Bounty Bay Online
User Rating:
  Log in to rate this game!
ESRB:
Publisher: Frogster Genre(s): MMORPG Home Page: http://bbo.yusho.de/en/Startpage/
The visuals - a homeage to the late 90s? Not only are sea-battles the most fun part of the game, they also offer the best visuals. The system requirements of Bounty Bay Online are very low by today's standard - an Intel GMA950 based laptop ran the game well enough, with all settings "on" (although with somewhat low frame rates). Any desktop PC from the last few years will be fine, so don't think of BBO as being the game to show off your brand new GPU with. The graphics, to put it bluntly, don't hold up in any way considering that BBO was released in 2007. Simplistic visuals consisting of blocky, sparse environments with low detail textures and, in some cases (such as on land fighting), abysmal animation really aren't things we like to see in a (at least for us) new game. The technological aspect aside, the game fails to deliver from an artistic point of view too - the cities all differ in visual style, but none of them really stand out, and everything just feels awfully bland. Some of the extra effects, such as the almost instant day/night cycle changes coupled with the above mentioned simplistic looks are, instead of helping the immersion, constantly reminding us that we are in a very sterile video game. The above may put a lot of people off trying BBO, but despite it being one of the game's biggest weaknesses, the low end graphics allow basically anyone to play the game, without having to upgrade their PCs. The game is quite happy with almost anything thrown at it, and will run fine on older single core CPUs and even 256 MB of RAM, so if you are craving an MMO and use a low end or a non-gaming PC, this title may be a game to consider. Given, of course, that the endless repetitive grinding doesn't put you off...
A major annoyance with the game is that the only possible resolutions offered are 4:3, leaving widescreen users with an unmoveable windowed game (or a horribly stretched full-screen one at a lower resolution), which will most likely get its bottom somewhat chopped off, unless a much lower resolution than the screen's native is chosen. Using a 1680x1050 LCD monitor I had to play in either 1152x864 windowed or 1280x1024 full screen mode. Outdated technology aside, I haven't come across any issues in the game, so the engine may not do a lot of fancy things, but at least the game remains reliable. Audio and the UIIn terms of the audio aspect of the game there isn't a lot to talk about bar a quite generic (although fitting) soundtrack, some subtle ambience and annoying sounds during battle. It is strange that the music is turned off by default, since ambient sounds only make the boring grinding sessions even more depressing. Although this could be simply the result of the developers expecting that gamers would simply just run the game windowed in the background, only jumping back in whenever their character needs to start cutting trees again after recovering from a previous session of lumber harvesting...
The interface, whilst far from being stunning, works quite well, and is for the most part pretty similar to other MMOs without any real surprises. Giving access to all skills early on can be overwhelming to new players with all the skill specific options, but this is only a temporary issue and it doesn't take very long until it feels familiar enough. One particular part of the UI that's worth mentioning is the full-screen map whilst on land - it is extremely clean and useful, the player's character can be moved using this view, and all NPCs are labelled. Something that Frogster should have worked much harder on was the translation of the original texts; generally, they're sub-par at best and can really kill any immersion the game offers. This affects every piece of dialogue in the game (such as quests) and sadly the manual too, to some extent. Admittedly, Far Eastern dialects may not be the easiest to turn into English, but it's just not helping the game at all.
Related Stuff Games: Bounty Bay Online
Tags |
 
 
See if your PC can handle the latest games:
 
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
