Pirates of the Burning Sea
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ESRB:
Blood,Suggestive Themes,Use of Alcohol,Use of Tobacco,Violence
Publisher: Flying Lab Software Genre(s): MMORPG Home Page: http://www.piratesoftheburningsea....
Tech Things Ships have tons of detail up close, but usually you can't afford admire the pretties if you want to win your battles. PotBS uses number of middleware pieces as codebase, and the engine isn't exactly super-modern. For a project that started five years ago this is not surprising. The game requires a basic Shader Model 2.0 graphics card as a minimum, but that's about it. If you are willing to drag down the sliders all the way, it actually runs on the listed minimum configuration. I wouldn't enjoy playing like that, but it does function, if you have the patience to endure disk swapping and massive load times. Toss in some extra RAM to such a system, and it even becomes playable, if ugly. The YouGamers minimum is set a bit higher - to a level where you can happily play in larger ship battles without ending up swimming just because the frame rate dipped to a slideshow in a tight spot. This configuration lets you play at medium settings at 1280x1024 without too many compromises, but with just 1GB RAM you will still have long loading pauses. The YouGamers recommended setup bumps things up a bit more, and allows you to happily move the sliders close to maximum even at 1600x1200, and the loading pauses are minimized.
Even if your system is a bit marginal, a lot can be saved with extra RAM. On a 2GB system the game gobbles up over a gigabyte of memory, so two gigabytes is strongly recommended - unless you enjoy staring at those pesky loading screens. When comparing the game at launch to the recent preview, performance has improved tremendously, especially on land. You still get occasional pauses and some warping just after entering a new area that uses the "land engine", but it's mostly a cosmetic flaw. It's yet another little bit that keeps nibbling at the overall immersion factor, but it's nowhere as distracting as it used to be in the beta. User Generated ContentUniquely, Pirates of the Burning Sea fully supports user generated content in the form of flags and sail decals. EVE Online had done something similar with user generated alliance logos, but PotBS goes a lot further. You can submit up to 60 items per month for approval and players then vote on the designs. Any design getting at least 25 votes, with the average being at least three out of five stars for the quality, gets passed to the developers for approval and potential inclusion to the game. Assuming the design passes the guidelines set to eliminate inappropriate, offensive and copyrighted material, and fits for the setting of the game, it gets added for the players to use. Only the player who created the design can buy the flags or sails from the related NPC store, but they can then be re-sold on the open market. This effectively allows you to make some doubloons with your Photoshop skills. As you spend a lot of time in the game on your ship, sail and flag customization allows you to differentiate yourself from other players, and the options are unlike with any other MMO today. PotBS also allows for user-created ship models, but the approval process and requirements for them are far stricter, so in general only semi-professional 3D modellers need to apply. You need to get your plans approved by a player-run steering committee, and the player-created work is limited to the model of the ship - any statistics and abilities, and the method of availability in the game are still decided by the developers. But it's an unique chance: should the ship pass the quality checks and get included in the game, it could be a nice piece in a portfolio for a 3D-artist seeking to break to the industry, and definitely a great idea to harness the small but vocal group that happen to love the old sailing ships of the era.
Related Stuff Games: Pirates of the Burning Sea
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