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I’m a MMORPG fiend, this is a given fact. I am also a Pirates of the Caribbean fanatic, so when you combine MMO’s with pirates I naturally get a bit rabid with desire. Pirates of the Burning Sea does a great job of satisfying most of my requirements for an MMO and I hope this review will properly expose all the unique traits of this oddball MMORPG. is currently under development by Flying Lab Software and will be published by Sony Online Entertainment, publisher of Everquest and Vanguard. PotBS will launch on January 22nd, 2007 but since December 5th the open beta has been underway. I myself have been playing through part of the closed beta and through most of the open beta so I hope I’ve got enough experience to give this game a proper preview.

Pirates of the Burning Sea offers a fresh new experience in the MMORPG scene that is primarily dominated by fantasy games featuring knights with unrealistically large swords and women in skimpy costumes. PotBS offers captains with unrealistically large hats and women in skimpy costume, quite a striking and entertaining change. To briefly describe PotBS I’d have to say it’s a game that revolves around PvE and PvP combat and it is driven by a strong player crafting economy that provides the vast majority of the equipment in use. Quite unlike your typically MMORPG, PotBS features gameplay in which there is less focus on grinding out runs on enemies and more focus on grouping together for economic endeavors and story driven quests. If you are an individual that likes to collect the “uber” items within a game, atleast as far as I have seen, you will be sadly disappointed but having such items in the game would make it just another World of Warcraft with a pretty face.

Gameplay

When you create a character you make three important decisions that will determine your gameplay for the remainder of the game. You will chose a country to defend, fighting style and a career and these decisions will determine what ships you can sail and who/how you will fight. The fighting styles include the specific techniques used in the avatar combat, swashbuckling, and include fencing, dirty fighting, and florentine techniques. Combat itself is based around hit-points, initiative, and balance and your goals are to unbalance your opponents so you can strike them and utilize finishing moves with your initiative to land massive attacks to defeat your opponent. The dirty fighting techniques specialize in quickly unbalancing your opponent, the fencing techniques specialize in dealing immense amounts of damage quickly, and the florentine techniques focus on advanced defensive stances. I myself chose the florentine style as I have faith in my crew’s ability to subdue my opponent, which I will discuss further down.

When selecting a country this will greatly influence how exactly you will go about working within the economy as certain countries may lack a specific resource and will therefore limit certain production lines without importing the raw materials. I myself when with the Spanish, felt I might as well go with what I’m closest to. Besides the Spanish you can choose the French, British, and Pirates and frankly between the Spanish, French, and British there is no major difference but the Pirates are a completely different nation of sorts and are the only nation able to sail as Pirates themselves. Unlike the first three, the Pirates tend to have ports spread all over the Caribbean and they have a greater focus on PvP combat rather than producing goods in the economy.

Your career will determine exactly what you will focus on with the four options being Naval Officer, Privateer, Freetrader, and Pirate. The Pirate is limited to the Pirate nation so keep that in mind when selecting a n affiliation. The Naval Officer is essentially your main combat class and they are given the option to sail the largest and most powerful ships making this career essential in PvP combat and in capturing ports. The Privateer is essentially a glorified Pirate, you focus much on what the Pirates do but you are under the sanction of a recognized Nation. The Freetrader doesn’t excel in combat per say, they cannot fight you with cannons and swords but they can potentially wreak havoc financially by cornering a particular resource on the market or by supplying their nation with goods at drastically reduced prices. I myself went with the Freetrader to give me the chance to fully explore all aspects of the game as they have access to advanced crafting techniques that aren’t available for the other classes.

Avatar Combat

All combat is voluntary to an extent in that you can choose to run to safety or turn and fight. Swashbuckling, the avatar combat, is typically utilized either on quests around ports or when you board an opponents ship so it helps to be a balanced player both on and off your ship. The combat itself is a rather simple affair, almost too simple some say. Your character has values for dodge, parry, and block along with offensive attack values. Your vital statistics comprise of health, initiative, and balance and there are various attacks and actions that can affect all of these values. There are two offensive attacks with slight differences between them all, preparatory and finishing moves and then there are a slew of defensive and offensive buffs. The preparatory attacks are used to reduce your opponents balance, the lower their balance the greater chance of success you have on landing a hit. The finishing moves are useful for when you have your opponent greatly unbalanced and have enough time to land a single killing blow. The buffs will raise and lower your dodge, parry, block, and attack values which will determine how effective you are in combat. When boarding a ship the battles typically last one to three minutes with three minute battles occurring only if you are fighting someone drastically stronger than yourself.

Unlike swashbuckling on land, at sea finishing a fight quickly can benefit you greatly. When you board an enemy vessel, your vessel is still a target for the other ships in the area so while you may defeat the opponent you boarded your own vessel could be torn to shreds under enemy cannon fire. This shouldn’t stop you from boarding vessels though, I typically run up on an opponent, shred their sails and blast their crew and then board the vessel to dispact the captain. This process takes much less time than literally blasting their hull to bits and saves precious ammunition.

Ship Combat

The ship combat is the single facet of the game that shines brightly against all other combat systems I have seen. You captain your boat which is equipped with cannons that can range from half-pound swivel guns to ten and twenty pound cannons capable of blasting enormous holes in your opponents vessels. Your ship has some important vital statistics that must be monitored which include it’s port, starboard, bow and stern armor rating, the structural integrity, sail integrity, number of crew members, and number of functioning cannons. Your cannons can be loaded with a range of projectiles such as round shot meant to damage the armor and structure of the ship, cannister shot meant to decimate enemy crew members and star shot meant to shred enemy sails. There are multiple ways to defeat an enemy vessel but typically you focus on either sending their ship to Davy Jones’ Locker or boarding their ship and dispatching the crew and captain personally. I personally opt for the second option as it’s much easier to simply destroy a ships sails and masts rather than blast through their armor and sink their ship. Ships will range from light sloops all the way to 100+gun ships of the line, over the course of your career within PotBS you’ll captain a wide range of boats all which feature different firing angles, sailing and turning speeds, and attributes.

Economy

The economy is an area of the game in which you can progress through even when you aren’t physically playing the game. Each player has the ability to control 10 plots of land on which they can build a variety of structures to drive the economy. Essentially there are raw materials, manufactured goods, and then finished products that can be created by players. Ship building is the primary top tier industry that consumes the resources of all the supporting industries but other goods used to equip the ships are produced also. Trade of goods is handled through an extensive auction house system, each port has an auction house and can be stocked and traded by characters from any nation. All production is taxed within each port with crafters of the ports nation receiving a 5% tax while other nations are taxed 40%. What this all boils down to is that players tend to craft in their respective ports and then ferry goods around to take advantage of where there are scarcities in their goods. A particularly intelligent captain can amass a fortune rather quickly by doing such things and if a few captains group together they can artificially raise and lower the costs for various goods which can be used to wage an economic war between nations.

The actual process of crafting items within the game is rather ingenious as it doesn’t force players to spend hours repeating the same actions over and over again to mass produce goods. Your facilities will accumulate hours of labor in real time and these hours of labor can be utilized at once along with money and materials to create goods. For example if I have a Fir Logging Camp and I leave it for a day, it will accumulate 24 hours of labor. You can then go to your Camp and tell it to harvest 24 hours worth of lumber, instantly. Now with these raw materials you can either process them into something useful like wood tar or you can sell them on the auction house after which someone will surely purchase them if the price is right. At first I spent hours and hours grinding out simple missions to earn doubloons but once I started crafting the amount of time necessary to earn enough money to purchase a boat was cut down from days to hours. The best part of all this is that you don’t need to visit the port where the goods sold to collect the funds, they are instantly delivered to you. Lately I have been crafting iron ingots and I’ll place 400 to 500 on the market and when I login the next day I’ll have a nice stack of cash waiting for me to turn into an even larger stack of cash. One of the most important parts of being a competitive Freetrader though is knowing when to switch production lines, for a week I was producing Iron but lately the market has been flooded so I’ve now switched production to wood tar and in two or three days I’ll start producing smaller ships, all to keep from getting left behind holding extra stock on the shelves.

What It Takes to Play

Pirates of the Burning Sea doesn’t strike me as a mainstream MMORPG in that I don’t see it being wildly successful which is honestly a good thing. Much like how Eve has a small niche in the MMORPG genre, PotBS will do much the same as it caters to a very specific gamer. A lot of the individuals that I have met play PotBS either for the content or a specific attribute of the game such as sailing or the economy. To play the game effectively I think you need to be a patient gamer but not necessarily one willing to dump 20 hours a week into a game. On average I’ve played the game an hour a day or less and often I’m doing something else while making sure my boat doesn’t sail into an island. For example all while writing this article I sent my boat laden with 400 iron ingots from New Spain to Guyana to sell to the British for a steep markup. I then picked up a boat load of cacao which I then dropped off back in New Spain and then traveled down to New Granada to setup my new Wood Tar operation. All that was necessary was to make sure the boat didn’t hit an island or get attacked by pirates, otherwise it just sailed from port to port. If you are taking a more active role in the game such as a Navy Officer or a Privateer then there would be a greater time requirement but even then it’s possible to be successful in the game with only a few hours a week of gameplay.

Graphics, Music, etc

Right now PotBS is still in beta so there are a few quirks that occur but overall the developers have done a great job in creating a very unique game. Graphically the game is exceptional and all the textures and characters look just like they have stepped out of a pirate themed dream. Character and ship animations are superb and little things like cannon fire and debris are handled well and add a nice touch to the game. During combat ships actually suffer damage such as sails being shot to pieces, masts falling over, over holes forming in the sides of the ships. While the water, physics, and textures aren’t up to part with say Crysis, for an MMORPG PotBS looks great.

Conclusion

Compared to a few other games I’ve played over the last 6 months, at this stage Pirates of the Burning Sea is more than prepared for release with a few bugs that will easily be ironed out in the month before launch. If you are looking for a game that you can sink a few hours a day into then Pirates should have the gameplay for you. If you are a crafter then Pirates DEFINITELY has the gameplay for you. All in all the gameplay is very entertaining and not too repetitive as you have the option to change what you are doing with very little penalties. I’d suggest checking this game out while it’s still free to play, if you are looking for a fun distraction then check it out. While giving a game a rating in beta doesn’t accurately describe the retail version of the game, I have faith that this game will only get better.

Final Score: 8/10

Pros

• Great Economic Structure
• Unique Ship-based Combat
• Engaging Gameplay

Cons

• Potential of SOE Screwing Up Like Star Wars Galaxies
• Niche Market