Pirates of the Burning Sea

[Neeyik]

With more than just elements from classic pirate films and games, Sony Online Entertainment offers new and unique aspects in their latest MMO title. Fancy being a ruthless buccaneer or a wealthy trader? Want to design your own ships, take over ports, or perform a spot of skullduggery? Set sail with our epic, in-depth review of Pirates of the Burning Sea to find out how!

http://www.yougamers.com/reviews/169...e_burning_sea/

A lot of your animation comments make me think you are seeing the LOD's. The ship detail slider will have an affect on the detail of your character and NPC's. As the bone count drops out the animations will look worse.

[Jarnis]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

A lot of your animation comments make me think you are seeing the LOD's. The ship detail slider will have an affect on the detail of your character and NPC's. As the bone count drops out the animations will look worse.

Nope, the settings are quite maxed. The problem with the animation is not the smoothness of individual moves, it's the fact that characters in combat face random directions, slide around and generally swing their weapon as if performing a canned animation instead of, well, fighting. The animations are not believable - they look stiff.

Believable character animation is *hard*, so I did cut some slack on it, but the animation in combination with the warping and sliding issues of characters just looks bad.

Thankfully the game is still fairly good - even if the land-based parts are poor. The real meat is elsewhere.

It's also apparently gaining popularity - the English-speaking EU server is getting pretty full... no such issues yet on the US servers, as the game launched with quite many of those.

Hi, I'm the CEO of Flying Lab. I think what you're reacting to is the lack of a robust animation blending system. When you're fighting against one or two opponents, it mostly works and looks cool. When you're fighting in larger groups, you get the animation overwrites that result in the problems that I think you're describing. It's something that we intend to address in the near future. While we would have liked to have gotten it in for release, it was a question of picking our battles. Our goal was to create a solid foundation of the core systems on which we could grow the game, and to launch smoothly. Now that we've done that, we can go back in and start adding on.

Anyway, thanks for coming back after the preview and giving us a fresh look. If you like the game now, you'll be knocked out with where we're taking it.

[Anjel_Few]

Man i am really intruiged with this game! I hope there will be a trial/demo, as i would love to try it before forking out the dubloons for the whole game.

[Jarnis]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Hi, I'm the CEO of Flying Lab. I think what you're reacting to is the lack of a robust animation blending system. When you're fighting against one or two opponents, it mostly works and looks cool. When you're fighting in larger groups, you get the animation overwrites that result in the problems that I think you're describing. It's something that we intend to address in the near future. While we would have liked to have gotten it in for release, it was a question of picking our battles. Our goal was to create a solid foundation of the core systems on which we could grow the game, and to launch smoothly. Now that we've done that, we can go back in and start adding on.

Anyway, thanks for coming back after the preview and giving us a fresh look. If you like the game now, you'll be knocked out with where we're taking it.

I agree that 1vs1 fights look mostly OK. Not perfect, but OK. Of course you currently end up in 1vs1 melee roughly never - but once you have whittled down a few opponents are are duelling the last one, yes, the problem is pretty much gone, and I agree that the stiffness is probably due to different animations overwriting each other - it just looks unnatural.

I'm glad to hear that work is ongoing to improve this part of the game. I also hope some of the less-than-perfect individual animations (such as running, and transitions to/from running) will receive some additional touches over time.

But, as I summarized in the end, it sure ain't a bad game. A lot better than most MMORPGs have been at launch. Most importantly, the underlying design appears sound. You have to also take into account that we at YouGamers are very strict with the scores.