August 24, 2007

Pax 2007

Flying Labs’ John Tynes chats about Pirates of the Burning Sea

“I love the ship combat; it’s always different, it’s never the same thing twice”

The folks at Flying Lab have been working on an ambitious sea-combat, swashbuckling massively multiplayer title for five years now. Pirates of the Burning Sea, to be published by Sony Online Entertainment, is getting close to release. The game, on display at the Penny-Arcade Expo in Seattle, is getting its share of tweaks and polish, with “stuff being turned on” that players – participating in the beta – have yet to see.

According to producer John Scott Tynes, “the biggest thing we are working on now is sword fighting.”

Tynes has been onboard since the project’s start. A lot of water has gone under the hull of this title and Tynes was kind enough to take a few moments to share some thoughts on the title.

Question: When you began the project, there were not a lot of ‘pirate’ games in the genre but now there have been several period titles. Do you think the market is saturated and are you going to have to work doubly hard to ensure your niche?

John: I’m not worried about saturation. When we began this project five years ago, pirate games just about didn’t exist. There was Sea Dogs and that was just about it. And seeing the stuff come back – like Sid Meier’s Pirates coming back and seeing the Disney people doing their kid cartoon pirate game – happy to see that stuff, it’s great to get the word out there but the game that we are making is not like anything else that is on the market. With our ship combat system the way it is, with our player-driven economy, with our PvP system where you can conquer the game world, it’s a very different experience. So we are very pleased that people are still loving pirates and they are ready for the best game ever.

You’ve been working on the game for five years. Graphically, what changes have taken place in that time frame?

John: Boy, you know … our water, for example, has gone through a bunch of iterations. Early on the ocean was Ok for its time, five year ago, but we kept working on it and our artists ended up making this amazing ocean, the most beautiful water I’ve seen in a game.

Another one is our avatars. We built our character arts over the last couple of years, kind of building a system and how it was going to work and made a bunch of art for it, and at the end of that time, we realized that the characters we made were really not up to where we were at artistically, at that point. So we actually threw out all of our character art about eight months ago and re-did it all from scratch. And it looks amazing now. We’ve come so far.

It’s been that kind of stuff, just raising the bar for ourselves, and then going back and redoing and replacing older stuff to make it look really great is an ongoing process.

Did you find yourself chasing the technology growth over the five-years this game has been in development?

John: The truth is the technology caught up to us. When we began the project, it was much more of a niche game; we expected a small audience and were making it for hardcore gamers. Our system specs, five years ago, were really ambitious. At that time we really required a cutting-edge machine. Five years down, now, if you’ve got a 6800-generation Nvidia – two years, three years ago – you will run the game great. At this point we really a high target early on and as the price of the hardware has come down, it has gotten to the point where any recent machine with a solid video card should be a great machine to play. That’s a great place to be. We’ve seen a lot of people who have played WoW on their eight-year-old machine, their crappy old computer, so we are very happy that by setting the bar so high, the technology has caught up to us to a point where a lot of people can play the game and have a good time with it.

You signed up with Sony to publish Pirates. Where you always looking for a publisher or did that opportunity just present itself and you saw it as an opportunity worth taking?

John: Early on we were going to use Steam, Valve’s software, but we decided after a while that we wanted to go on our own and do our own thing. What really changed our attitude was the success of the Disney movies. As Pirates of the Caribbean came out and did so well, it was clear there was a lot more excitement about Pirates in general than there was five years ago. And once that happened, and once that changed occurred, we really wanted to make sure it was available to everybody, that it was in the Best Buys and the Wal-marts and so forth. We could do our own self-publishing, no problem, with digital download, and we were going to do that, but once we realized we really wanted to get a retail presence out there and reach a retail audience we really had to make a deal with a publisher to do that. SOE came along and we talked with them for a long time. They’ve obviously shipped a ton of titles; they are doing our marketing, distribution and billing; we’re making the game and so it’s a great deal cuz we get to focus on what we want to do – which is make a really great game and they get to do the stuff that we really don’t know anything about. We’re not marketing people, we’re not distribution people.

Do you have plans for expansions for PofBS or will it primarily be downloadable content?

John: It will be both. We have a pretty ambitious list of features we want to add to the game after release. We want to have an officer system, we want to add politics where you can vote for who should be magistrate of a given port and we want to add a lot more stuff like that. Much of that is going to be downloadable, free, just constant updates as we go along. We will be adding new features all the time and new missions as well. We will be doing retail expansion packs eventually and those will probably be some new zone, some new area of content to go explore. But as far as adding new features, that will all be core content; that will all be free.

What is your favorite aspect of playing Pirates?

John: I love the ship combat; it’s always different, it’s never the same thing twice. And especially when you begin playing against other players, when a PvP opens up around a town that is under attack and you can go in there and fight it off, it’s really fantastic because players are always the best enemies. They are far smarter than any AI.

You’ve taken some liberties with ship combat in that rather than force people to tack with the wind and so on, you’ve sped it up and sacrificed reality for the sake of gameplay. Did you find that was an easy decision to make?

John: It took us a long time to find the sweet spot. We started off in a much more realistic space and just playing it, playing it and playing it and finding the places where it was boring, or dull or hard or whatever. We had an entire wind system that was really complicated, there were different currents of wind around a geographical area, and it was just a nightmare because you couldn’t tell where the wind was well enough to really kind of know where to go without putting big icons in the game world to tell you were to go. So stuff like that we kept trying it and changing it, trying it and changing it, and we just kept iterating until we got to a point where we got the flavor that stuff. Your ship still moves in real time and the wind is still hugely important in battle. If you have to turn through the wind or sail upwind, it’s going to cut your speed down dramatically; it is a big deal. But it is not going to take you to a stop, it’s not going to lock you in place for 10 minutes, it’s pretty quick. So the smarter you are about playing, the more experience you get playing the better a fighter you are going to be. And it’s not just leveling up and getting skills, it’s about player skill as well. We really do feel like we have brought about ship combat that is certainly much closer to the tactics of naval warfare.

 So finding that sweet spot has been our goal and I think we really nailed it.

Are you happy that the game is so close to release?

John: Yes, I’ve been there since the start and I’ll have been working on this game for five years this fall. Five years is a long time to work on one project so I’m looking forward to shipping this puppy. It’s been a great ride.

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