Pirates of the Burning Sea at PAX

The first day of PAX I was lucky enough to be able to sit down with Greg Hanefeld, game designer, with Flying Labs and Pirates of the Burning Sea.

I was a die-hard PotBS fan and had previously been the managing editor of a fan site for the game before my video card bit the dust and I was unable to play. That was close to a year and a half ago and the game has, unsurprisingly, gone through a myriad of changes. Greg, along with Janice VonItter, aka Fraxl , associate producer, were kind enough to answer my plethora of questions regarding what is happening in game now, game changes as well as telling me about their plans for the future.

The Present

PotBS is on their nineteenth milestone post launch and have been doing one milestone every five weeks or so.

The last six months in-game was based around a huge storyline called Black Flags, Dread Saints, which was the story of Black Bart. The storyline allowed for new missions, new stories and tons of new content, including chasing down Black Bart and his group of pirates. Since the launch of the game, FLS has released two “epic” missions, including one dealing with Black Bart.

Changes to the Game Since Launch

Having stopped playing the game due to a disastrous ending to my own video card which made playing PotBS and EVE impossible, I, of course, had to ask about changes to the game since I had quite playing. There had been several discussions in the past two years over improving avatar combat, increasing the number of missions available, balancingPVP, improved UI , changes to the auction house and more. Their answers surprised me: almost everything that I had heard talked about had happened or was in the process of happening.

At the beginning of this year, FLS completely revamped and refined the avatar combat system. They went over the weird parts players couldn’t understand and either tweaked it or got rid of it as well as added a lot of new systems in that were not present prior. For example, in the new combat system, you have an area of effect arc instead of single target combat. This allowed players to swing and hit all targets instead of just fencing against one target at a time. This gave players a more powerful, faster paced fight with flashy moves, animations and sounds.

“We really tore it down to the bones and built it up again from scratch,”Hanefeld said of the change.

In fact, they think one of the biggest, and perhaps the most important changes to the game was the avatar combat system.

In addition to this, they add in a skirmish system. The skirmish system allowed for risk free PVP battles on demand. You could group with other nations in the skirmish and it was a 24 on 24 fight. This allowed for established guilds and newbie guilds alike to train for port battles and see how it can be done without loosing everything.

The game is also growing. There is a dedicated base of players, but also more coming in with the free trial accounts, especially after it became easier to download and play for 14-days. The game now has five servers, Antigua still being the one most role players have adopted as home. They attribute a push in marketing, such as banner ads, web advertising as well as a care package program for the military folks with an extended free-trial period as to reasons for growth. Expect to see some TV commercials in the future as well (or so it was hinted at).

Some other changes made to the game include:

* a completely redone UI which improved or corrected many of the performance issues folks were experiencing

* Auction house was revamped with a change to it’s UI, making it easier to use and is included in the Economy tutorial The auction house also allows for items not only to be placed for sale, but also to request items you need.

* Ship insurance was added to help players be able to replace their ships easier after loosing them in battles.

* They have been moving forward with the graphical remake of the cities. All of the capital cities are done and are moving on to the individual towns. They are looking to make each town feel and look unique.

* A new chat box with chat channels was incorporated and made them a lot less spammy. Chat bubbles are now an optional feature. And players can chat with players from different nations now, unlike before.

* Cargo manager–a new way to view and organize your cargo that was a lot easier than the first version.

* Ship storage: you can store as many ships as you like, but you are still limited to 5 in the dock yard.

*Underpopulated bonuses were added to help draw players to underpopulated sides on servers.

They also mentioned they now have around 2000 missions, but when they create new missions, the focus is on quality over quantity. Each mission is custom built from scratch. No more standard missions from templates. They also went through and streamlined the old quests for leveling so they aren’t clumped together and provide more variety for leveling at lower levels.

The economy is still 100 % player based. In March, or April, they went through and stream-lined the economy to make it easier for small societies to build ships. The economy was really too complicated, but they worked to make it a bit less complex and more fun. They were quick to add that the economy is still complex, but not as complex as it was originally. This brought a sigh of relief as I remembered how hard it was to get all the supplies we needed as a guild that was on an underdog nation.

“In reality, we’ve had 18 months to fine tune and polish the game to what players want,” Hanefeld said. “We really fine tuned combat and PVP to make it balanced. Now we’re getting to the end of the storyline that leads us to the expansion.”

Fraxl agreed. “It’s a totally different game. It’s changed so much since the launch and I am so proud of what we did in the past. It’s almost unrecognizable from what we launched with.. We really pride ourselves on listening to the community feedback.”

The Future of Pirates

The future includes an expansion, titled “Power and Prestige” which the story lines in the last few milestones have been leading up to. The past year and a half to two years they have spent releasing milestones at a break-neck pace. Now, they’re taking a step back and taking a good, long time to put together a really cool expansion. The expansion will be focused around governance, players and allowing societies to actually control ports. There will also be a separate component based around controls with the faction system and reputation to unlock new content based off reputation.

The theme of the expansion pivots around Black Bart as well as the new political struggle which creates a new layer of game play.

Many players will be relieved to know there is no level increase with this expansion, but there will be plenty of new quests and new adventures. They also plan to redo some of the leveling content to help improve the variety and leveling.

“We’re happy with how the game is now,” Fraxl said in regards to levels.

When asked if they were planning to expand the map, the answer was no. They plan to release new content every single month, just like they’ve been doing with the past 18 months and keeping everyone on the same map allows for everyone to be able to play together and stay together and not be spread far apart.

With the expansion, they plan to incorporate new features, missions and rewards to every faction in the game. There will be special rewards that only people with reputations with certain factions can get. And there will be choices to make, because if you choose one faction that is the enemy of the other faction, items, quests and features with the other faction will be blocked off to you.

Conclusion

I greatly enjoyed my time at the PotBS Booth at PAX as well as the meet-up with them later that night. The game has changed a lot in the past two years and I look forward to picking up and playing it once more, especially after being brought up to speed as to all the changes and the fact that the company still values and listens to its players when it comes to changes that need to be made to the game. I’m excited to see the expansion and details that come out with it as it progresses.