Pirates of the Burning Sea

[PeteG]

PotBS have updated their website: http://www.burningsea.com/ in preparation for their demoing the game at E3.

I've been following the game's development closely for over a year, a brief rundown of it is:

• An MMORPG set in the Caribbean in 1720
• Beta in Fall for a late 2005 release
• Will be distributed via Steam, low (or possibly no) initial cost, monthly cost at the low end of the US$10 to US$15 range
• Play as a pirate or an English, French or Spanish naval captain or merchant
• Most of the gameplay will be ship based, similar to EVE, though your avatar will also be able to run around ports
• No levels - player skill and your character's and officer's skills will determine combat
• Long distance travel is fairly quick on a zoomed out navigation map, but combat (and also entering / leaving ports) will be in real time on instanced zones. The intention is that you'll only spend a short time on the navigation map and most of your time in instanced zones.
• Ship to ship combat will be fairly slow paced, I'd guess an average battle might take 15 minutes or more as you manouver and exchange long range cannon fire before closing and boarding.
• Open PvP, with strategic objectives (ie capturing cities for your nation) and a reputation system (attack merchants and you'll be declared a pirate and will be unable to enter most ports and will be hunted by the navy)

The game has one of the most communicative dev teams I've ever seen, and to me the game looks like it will be avoiding some of the major flaws (grinding, levelling, farming) common to many MMORPGs.

[neimad]

Yaar, maties, 'tis a fine sight ta see this here Burning Sea.

[Ijs]

New spiffy upgraded website is www.piratesoftheburningsea.com

Adding avatars for R1 was a good idea I think. Been following this one off and on since fall '03 (when it was supposed to release in '03. )

This is one game where the devs said, "Yeah, we put a lot of time, money and effort into this.... yeah, we've already pushed back 12 stinkin months... but it's just NOT going to work. What will work? Ok, let's do 'er~!"

Beta is scheduled for fall '05 with an over-optimistic release date of "later in the year".

Look for this one in the spring of '06!!! I'll get a new PC for this one -- no macs allowed (due to Steam limitations).

YARRRR!!!!!

[Garain]

This just looks too COOL!!!

[Durthos]

I tried out the demo at PAX last weekend, and really enjoyed it!

They had two stations set up, one for PVE, and one for 2 Player PVP. I tried the PVP on the smaller ship - the fluyt I think, and managed to win -- got a cool tshirt out of it too.

The battle took about 10 minutes, but still felt like it was over really quickly. There was a lot of manouvering, and firing, and just trying to avoid the other guys bullets.

So far the game is looking good -- I can't wait till their beta -- I hope to be in on it... has anyone seen a sign up besides the guild one ?

[Mormi]

No signups yet other than the chance for guilds to register interest.

[Ijs]

The devs have strongly hinted at September for beta registrations. But it won't be beta yet. They still have to do some limited testing (combat & missions) with hand-picked 'public' testers (alpha)... which will transition into beta. When's that? Still up in the air.

[MaevSpire]

Hello TOG!

I hope this game is what it adds up to be Speedy, I have been following this for awhile and so has Frag Haus. There has been a great buzz in Frag Haus about this game for a while.

I sincerely hope that The Older Gamers and Frag Haus will combine our thoughts into making this the best MMORPG's out there!

It seems that most Frag Haus people want to go Pirate in this beta while I want to go possibly a British merchant but I hear that merchants may be mostly useless with R1.

Daarrr Matey hope to see ye on the battlefields with a sword in one hand and a pint o grog in the other!

Respectfully,

Maev Spire
Valcyn FHA
P.S.Ilovethisgradientoption!

[Ijs]

Good luck with it Maev! There's a fair bit of interest here too, and probably some more when they actually start beta.

No idea what nationality though -- probably England, Spain and Pirates. It brings up an interesting debate regarding one-character-per-server. Unless that changes, we'd probably need multiple guilds on different servers...

[PeteG]

See you on the high seas MaevSpire Hopefully quite soon.

An earlier thread with about 100 replies seemed to have a mix of members wanting to play pirate, some wanting to play a specific nation, and some with no nation preference (but who don't want to play pirate). So as Ijs said we'll probably need to have multiple in-game guilds to cover everyone's preference.