Pirates of the Burning Sea Open Beta

[Andrew (I2ed3ye)]

Well, at 6PM today, Pirates of the Burning Sea went in to Open Beta.  From what I've read it's pretty much like EVE Online.  Large scale battles.  But with pirates instead of.. sci-fi stuff.  And instead of time-based skill sets it's time-based resource collection.  So you don't have to spend all day farming for ore and stuff.  One of the things I didn't like about EVE was that your identity was pretty much defined by your ship, not really your character.  It was just an avatar.  But in Pirates, you get to duel on land with your character and interact with him/her.  I wouldn't really bother with the videos on the site as they show very little.  The NDA was just lifted with the announcement of the Open Beta so hopefully better footage will be uploaded on YouTube.

http://www.burningsea.com/

It's a little hard to navigate, but basically you have to go to FilePlanet to download the client in 3 parts.  1 is the installer and the other two are data files.  It's taken me a few hours to download it all and I'm just waiting for the last one to finish to complete the installation.

I don't think it'll replace WoW, but it'll definitely be fun to try something new for a few days.

[Andrew (I2ed3ye)]

So, after a full day of download, redownloading (FilePlanet having bogus/incomplete files.. yay), installing, and patching.  I have now been able to load up the game.

The lag is horrible.  It's basically a stress test, I know, but damn.  There's only one server and everyone's trying to get on it from the US and Europe.  It's all instanced so the very beginning isn't bad where you spend about five minutes learning how to duel with a sword.  But once you get your ship out, it's a whole 'nother world.  I quit after my ship just started doing spinning around like a top.  I like the character creation though.  It's not as nearly open-ended is ones being put out now but it does have a dozen options that change your appearance greatly.

I made a French Privateer.  Basically the reason why everyone else did.. all the other nations have a population of "Very Heavy" and the French is just "Heavy".  Please excuse the graphics, they're all the way down (it auto-detects the best settings hehe)

[Donnie (S3 / Jagor)]

That looks a lot like you...


And I like pirate games, always have.  Maybe once this has a little more support behind it I'll check it out.

[Andrew (I2ed3ye)]

Yeah, I totally wish I had an eight-pack.  hehe

[stuy]

looks kinda cool

[Andrew (I2ed3ye)]

Now that I've played it for a few hours, I can honestly say Pirates of the Burning Sea is totally fail.  I'll enumerate the problems I see.

1) More instancing/zoning than EverQuest.  We're grown up now, we like the majority of our world to be large and free-flowing.  We don't want to see "loading" everytime we move to another section of a place.  That really puts a hamper on the enjoyment factor.

2) Horrible netcode.  At first I thought it was due to the stress test from everyone.  Now that they have two US servers and a EU server, nothing has changed.  At 5AM EST with "light load" on a server, you'd expect very little lag.  For the most part it's true.  But every few missions, you get stuck in a lag bug.  You have to keep raising your sails and trying to turn.  Ten minutes later, you'll see your boat doing crazy spins.  Ten more minutes later, you're stuck in the beach.

3) Extremely boring combat system.  This has got to be the most boring MMO ever.  Puzzle Pirates, a 2d isometric puzzle MMO with a few games, is more fun than this.  One of the videos said, "We're not like WoW, you have to do things and you can't just sit there and hit 1..1..1.."  I'm not sure who said that but it obviously wasn't someone who touched the game.  That's exactly what you do.  Like a Mage on a boss fight, you just hit the space bar.  And in melee, you hit a ranged (if you have one) and then it's back to doing a sword attack every time the cooldown's up. 

4) Extremely boring locales.  They basically just took, like, a postcard from any old, Spanish seaport town you've ever seen and designed dozens of towns just like it.  And then the sea combat.. beach.. check.. ocean.. check.. a couple rocks.. check.  That's it.  That's it?  Gesh.

5) Extremely boring missions.  These quests are so repetitive, you'll wish you were doing the Onyxia key quest.  They last about 10 minutes each.  But you've done them a million times.  Every enemy looks exactly the same.

6) Horrible UI.  This is the 21st century.  Make it look good.  It's okay to make it look weathered or olden.. but make it look good.  Not just a bunch of boxes and squares and primary colours.  Who taught these guys how to make an interface?  It's so generic and ugly.

7) No challenge.  You basically just keep doing things until you've advanced to a certain level where you need other people.  Some places will have 40 mobs you would normally have to kill to get somewhere.. but here, you just run right to your destination and finish the mission and warp out.  They don almost no damage.  And most fights involve a Captain.  You kill him, you win.  He takes a few more hits than the regular mobs.

The only thing I somewhat like is the mechanic with steering your ship.  They're still horrible unrealistic (they acted like it was some kind of ingenious, revolutionary idea) but have somewhat strateg.  Basically, the wind comes a certain way (yes, all the time, never changes) and depending your type of ship it will slow you down if you go certain directions.  And then you try to keep the healthiest part of your ship to people shooting at you so you don't sink.  What's silly is that you can practically turn on a dime.  Each side has cannons and you can swing back and forth at someone to alternate shooting from both sides.  It would have been nice if waves and current made a factor in movement.  Choosing different ammo types was a nice touch.

The game "technically" isn't finished, but there's not much going to change at this point.  What a waste of a good idea.  Poor pirates.

[Donnie (S3 / Jagor)]

After all the time you spent setting it up I was hoping you would get more enjoyment out of it.

[Donnie (Arne)]

Is is more boring than 3 years of wow grinding?

[Andrew (I2ed3ye)]

Yes, very much so.  I couldn't imagine playing this game for one whole month, nevermind three years.  It looks like it's the exact same thing from start to finish.  Could you imagine doing RFC over and over again until you were level 70?  Atleast stuff in WoW is memorable.  Well.. the first time you do them.  "Shhhh.. Rag is talking!"