Others say...

"Something is Wrong at the company level"
Something is really wrong at Flying Labs Software, the company who created this game. The company will not respond to e-mails or to direct phone calls. When I called the company all that I was able to get was the auto machine. When I attempted to reach the company's operator there was no response. The operator's mailbox has been full for more than 60 days. Be aware of this and be very careful of this company and what could happen to a customer who cannot reach the company to find out what happened to your money.

"A Voice in the Chorus"
Add my voice to the chorus of those that 'really wanted to like this game.' I am a hobby pirate historian and own several other pirate games, computer and board. My only other MMO reference/experience is World of Warcraft; so, I'm using that as a point of comparison. The game offers a number of aspects of play, character based and ship based, as well as an economic facet; I will comment on each.

The character based aspects are limited to movement around ports, visiting shops and such, movement in missions and boarding actions. Do not expect WoW's ability to move around and over nearly everything, no swimming, no jumping over things. Missions tend to be instances, think Guild Wars rather than real MMO. The swashbuckling/sword fighting system borrows from other MMOs in the use of skills, and while in my opinion is a good feature, is still a little cumbersome in its management of readily available mix during actual combat.

Ship based activity borrows much from Sid Meier's Pirates! and adds another set of skills to be learned as you gain experience levels. Ship movement is intuitive and allows for grappling, repairing and changing ammunition. Ship to ship combat is still instance based rather than true MMO, which may be a reasonable compromise, but...

The economic aspects of the game offer the ability to build industry and produce goods, not really sure that this fits with being a pirate, but chalk it up to a concession for playability. The downside is that while you can produce items, demand seems to be limited in the extreme.

Bottom line time. There are aspects of the game that I found entertaining; however, the initial release is buggy and still needs refinement and a few more features to make it worthwhile. Others might say that every other MMO that has come out has faced the same challenges, and I would argue that I should not be expected to pay full price just to help out with the later stages of what amounts to a beta test. For myself, I cannot see myself paying a monthly subscription to play this game, and that makes me sad, because 'I really wanted to like this game.'
P-)


"Ignore the nay-sayers"
Ok 1st and foremost, the game still has bugs. Some people won't be able to play, so do your research on system specs etc..

Now

1. Ship gameplay gets 4.5/5 for me, it's fun, it's engaging, it looks pretty darn good. The only downside for me is the enemy and NPC AI. This will improve over time.

2. Swashbuckling gets 2/5 right now. It has a lot of potential, but at the moment little things throw me off... Females NPCs have a male death sound byte, there's quite a few bugs, ship combat is iffy... I see this as being fun and maybe some what fixed within 6 months, and it has the potential to be perfect within a year.

3. Graphics overal 4/5 While the graphics don't stand out, the overall atmosphere is nice. Pirate towns are run down with drunks aplenty, British ports are well put together and tidy. Ocean graphics far surpass the land based areas of the game for now. But for me the visuals are more than sufficient for now. I do have high hopes that they will add more diversity to the towns and more fluid movement to the PCs, and FLS said they are working on that.

4. Customer support 5/5, FLS has been amazing. There were quite a few hiccups at first, but the Devs have been there for almost every problem, and while they don't always fix the stuff right away, they do provide fairly accurate time-lines to fixes and sympathy. Can't ask for more than that.


In the end it's a good game, with the potential to be great within a few months, and near perfect within a year.

Give it a shot, and don't have your hopes too high. You won't be dissapointed as long as you don't come in expecting Crytek graphics and a MMO experiance comparable to one that has been out for years with most bugs fixed.

"Tharr be pirates"
Pirates of the Burning Sea (PotBS) is a Massively Multiplayer Online game where you are the captain of your own ship sailing the Caribbean circa 1720. There are three main gameplay areas in PotBS. They are,

1. Swashbuckling - This is your avatar. You walk around the towns gathering quests, selling goods to merchants, using the Auction House, and engaging in swashbuckling quests.
2. Open Sea - Used to travel around the Caribbean, sailing from port to port and avoiding or engaging in combat with other ships. This is not your real ship view but a much quicker way to sail around. When you do engage another ship in combat you will go into ship combat mode.
3. Ship combat - Undoubtedly the main focus of PotBS where you fire broadsides into your enemy, grapple, and board.

Quest come in two forms, Swashbuckling and Ship combat. With the swashbuckling quests you use your avatar and fight with sword and pistol on land. There are three styles of swordplay you can specialize in, Fencing, Florentine, and Dirty Fighting. While they vary slightly the principals are much the same, the differences being mostly aesthetic.

With the Ship combat quests you attempt to sink or board enemy ships. If you choose to board you will go into swashbuckling mode on the deck of the ship and engage in swordplay against the enemy captain and crew.

When starting the game you can choose one of three nations, France, England or Spain, or choose to be a pirate. The three nations play the same with the pirate play style differing. If playing one of the nations you can choose to be a Naval Officer, a Privateer, or a Freetrader. Naval officers get the biggest ships, Privateers play closer to the Pirate class, and Freetraders are the "crafters" of PotBS.

I chose to make a Freetrader as my first character and this review will focus on that aspect of the game. Other classes will provide a different experience. While all classes can "craft", Freetraders get to build the most advanced structures and recipes, and get benefits to trading and other skills focusing toward trade.

Crafting. There isn't really crafting as such in PotBS. There is no need to harvest resources like in World of Warcraft, and there's no crafting mini game like in Everquest 2. Instead you find a port with the resources you need then build the structures you need such as factories and warehouses. Each player can have a maximum of 10 factories. Labour is earned in real time in your factories. So when you have enough labour stored, you can immediately make items provided you have the resources and the recipe.

The end result is to build ships but no one player can be fully self sufficient. Ships require lots of different parts and you can only hope to provide a small amount of the parts required. For instance, I decided to be a weaponsmith, building cannons for ships. Firstly, I needed a port that had iron deposits. Then I built my warehouse. I had to buy a deed from the auction house in order to build my iron mine. Then another deed for a forge so I can turn the ore into iron ingots. Of course, I also needed limestone to make iron ingots. So now I can either buy limestone from another player via the Auction House, or I can start another production line. I found a port that had limestone deposits, built a warehouse, built a limestone quarry, and mined limestone. Now I load the limestone into my ship, sail back to the other port and make my iron ingots. I also bought a deed for a Weaponsmith factory so I can make cannons and cannonballs. Making cannonballs requires black powder also, which you get from mining sulphur and combining that with another product etc etc, so you can see how complicated making an item can be. And that's just cannons and cannonballs. Ships require hulls, sails, masts, cannons, anchors, fittings.....the list is endless. It's quite costly setting up your factories, so you will need to run quests to earn money to begin with. Factories also have a weekly upkeep. Unfortunately for me I don't appear to be selling much and the cost of keeping my factories open is eating up most of my profit.

Freetraders aren't good at ship to ship combat, so if you want to focus on the player versus player (PvP) side of the game you would make one of the other classes.

Pirates play somewhat differently to the other classes. They are the only nation that can actually claim a ship as a prize and captain that ship. This gives you an incentive to constantly level and attack other ships. Their skills are also heavily focused towards combat.

The Good:
The period. I love the 1700s, the clothes, the ships.

The ships. Ship models look great, and the ship combat mode looks beautiful, with waves breaking over your bow as you sail into battle.

Economy. I like the player driven economy even though I don't seem to be making any money.

The Bad:
Load times. Every time you go somewhere else you zone. You zone into the tavern. You zone into the shop. You zone into quests. You zone into ship combat. You zone into ports. You'll spend a lot of time looking at a loading screen.

Swashbuckling. It needs work. It also loses its appeal after a while and gets boring if you're winning and frustrating if you're losing.

The open sea. I guess this part of the game is unavoidable, but you'll spend a lot of time sailing to a destination. You can spend 15 or 20 mins staring at a miniature version of your ship while you sail to a distant port. If you're a freetrader you'll want to avoid combat for the most part so this can be dangerous as well.

Your avatar. All characters are much the same. There are no character "classes". This means there's no real reason to ever group in order to do swashbuckling quests. There is no tank/dps/healer type setup. There is no musketeer that is a ranged specialist. There is also no world to run around in. There are no dungeons. The only land is the towns where you conduct your business. If you grab a swashbuckling quest you zone into and instance of that quest. While I understand that this game is not a MMO such as WoW or EQ, the whole avatar quest and combat gets boring after a few levels and seems like a worthless part of the game. I just can't help thinking that this could have been a much stronger, more important part of the game. As it stands it just seems to be worthless fluff to appeal to the masses.

Summary.
I have a love/hate relationship with PotBS. The ship models and combat mode is visually spectacular. There's a lot of satisfaction in setting up your factories and watching the goods you've made sell. But the amount of time spent travelling from port to port and staring at loading screens could deter most casual players. I pre-ordered the game and played 15 days before official release, but I don't know if I'll play beyond the 30 days included time. For PvP lovers there may be a lot in it for you, but if you're not into PvP I don't think there is much to keep you interested in the long term. Except pirates.


"Mixed feelings, technical nightmare, beautiful, easy, fun, game"
This game is great! So far that I have only been able to play it for 20 minutes. I loved the tutorial and the graphics are amazing. So far I actually really enjoy the interface... though I question... was "Age of Pirates" a pre-liminary release of this game??? The symbols, the graphics, the key-board controls, pretty much everything is identical in the UI. Voices are pretty good, I was actually disappointed in the ship-ship combat graphics, and if I can ever get back in, i might play with the preferences to make that nicer. The background graphics are phenom and I can't wait to go sailing around.

Early "learning" quests are semi-guided and it seems it is easy to get what you want when you go places as there are always many options when talking to a "store" or "quest" npc. Makes the learning curve not so bad. I am ready to start figuring out what I need to set sail or start some business ventures before I go.

However, before you even install it, you should go to AEGIS and download their PhysX software drivers (free). If you don't you likely won't be able to run the game anyway.

Plan on downloading updates for at least 45 minutes after you install as well. I have wireless-n with 75k/s actual throughput.

Now that it's installed, it ran, once. Now I can't get it to run again. In fact, I can't end the process either once it freezes. I have to soft-boot. There is almost no information on their support site.

C2D 2.33ghz CPU, 4x1gb 800mhz gskills RAM, pny 8800gts 640mb GPU, encore wireless-n WIFI, EVGA 680i-LT mobo, cooler7pro CPUfan, 3xDVD r/rw, 4x160gb HD, Antec 650w SLI PSU. Windows XPsp2-32bit.