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Pirates of the Burning Sea

The Laundry List of Ugly Bits

As you can see, there is plenty of depth to Pirates of the Burning sea, but it's far from perfect. The laundry list of things I disliked is fairly long: poor animation of character models, inconsistent quality of character art and land-based 3D models, obvious design shortcuts that undermine the immersion, unfinished balancing of combat difficulty and small inconsistencies that keep breaking the illusion of a working game world.

The first thing anyone would obviously notice is the poor animation of character models. None of the models look that bad in still images, but the movement is just unnatural and stiff. The rest of the land-based visuals are a mixed bag - some places look like cheap cardboard sets for a two-bit pirate movie, while another location close by might look outright stunning. Overall consistency has been sacrificed in order to crank out more content - a fair trade-off, but it shows in the scoring.

In the long run, what bugged me the most are the little things that constantly break the immersion. I don't know if it's due to the limitations of the game engine, but everything in the world is split into teeny bits, and you generally can't play for more than a few minutes until you run into a loading screen. A real example to illustrate my point: you sail to a port (loading), you appear at the docks and make your way to the local bar (loading). In the bar you find your mission NPC, finish your current task and start a new one.

Then you exit back to the town (loading), walk to the auction house and enter it (loading). Once done shopping for ammunition, you exit back to the town (loading) and head for the docks, boarding your ship (loading). Arriving on the world map to the mission destination port, you enter the mission instance (loading), and get down and dirty with some filthy Brits. After dispatching the enemies, you return to your ship (loading) and head back to the original port. That's eight loading screens in less than ten minutes of gameplay. I have nothing against accessing the disk, but such jarring breaks should be kept to the absolute minimum, and smooth transitions between scenes should be employed whenever possible. PotBS is taking the easy road here, and it's annoying.

The illusion of a working game world is also shattered by silly mistakes stemming from re-use of assets. There is no functional day/night cycle - different areas just happen to have a different time of day. You might arrive at port while it appears to be night, then enter a house with pretty sunbeams filtering through the windows, indicating a day outside - but when you exit the house, it's night again. The time of day also varies wildly from mission to mission and in general it's used only as a visual effect, with no relation to any real day/night cycle. These may appear to be small details, but it's the small details that turn a pile of pixels and polygons into a believable world.

Mission difficulty also varies too much; while you can sort your quests by level (and they are color-coded according to their intended difficulty level, when compared to your level), in reality you can run into nasty surprises. Boarding combat also feels far too easy with the ability to direct your crew to concentrate their attacks - you just hang back for a bit, choose enemy captain and then direct your crew to hack him to bits. It takes some effort to "prep" an enemy ship for boarding with anti-personnel and anti-sail shots, but it's far easier than actually tearing through the hull and armor in order to sink the enemy.

I also found the game to be inconsistent in handling combat-related abilities across session breaks (in essence, loading screens). I guess it's acceptable that all damage sustained is instantly repaired when you finish a battle, but it's a nasty surprise when you hurry to another battle, only to find all your in-combat buffs gone while the related abilities are still cooling down. The same happens when you finish boarding one enemy ship and move back to the sea battle to tackle another. You may have used a 5-minute buff to sailing speed just before boarding (with eight minute cool-down period), but after boarding it's gone and you need to wait over seven minutes before you can use it again. It should be consistent - either your in-combat buffs stay up for the full duration, even if you exit a re-enter a sea battle, or everything should reset - buffs and the related ability cool-downs.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Factions and CareersPage 3: Gameplay FundamentalsPage 4: Gameplay - Sea BattlesPage 5: Gameplay - EconomicsPage 6: Gameplay - Faction PvPPage 7: Issues & ComplaintsPage 8: Technology, User Generated ContentPage 9: Final Thoughts and Scoring

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