preparing to play." I spend a majority of my time in-game doing things I don't like doing for the few times I can do what I like to do. Want to be the lone pirate of the seas? Forget about it. If you're not running in a pack of 4-6, you're just an easy kill for someone who's in one that has an even half-decent tackle ship. Spawn points in PvP are ad hoc, so you can dodge bullets sometimes... and sometimes have no chance when you spawn 100y off of a fourth rate.

To finalize, even all this sounds terribly negative, I'm still torn on whether or not to buy. A lot will depend on if the folks I run with end up playing; the only way I'd be able to tolerate the missioning/xp grind is with some other folks to shoot the shit with. Right now, only one other person plays, and he's pretty anti-social. awesome, for real So I've spent almost all my time solo, and it's sucked. I've looked for groups a few times with the group search, but I've never seen a public group posted.

It'll be interesting to see how this game unfolds. It doesn't have disaster written on it, but at the same time a lot of folks are like me, kind of on the fence about it. There's reasons I still log in, but the higher I level, it becomes harder and harder to do the missions over and over again. After one night of setting up the economy and managing it every 2-3 days, that's all the work that it needs... it just gets tiresome.

Yet the port battles are tres cool, even if they do represent hundreds of thousands of doubloons going to the bottom of the sea with not a whole lot of tangible benefit for either side. The naval manuevers are in there, people actually do talk about "nelsons" and splitting the line and all that. Port battles and PvP feel very period and very thrilling.

We'll see.

 

[psycojester]

I'm sad to say that i'd have to agree with a lot of the stuff he said there, but i'd put in the addendum that grouping up with actual friends makes everything in this game deliriously fun

3.) Grinding... gets horrible.

Sorry Drew. There's no other way to put it. The grind past 20 becomes almost intolerable. By this point you've seen all of the instances avatar combat (avcom) uses, and the jungle and beach ones are GODAWFUL overused. The NPCs are in static spawnpoints and will be in the same spawn patterns. With only a very few exceptions (and refreshing they are,) they will be in the same positions and your goal will be to look for a foozle that spawns in one of about three or four places. You will find yourself sending silent prayers that the foozle is in one of the close-by ones. Overall, the avcom missions feel like the proof-of-concept for CoH's instancing system.

Ship combat missions come in about five varieties, and you will become absolutely sick of every one of them in pretty short order.

This one here is probably the games biggest problem as i see it, past lvl 20 the only missions i've actually enjoyed doing have been the roleplaying storyline missions (which totally kick arse btw) and the naval officer exam missions, which have a habit of being a tendency to combine novel ideas and scenario with a truely epic amount of ships. My one complaint with these missions is that friendly NPC ships can be a bit retarded with their shot selection. During my lvl 25 officer exam i had to do a U-turn and sail back into the wind and go back to the starting point because 3 of my friendly NPCs were sitting there happily firing shot after shot of chainshot into a demasted badly damaged privateer and accomplishing fuck nothing.

4.) "Preparing to Play"

So a lot of the grind and such could be avoided by PvP, right? Well, kind of. PvP is a raw loss-generating activity - unlike, say, UO where the economy doesn't actually -lose- anything, it just gets transferred; when you lose in PvP a LARGE sum of money heads straight to the toilet. While open sea is good for experience, real money comes from missions... and missions get old. It's a case where you seriously have to do missions to support a PvP habit, since they're the primary faucet of currency for the entire economy.

This one is also sadly true. Why not give gold rewards for PvP kills. Give each player an infamy ranking based on say:

Ship class+player level X .1 of the total amount of people killed

Or something like that, and have the local magistrates award bounty on PCs based on their infamy.

Other than that i'd recommend giving players some other method of identifying the type of quest other than a tiny eye straining icon in their quest log to identifying group quests and such.

Oh and give us some way to target distant ports, like the ability to select them on the map as our travel target or something like that. Its a bit retarded sailing around the open sea and not being able to work out which way your meant to be going because the map shows you a fairly useless side on picture of a ship that doesn't give you any useful information about your current heading.

 

[sabishii]

So how does this game compare to Eve?

 

[Lurkar]

I've been puttering around with this, and while, at first, I was awe struck with the sheer NUMBER of quests, I realized WHY there were so many, and why most of them felt so familiar.

The actual swashbuckling combat can be fun, but, at my admittingly low level, boarding is stupidly easy. Use +attack skill on all my crew, target enemy captain, tell crew to attack him, shoot him, watch crew dismember him in seconds. Run into battle and use my -health attack as much as possible against everyone and everything.

I'll second what others have said about the NPC ships. There was one mission I recently did to protect 6 or so merchant ships from 6 or so pirates. What did the merchants do? Charge headlong into battle. Yeah, I failed that one a few times.

That said, I don't tend to group much (or, well, at all) so that could be contributing to my feelings. All and all, it's still a very fun and well made game.

 

[kenney bounces]

Is there like a demo/trial version of this game? There's dozens of mmorpgs out there, and i see no point spending 50 bucks if it's just another min-max online.