Features
Blistering Naval Combat
Maneuver your ship in real time, turning one way to unleash a broadside and then cutting back to guard your damaged armor. Drop sails and heave to while your opponent sails forward so you can fire at his vulnerable stern. Work together with your friends to choose your targets and your aim points: small, fast ships can swoop in close to rake the enemy crew with swivel guns while your bruisers blow chain shot at the enemy sails. Once you've crippled his ability to move, send in a boarding ship laden with armed men to grapple, board, and seize the prize.
Ship combat in Pirates of the Burning Sea has all the action, intensity, and tactical gameplay of a single-player game. Speed, direction, and facing all matter, and you fire and dodge in realtime. As captain of your own ship you balance your crew health, sail integrity, hull armor, gun reload speed, and maneuverability, making decisions moment to moment and planning what's going to happen in ten, thirty, or sixty seconds. It's a white-knuckle experience, whether against determined NPCs or wily players.
PvP-Conquerable World
The Caribbean of 1720 is home to many dozens of ports belonging to the three great powers: Britain, France, and Spain. Each port is a valuable source of goods, equipment, and mission patrons. Players use PvE missions to destabilize a port, making it eligible for conquest by their nation. With enough players doing enough missions, the conquest mode begins and the ocean for many leagues around the port becomes an open PvP environment. This unlocks new PvE missions to smuggle in supplies, destroy fortifications, and tilt the odds in your favor. Scheduled PvP battles culminate in a final conflict to either save the port or conquer it.
Every day, each nation receives victory points on the basis of its port holdings. The first nation to reach the goal is declared the victor, and celebrations and awards ensue. Then treaties are signed, ports revert to their original sides, and a new round of conflict begins.
Cutting-Edge Graphics
We believe video cards are made to be pushed. Our extensive, custom library of DirectX 9 pixel shaders give us a photorealistic ocean, normal-mapped avatars, and dynamic self-shadowing on ships and characters. Pirates of the Burning Sea looks great on current hardware, and will look even better on the next generation of video cards.
We've learned to stop fearing high polygon counts. Our ships are intensely detailed, with poly counts in the tens of thousands for breathtaking fidelity. Animated crew fire your cannons, work the sails, repair damage, and keep lookout in the crow's nest. Roiling cannon smoke, showers of impact splinters, and massive ship explosions show off PrometheanFX2, our custom-tailored particle effects system. Painterly lighting and adventurous art direction bring it all together, resulting in the stunning in-game screenshots featured in our gallery.
Sophisticated Missions
Our mission system gives you a starring role in your own epic. Each player accumulates a personal supporting cast of NPCs, including old enemies, new friends, lost loves, and treacherous allies. No two players have the same cast, and their stories will take them to different places and fight in different battles. And since each NPC can have multiple roles, the pirate who is your arch-nemesis may be the good friend and ally of an enemy player. Your long-lost cousin may turn out to be your best friend's sweetheart - or a treacherous spy! We bring the plot twists and the bold adventure of classic adventure fiction to life every time you play.
Ship battles aren't just spawn camps. Our AI personalities and dynamic goals ensure that no two battles are alike. Unexpected reinforcements, nighttime stealth missions, and optional secondary objectives mean you get gameplay as intricate as any handcrafted single-player game level.
Dramatic Avatars
You don't have to look like everyone else. Our avatars are built with more than a dozen customizable slots. Choose hair, faces, footwear, hands, coats, hats, belts, jewelry, and much more, selecting from a library of parts and textures and assigning the colors you want. Most games with customizable avatars use flat gray textures that are then customized with flat, featureless colors. Our full-color customizable textures mean we start with gorgeous, photographic color and then apply your custom shades selectively, preserving details such as gold buttons, fabric coarseness, or bloodstains while still allowing for tremendous creative freedom. And of course, you can choose from the eyepatches, hook hands, and peg legs that every pirate craves.
Action For Every Play Style
Whether your interest is in ship combat, piracy, commercial trading, or adventure, you have a role to play, and all your adventures take place in a dramatic world of conflict and change. A dynamic commodities market provides opportunity for clever traders to turn coin, navy missions throw you into the thick of combat, and pirates have ample targets for plunder. Our strategic gameplay keeps the world in flux, offering ample opportunities for both PvE missions and PvP battles & ambushes to affect the ongoing struggle. The Caribbean of 1720 is a world at war, and all players can take part on their own terms. Whether you want to join a major port conquest battle, pursue smuggling missions to help your side in secret, or organize your guildmates to bolster a port's defenses in the face of enemy plotting, you can be sure your efforts are meaningful and the stakes are very real.
Last edited by Tychus on Mon Sep 19, 2005 11:23 pm; edited 1 time in total
Posted: Fri Jan 23, 2004 4:58 pm
someguy
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 259
I've actually been reading up on this pretty extensively while I don't have anything else to do (read: while I'm at work) and I'm very excited about it.
_________________ "The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love." - Jeanette Winterson, "Gut Symmetries"
Posted: Fri Jan 23, 2004 5:02 pm
Tychus
Editor
Joined: 12 Jan 2004
Posts: 1573
Fortunately there's a lot to read. The devs are very good about posting dev logs and participating on the forums.
It's also encouraging to see that the devs have both a long term vision and a realistic idea of what they're actually going to release with.
Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2004 12:14 am
Demiglot
Editor
Joined: 13 Jan 2004
Posts: 1316
Location: Stamford, CT
Very interesting. My initial reaction to this is along the lines of Frontier 1859. It sure sounds great if they can live up to their own hype. And again, I'm not sure what I think of the setting, but if the game is cool enough I could see myself getting into it. I love history, just never really had a thing for boats.
Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2004 9:28 pm
OddjobXL
Joined: 24 Jan 2004
Posts: 745
I suppose my off the cuff question is whether we are characters or we 'are' ships.
That said, tall ships are one of my things (who'd guess from the way I play Mandash?) so I may give this one a second look.
At some point in the future they plan to implement avatars, allowing you to do things like wander around on land, fight in your boarding actions, etc; but that won't be included in the initial release. Until then, you're basically playing as your ship (pretty much like Eve, I guess).
Incidentally, for those who can't wait to fight a pirate boarding action, there's a pirate mod for Battlefield 1942...
Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2004 2:48 pm
Tychus
Editor
Joined: 12 Jan 2004
Posts: 1573
The newest ship type, the schooner, was posted this weekend. Take a look at the ships page.
Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2004 2:10 am
Tychus
Editor
Joined: 12 Jan 2004
Posts: 1573
News from Flying Lab:
Quote:
Now that we've reached Alpha, we've been updating our milestone schedule for the rest of the project. Playing the Alpha has been a lot of fun -- in particular, combat is shaping up great -- but it's also made us more aware of areas that we believe need more work. As a result, we're moving our expected ship date to Q4 2004 and expanding our programming and art staff to tackle the next milestone.
While we'd like to ship sooner than that, we don't want to rush the initial release. This extra time will help us ensure the stability of the game, make it more fun, and improve the quality of certain features.
Later this week, the Pirates of the Burning Sea Community Site is releasing a major new interview with us about the Alpha and the current state of the game. Stay tuned!
Last edited by Tychus on Tue Jan 27, 2004 2:10 am; edited 2 times in total
Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2004 6:21 pm
C
Joined: 12 Jan 2004
Posts: 454
Location: Madison, Wisconsin , U.S.A.
That's not a Schooner it's a sailboat.
Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2004 8:36 am
someguy
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 259
There's part of an extended interview at the Pirates of the Burning Sea Community Site that's very neat. You have to be registered on the site to read it, but the exclusive screenshots are almost worth the time it takes to register, alone.
Some highlights:
Quote:
Community: When shooting at a ship with a broadside of cannons, this does major damage to the ship and kills/injures a lot of crew. How will this be simulated? Will the firepower reduce, the reload time take longer, while keeping the same number of cannons? Or will we lose a cannon that can shoot while the other keep their strength. What about the crew, will losing crew effect the handling of the ship?
FLS Design Staff: We have a terrific crew allocation system that is under player control. You have a window showing you the various categories of crew work, such as Repair, Pumps, Cannon, and Sails. For each category, you see how many crew are needed to do that job at this moment, and how many are actually doing it. If you don't have enough crew to do everything at once, you click priority buttons to change which categories get more crew. You aren't changing the numbers directly -- as captain, you're saying, "Get more men on those pumps!" and then crew are taken off of lower-priority categories and put onto the pumps. All this updates moment to moment, of course, with your priority settings driving the flow of manpower.
Each crew member can be healthy, stunned, injured, critical, or dead, depending on how damage from incoming fire is inflicted. A single cannonball can pierce the hull, wreck a cannon, and kill crewmen on that deck; in addition, as the round travels it's causing splinters and wreckage that mean additional damage.
As your healthy crew diminish, they'll be less able to do everything you ask of them. That's where the priority console becomes critical, because you need to put your men where they can do the most good at this moment.
Community: Will all ships be the same ? Or will there be difference between the ships of one type?
FLS Design Staff: The differences are entirely in the modifications performed on a given ship. We have dozens of mods that change the characteristics of your ship, so you can tune it for speed or cargo space or crew efficiency and so on. Ships you buy in dockyards will vary in this way.
Community: What equipments can we put on our ship? Does this depend by the ship's class?
FLS Design Staff: It does, and also on the modifications. Basic equipment includes cannon, ammunition, sails, pumps, and repair/replacement supplies. Different kinds of sails will affect your ship's performance in different circumstances. A given ship might take seven 4-pound cannon, but only 5 9-pound cannon. And so on.
Community: How is damage dealt with in Pirates of the Burning Sea? Do we see standard graphics as a representation of the damage or are we going to see realistic damage?
FLS Design Staff: You see your yards, masts, and sails collapsing due to damage. You can see through holes in sails. There are visible damage marks on the hull. We aren't cutting holes in the hull, as there are problems with that, but you can definitely tell a ship is beaten up just by looking at it.
_________________ "The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love." - Jeanette Winterson, "Gut Symmetries"
Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2004 1:51 pm
someguy
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 259
The second part of the extended interview is up. It's mostly about the mission system in Pirates of the Burning Sea. Highlights include:
Quote:
Community: People, who play games a lot, are mostly tired of boring quests or mission of which they do not see any purpose to accomplish other than for their own good (because they need it to get further or get a certain item, for instance). How will you keep the player interested with your mission system?
FLS Design Staff: Our approach is to have no static missions. Every mission in the game is generated when needed. Some are part of the economy: the cargo mission system responds to the supply and demand levels of other ports and generates missions accordingly. Others can change your legal standing, allowing criminals to rehabilitate themselves or upstanding citizens to earn some goodwill from the government before doing something shady.
The more missions you complete, the better the missions you can take. Low-paying missions are available to everyone. Bigger missions can only be taken by those who have proven themselves in the past. And if your ratio of missions succeeded/failed drops too far, you'll be back doing the little ones again.
Community: Will the reward depend on the risk of the mission? What about failure?
FLS Design Staff: The base value of the mission depends on what the mission asks of you. If it's a cargo mission, the reward is based on the value and quantity of the cargo, for example.
Mission rewards can increase above their base value in three ways:
Deadline. If a mission is to a nearby port, it may be a beat-the-clock mission where you are asked to complete it within a short amount of time. If you succeed, you get a bonus depending on how fast you got there. If you fail, you can still earn the base reward whenever you do get there.
Priority. The longer a mission goes unclaimed, the more it's worth. Eventually, though, those high-valued missions that have hung around a while will get cancelled, so don't wait too long!
Risk. If someone fails a mission, the mission goes back to the place it came from and is eligible for someone else to take it. That increases the Risk of the mission, which raises its value as well.
Failing a mission hurts your overall mission-completion rating, which is part of your reputation. You need a good success ratio to qualify for the better missions. Other reputation metrics, such as your legal standing or your relationship with the magistrate of a port, may also change as a result.
Community: Players tend to group together for social interaction and in this game, also for safety (protecting convoys or fleet combat). Will this be supported in the missions?
FLS Design Staff: Yes. Every mission in the game can be accepted as either a solo or group mission. When you accept it as a group mission, everyone in your current group gets a sort of fragment of that mission. Everyone gets paid according to what percentage of the group succeeded. So if only half the group completes the mission, they won't get paid as much as if everyone had. But group missions pay better than solo missions, so even a partial group success can be worth more than a complete solo success.
Community: As a Captain of your ship, you will be able to hire your own crew. How will hiring and firing crew be handled? Will we have to select each crew member, or do we hire them by groups? And what about the officers?
FLS Design Staff: Crew are generic and have no stats other than their current health status that I described earlier. You just have a certain number of them, and you pretty much hire them in bulk.
Officers are unique and you hire them individually. Their mix of skills affect what you can do with your ship.
_________________ "The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love." - Jeanette Winterson, "Gut Symmetries"
Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2004 1:14 am
someguy
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 259
Here's a nice series of interviews with the lead designer of Pirates of the Burning Seas on Warcry that C clued me into. They're a few months old, but they detail the design philosophy and it's very interesting. The designer's philosophy is very much akin to my own in what I've experienced as far as the factors I enjoy in an MMOG.
As we all know, it's standard operating procedure to promise the world and deliver Norway. But the world Pirates of the Burning Sea is promising is amazing.
_________________ "The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love." - Jeanette Winterson, "Gut Symmetries"
Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2004 12:22 pm
Stormwolff
Joined: 12 Jan 2004
Posts: 295
Hey! I like Norway! They make good smoked herring there!
Now Iceland....thassa whole different story. Only good thing to come out of there is Bjork and the Sugar Cubes.
_________________ " Diet Caffeine-Free Mountain Dew. For people who don't like sex, but enjoy using birth control. "
WoW- Moradon
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2004 1:00 am
someguy
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 259
Because things like this make me happy:
Quote:
The stars in this shot are in their actual real-world positions (I think for the equator at 0 degrees longitude in 1900) and are rendered using 6000 point sprites. They are also given a size based on their brightness in the yale catalog. I think that it's pretty cool that you'll be able to look up at the sky in PBS and pick out constellations, even being able to tell which direction is which based on their relative positions.
That is in reference to a screenshot of the night sky in Pirates of the Burning Sea.
_________________ "The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love." - Jeanette Winterson, "Gut Symmetries"
Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2004 3:08 pm
someguy
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 259
The third and final portion of the extended interview is up on the Pirates of the Burning Seas Community site. It's here.
Some highlights include:
Quote:
Community: Camping on certain places, plundering markets by buying loads and selling the loads elsewhere again is a common behaviour in exploiting the economy. How will this be prevented in your game?
FLS Design Staff: The Caribbean is a big place, with hundreds of thousands of people. The players represent only a fraction of the total population. NPCs are present also, buying and selling cargo around the clock. Each town has its own population who produce and consume goods. All of this activity is happening constantly, and represents something of a soak on a single player's ability to affect the marketplace.
We expect individual players to keep their finger on the market's pulse and take advantage of good situations. When St. John's is running out of copper, it's time to buy low and sell high!
We also expect players working together in trade companies to develop policies to affect the market. If a large group of players steadily works to depress the price of sugar, they can. It won't happen overnight, but over time the market will adjust.
At that point things get interesting, because the world reacts. Some nations may implement tariffs on foreign sugar to protect their home markets. Missions crop up to move sugar to places where the prices are higher. If a trade company is angry that a rival company is benefiting from the changed market conditions, they may quietly offer secret missions to harass that company's ships.
There's no end to this, of course. Things keep changing and the world keeps growing!
Community: When we buy goods from a certain nation, will we be able to sell it to any other nation? What about smuggling the goods into the ports?
FLS Design Staff: When you buy cargo, it gets a customs stamp on it identifying the nation of origin. You may or may not be able to sell it at another nation's port -- that depends on what the current relations between the two nations are like, as well as how the nation you're visiting feels about you.
_________________ "The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love." - Jeanette Winterson, "Gut Symmetries"
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