Initial Impressions

My very first impression wasn't very favorable - the initial land-based questing appears very conventional, while sporting poor character animation, bland landscapes and very inconsistent client performance. Even a top end system can dive down to 5fps at times if you push the graphics settings up, but the performance seems to vary depending where you are. As sections of cities are divided by odd-looking twisty "tunnels", I think it's due to the engine - it doesn't perform potential visual set calculations to the vertex data, and instead the areas are just split to blocks that are completely drawn every time, leading to horrible overdraw and performance issues. I hope some work is still to be done for the client performance in these areas.

Technical issues aside, the rest of the game isn't half bad, and the first impression is partially misleading - there is a ton of depth here. The quests start out simple, but there is an actual storyline to read if you can bother with the long blocks of text, and if you take your time, you soon find that the quests do go a bit beyond the usual "kill X thingies for Y reward".

An exclamation mark? I guess you have a quest for me.

The press tour included a peek at the Ghost Ship - indicating that there is some in-depth PvE content to be found.

Graphical issues also seem to be mostly limited to the land-based gameplay. On the high seas the game can look positively pretty while running quite smoothly. Detailed ships, filled with crew scurrying around doing their duties delivering and taking full broadsides of cannon fire, masts snapping, sails getting shred... all done on a fairly convincing representation of the rolling seas.

However, it's impossible to ignore the major issues while adventuring with your avatar. While characters themselves look fairly good, the combat animation is just incredibly rigid and unconvincing, and the playability in melee combat is poor. I doubt Flying Labs can do anything about such a major issue before their scheduled launch date (currently set at late January 2008), so it will end up hobbling otherwise fairly interesting MMO.

Pirates of the Burning Sea is currently in Open Beta - initially open to paying Fileplanet subscribers, with promise that even non-subscribers can participate in "about a week" - which would put the completely open beta start date at 14th of December. Preorder boxes are also shipping, with beta keys and guaranteed "early start" on the live servers starting approximately two weeks before the official launch date. Both US and European editions will ship simultaneously, and you are not limited to a specific set of servers - any box can play on any server, just like any other SOE-published MMO.

In summary, there are some fairly good ideas here, and PotBS is not your average WoW clone with a pirate hat, but it's still too early to say if the good parts - ship combat, economy, business and related PvP aspects - outweight the poor character-based combat and adventuring side. The pessimistic part of me is dreading for yet another buggy MMO launch, while the optimistic side is hoping that the Flying Lab guys can pull off a miracle and do something about the unpolished bits before launch. We'll definitely take a far more in-depth look for a proper review closer to the launch, but the current verdict is that Pirates of the Burning Sea is definitely worth taking a look for being somewhat original and trying something different.

If you would like to comment on this preview or discuss the game further, then please click here (registration not required).