Pirates of the Burning Sea

I play a French lady privateer on the Blackbeard server named Pomme de Terre, if any of you play this MMO too.

Is the core gameplay anything of note?

You get to play as British, French, Spanish or Pirate factions. Each of the three nations can choose between Naval Officer (ride the game's largest and strongest flagships), Privateers (fastest class in the game), and Freetraders (specialize in moneymaking). Pirates can choose between cutthroats and buccaneers. Both of them are the only classes that can steal ships. They can ride any ship, whilst the nationals have categories. I don't know much else about them. I believe cutthroats are good at avatar combat and buccaneers are economy oriented, but I'm probably wrong. I'm a French privateer named Pomme de Terre on the Blackbeard server.

The ship combat is remarkably deep. You've got to keep track of wind direction, because the difference in speed varies from really fast to nearly standing still depending on how much wind is in your sails. This means you have to carefully plan your angle of attack. Different ships have different sails, which catch the wind best at different angles. Also, you can steal another ship's wind by intercepting it with your own ship, slowing it down and allowing pursuit. PotBS is a geometry expert's wet dream. Your forward and aft are weak compared to your broadsides, so you want to keep that in mind as you close on your target. Often, making a T where you are the horizontal bar and the target is the vertical poking into you is a great way to maximize damage. Different cannonballs are specialized at dismantling specific portions of an opponent's ship. You can demast- destroying sails to leave the target immobile. You can kill the crew. You can just try and sink the ship by destroying the hull. You get more loot from immobilizing and boarding, leaving the ship intact. I could go on and on.

Avatar combat isn't quite so deep, but it's still fun. You can choose a rapier, a small sword & main gauche, or a cutlass, whichever you pick you also get a pistol. Combat involves trying to unbalance your opponent so that you can damage his HP. You both have a balance bar that refills fairly fast, and a HP bar that doesn't refill without items until you complete the instance battle. So long as you have balance you'll never lose HP. As you attack your opponent you gain initiative - a third meter. You use initiative to use fancy attacks - some of which strike multiple opponents, debuff, or whatever. It's a lot of fun, but you can tell it was an afterthought and that the ships got 90% of the attention. Still, even as an afterthought, it's deeper than games like Phantasy Star Online/Universe and other dungeon hackers.

The character creator ensures you'll almost never see your clone - a weakness of most other MMOs. You have options for everything - a dozen or so faces, hats, shirts, vests, coats, jewelry, eyewear, gloves, pants, boots, boot accessories, belts, neckwear - and for each item you can often choose 2-3 styles, IE: striped, patterned, plain (the most common three), and then you can choose two different colors from a big color chart.

The game tries hard to be historical. When it can, which is often, it uses actual facts. You'll learn a little about the Knights Templar, Barbary Corsairs, the age of exploration in general, etc. All the ships are based in history.

Quests are the usual videogame fare - a limitation of the medium really. You have fetch quests, talk quests, kill quests, and escort quests. The quests are disguised pretty well from their basic nature. One fetch quest is a race, which I thought was clever. Some quests simply demand you survive. One early quest puts you in the open sea, ambushed by a dozen pirates, and all you have to is get by them to the exit point without dying. You can choose to kill them, but the quest I reference in particular is so early that I wasn't skilled enough to defeat that many opponents solo. The only real WoW feature they use is locating quests. IE: They have icons over quest givers. A ! means there's an untaken quest. A ? means the person continues a quest in some way, either finishing it or furthering it - usually the former.

The game was built as an economy sim, and if it follows the footsteps of any one MMO, it's probably EVE. You'll want to build industry all over the new world. For example, I want to go into textile to make sails. I can build plantations for the cotton, and textile mills for the cloth and finished products. There are lots of possible industries, and most cater towards ship building, but not all. It takes a handful of industries to complete a ship, and many people work together in this regard. Societies are the guilds of the game, and intrasociety production seems to be the name of the game. You get all your friends, specialize in skills, and make everything your society needs to beat the extortion Auction House rates. I just started my own society, though atm it's only me. If this isnt your thing, you can always sell your materials and components on the Auctionhouse.

Endgame is comprised of fighting for control of cities and ports. Your nation goes to a place under rival control, destabilizes it, and then it becomes a freeforall. Then open PVP begins for some time and the winner takes the town. Owning a town has large economic benefits. You can't really profit from resources in an enemy town. If you're a crafter, losing access to resources can be troublesome.

Death in PotBS isn't friendly. You lose your ship and everything on it. Ships cost a fortune. If you don't have a spare ship, you'll be given another free level 1 starter ship. Otherwise you'll have to use another that you bought. They recently began selling insurance policies on ships to help buffer the loss, but really, you won't be dying on purpose. This is a stark contrast to say, FFXI, or Warhammer Online, where suicide was a convenient mode of transportation. PotBS is even worse than FFXI in death loss, though you lose no EXP, you do lose a large chunk of wealth, which in terms of ease of acquisition is probably no easier to get than exp. Meaningful death keeps the game cautious. Most people won't enter a PVP unless they can stack the odds. It's pretty routine to seek out unfair fights. Going into a PVP zone without a full party is asking to be assaulted by a full party. Going into PVP with a full party means you need only fear people higher level than you, because the aversion to a fair fight is strong, because the loss in losing is high.

Hrm, it sounds interesting.

Personally I'm more interested in Avatar combat (which is hard to find unique/well-excecuted in such a slamdown of variety of Clones) when it comes to MMORPGs.

As long if there's options, I really love the ability to have options in combat and things to look forward to as I advance... Ship combat doesn't interest me much though (as much as is DOES interest me, that's alot of stuff mate!).

Avatar combat is my ticket to success so far. My typical strategy in an encounter is to sail in as fast as possible, a strategy made most effective in my choice of the speed demon privateer as a career. I try and avoid wasting ammunition. If you slam broadsides, you have a chance of tangling riggings. If I do any shooting it's to take out the other ship's sails. In any case, I'm trying to board and swashbuckle ASAP. Why sink a good ship when you can sell it? People are free. Equipment is expensive. That's why I prefer to raid with swordsmen rather than waste ammo. Your crew regenerates. You have to buy supplies. It's all in all, a bargain leaning towards avatar combat as much as possible. You sound like you'd play a lot like me.

The default weapons for each career are rapiers for naval officers, smallsword/main-gauche for freetraders, and cutlasses for privateers, cutthroats and buccaneers. They get a unique fighting style respectively, fencing, florentine and "dirty fighting". Why the cutlass is associated with cheap shots, I don't know. Historically, it was favored on ships because let's face it, the deck is cramped, tangled with ropes and obstacles, and generally a pain to maneuver on. It'd be hell trying to swing a big sword. Cutlasses were pretty small, and good for boarding combat. But regardless... Fencing focuses on defense. Florentine focuses on offense, and dirty fighting focuses on ranged and debuffs.

Apparently, for a long time, PotBS was so intent on being realistic, that debuffs had no visible effect. The devs avoided anything remotely magical looking. But they recently compromised, so various effects do look more videogamish than before. This happened before I joined. Still, I like the game for trying to be a different kind of mmo, even at the expense of market. It's not WoW2.0, or Everquest 3.0. It's Pirates of the Burning Sea, and as long as it stays that way, I'll keep playing.

Wouldn't the ships burn on a burning sea?