Set sail on seas of adventure with the producer for Pirates of the Burning Sea

By Michael Lafferty

Massively multiplayer game transports players to the Caribbean in the 1720s

The warm Caribbean washes against you and the breeze gently caresses you. An enemy comes in from your right and you loosen your guns on him. Wait … that shouldn’t be on your right, that should be to the starboard. And that water is washing against you because you are a boat.

What’s going on here?

I wanted to be a brigand of the high seas, not a brigantine on the high seas.

The game is Pirates of the Burning Sea, a pending online massively multiplayer adventure from Flying Lab Software. It is slated for release in Spring of 2004.

The game takes place in the year 1720, with the setting being the New World that has become a battleground. Spain, England, and France are all vying for control of the Caribbean, and the territory is a microcosm for the turbulent times and old hatreds.

Unlike a lot of MMORPGs, the setting for Pirates is reality based. The whole of the Caribbean is waiting to be discovered again, players can leap right in and customize their ships and the skills are based on knowledge and practice.

Russell Williams, producer on Pirates of the Burning Sea, anchored for a moment or two to speak with GameZone.com about the pending title.

Question: Tell us a little about the underlying story for Pirates of the Burning Seas, please. Is there a plot that will weave this all together, or is this a wide-open MMORPG?

Russell: It's 1720, and the Caribbean has become a battleground. The three great powers -- Britain, Spain, and France -- are fighting over the riches of the New World. Naval officers, merchants, pirates, and privateers seek their fortunes as captains of swift sailing ships.

The story of the game is the life your character lives. Over the course of your career you might be a brave naval officer who distinguishes himself in wartime, then retires to the merchant life and eventually becomes a dastardly pirate! Along the way you'll encounter periods of war and peace, the cutthroat competition of international commerce, the rise and fall of pirate kingdoms, and your own tangled web of alliances and betrayals.

Ultimately, we believe that player interaction is the best story of all.

Q: How much impact will players have on the persistent world? How much of the play will evolve around trade routes and island politics?

Russell: Pirates of the Burning Sea offers a dynamic world of politics, commerce, and war. Our international relations system analyzes player activity and produces appropriate effects. If Spain's trading fleets grow significantly, British ports may put tariffs on Spanish goods to protect their own traders. Prices at each port rise and fall on the basis of production, consumption, and trade. And the player's own actions affect his or her reputation. Notorious pirates can't enter respectable ports, and town magistrates only give their important missions to people of sterling character and a track record of success.

Q: What do you think intrigues people about this era and will make this a MMP that will attract gamers?

Russell: It's a very accessible genre, familiar from movies and books. This is a time and place famous for adventure, excitement, and romance. And it's not bound to the clichés of swords and sorcery, with endless dungeons and spell lists and monsters.

We believe there are gamers out there who have played fantasy and sci-fi games endlessly, especially in MMORPGs, and who are open to new ideas.

Q: With a rapidly growing MMP market, what do you think are the essential ingredients for a MMP and how does Pirates fit that bill?

Russell: There are two ways to gain an advantage: buy awareness with a large investment and/or a big license, or make a game so unlike the rest that it's impossible to ignore. A Tale in the Desert, for example, has a very small player base and is clearly a niche game, but it has a lot of awareness because it's such an unusual approach. Star Wars: Galaxies on the other hand has a big license and a fat bankroll.

In our case, we are offering a very different genre and play style. Our combat is real-time tactical naval warfare, neither click-and-forget or twitch. Our economy and politics are dynamic and tied intricately into player actions. And after the Pirates of the Caribbean and Master and Commander movies, people are more familiar than ever with the genre and eager to give it a spin.

Q: Rather than people having human or avatars of other races, the central characters are ships? How do you see that affecting the community dynamic? What kind of chat system do you have in place?

Russell: The sailing ships of this era are stunning creations, at once both beautiful and powerful. Every player is the captain of their own ship, free to make their way in the world. You have your own skills, which you can improve over time as in other MMORPGs. But as in a racecar videogame, you can also extensively customize your ship with a fat list of modifications to tweak speed, performance, combat specs, cargo storage, crew efficiency, and more. We'll launch with about twenty different ship types, ranging from small, swift sloops to monstrous 74-gun ships of the line. And through our peer-reviewed submission website you can customize your ship with your own original sail and flag textures, created by you and other users, to express your creativity and distinguish yourself on the high seas.

We are going to expand the game over time to add human avatars, towns, land adventures, and so on. But our initial focus and primary gameplay is on these massive ships in all their glory.

Chat is critical to MMORPGs because it's what builds community. Our chat system should be very familiar to anyone who has used Windows Messenger. You've got a buddy list with user-defined groups. You can chat with anyone in your buddy list at any time. You can also chat with any nearby ship. And in port, each location in a town -- such as taverns, shops, shipyards, and admiralties -- has its own chat room you automatically join when you enter that location.

We are not, however, doing any sort of global shout. You can chat to nearby ships, or anyone in your buddy list, but you can't just spam every logged-in player with your cries of "Yar!"

Q: What are the PvP elements of this game?

Russell: Pirates of the Burning Sea is a fully PvP world. Ship-to-ship combat is an important part of the game and is a hell of a lot of fun. If you are sunk, you lose your ship and cargo but your character's abilities are not penalized. You can get another ship and get back in the action.

We believe the game's major focus will be the nation vs. nation competition. The international relations between Britain, Spain, and France are a major aspect of play that players affect with every action they take. Whether it's bitter trade wars or open conflict, the sides keep changing and the stakes keep rising.

We've been impressed with Dark Age of Camelot's RvR play. We're opening that up even further, with dynamic alliances/enemies and all the ocean as your battlefield.

Q: What kind of graphics engine does this game use and what new graphical elements will gamers see in this game? 

Russell: Our engine is the Vicarious Visions Alchemy engine, which we've found to be superbly engineered. In our tests we've had it pushing over a million shaded polygons on-screen at acceptable frame rates.

We are building Pirates of the Burning Sea to make use of the latest DirectX 9 and PixelShader 2 technologies. One thing this means is that our ocean looks fantastic.

Perhaps the most noticeable graphical element in our game is the ship you're sailing. The ship models range from 60,000 to 350,000 polygons -- far, far more than any human avatar has in other games. Our friends at Akella Studios in Russia are modeling these 3-D ships and they are putting obsessive details in them. The ships look amazing and really show off the Alchemy engine.

Q: What are the system requirements?

Russell: We'll announce final specs after beta, but our current expectations are for a 1gHz CPU with at least a GeForce 3. You'll also need broadband, as we do not support dial-up connection speeds.

Q: Will this game feature streaming downloads or monthly updates? How much live event content will there be?

Russell: Valve has developed an online gaming application called Steam, which they've recently released and that is used to play Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike online. Steam also delivers patches and new content in the background, streaming it down so it's automatically ready the next time you launch the game.

We are using Steam to sell, distribute, and update Pirates of the Burning Sea. Through Steam we'll release updates and major new features and content, such as human avatars, free to players. We have enough new features in the works to keep us busy for at least a couple years, and we're thinking up more all the time. And thanks to our online forums, we are constantly getting great suggestions and discussion from our future players. It'll be with their guidance that we'll prioritize new features after the game's release. You will help determine what the game becomes as time goes on.

Q: How many servers are you anticipating having for this title and what will be the server capacity?

Russell: Our launch strategy is still under consideration, but we are leaning towards launching with just a couple of servers and a limited-player base. We aren't looking to do a huge launch with massive marketing. We want to grow the game in stages, bringing more capacity online and adding new features. As the player base grows and the game's scope expands, we'll push more aggressively into the mainstream. But we're starting with hardcore gamers, and we're building a game they're going to love.

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