I refuse to play MMO's untill there's a Nintendo MMO, I'm going to be waiting a long time.

When they take a niche game like pirates in this time period and attempt to turn it into WoW, this is what you get.

I was waiting till they had a ninja MMO Luke. ^_^

How can this be? I just read an article on MSNBC that pirate attacks are up 20%!

[www.msnbc.msn.com]

It's way too much like Sid Meier's pirates except online.

I already saw this game on clearance at Target the other day. Never a good sign.

@ThatsMrOffDutyNinja:
Yeah, this would never happen to a NINJA MMO. Of course, if a ninja mmo game did exist, you wouldn't know about it. =/
What a connundrum.

While I am slightly biased with a dislike towards the grind and job like work of most MMOs, I must admit the Pirate idea would be fun if implemented well.
It's a shame WoW is so big, it's a great game and it's amazing what it has achieved. But it takes up all the market, leaving less room for other MMOs with good ideas, which this could of had.
But you try getting people to quit their level 70 Paladins they worked for for a Level 1 smelly Pirate.

You know instead of shutting down servers they could've given a 15day trial like most other MMOs do. With Pirates you have to buy it in order to just test it out, that put me off..

This is what happens to bad mmo's cashing in on the "Pirates" craze... I've played it and it was fun for a bit but paying a premium MMO price (at $15) Wasn't worht it for this game.

@Channing: I'd know about it seeing as I am off duty and all ;)

Maybe more people would play if it wasn't shiite? I tried it and found it lacking, then again I don't play any MMO's at the moment.

Nothing will ever even come close to touching WOW in the MMO world, and its a shame, I'd love for there to be some reason to play something else. After the failure that was Exteel i'm starting to lose hope.

Just because a game has an awesome concept doesn't make the game itself good.

I tried the beta and it was just too much like every other MMO but with another skin. The ship combat was fun and economy model was interesting but it was just as much "work over fun" as everything else in the genre.

Why can't I be a parrot? I should be able to squawk and fly and crap on people. They should be able to shoot/stab/eat me.

If they'd let people be parrots, this would solve all their problems.

THEY NEED TO HAVE A TRIAL! I'm not spending 40-50 dollars just to find out the game blows. I think it looks promising and I'd love to give it a try, however there needs to be a trial.

I refuse to play mmo...I don't have that time or dedication. I'll just stick with multiplayer games like warhawk. That's good enough for me. No mmo...stop making them!

It's funny but a pirate MMO *should* be the next World of Warcraft. Everyone wants to be a pirate. The concept alone should be enough to entice many people to join. I haven't played PotBS myself but I wonder what they got wrong if it is dead in the water (so to speak). Is it bugged, boring, too complicated, too realistic or what? Anyway, people who want their pirate fix can check out Puzzle Pirates. Not strictly an MMO but still enormous fun (and substantially free).

I would sign up but there are no Ninjas, and we all know

Ninga > Pirate ;)

@DrXym: Puzzle Pirates is unadulterated crack. D:

PotBS intrigued me at first but lacked the sparkle of something genuinely different - and without a trial to test it out, I'm certainly not investing in the game when there're so many like it available for free.

The problem is that Flying Labs is that they built a beautiful game... with only two missions. They had the "ship combat" mission and the "walk around bein' sword-fightey" mission. That's it...

It was boring. Great idea! Awesome concept! Really boring game...

It's their own damn fault. They knew from beta that sea travel times were outrageously long and perilous, and that basically forces out anyone who's not up for being bored out of their skulls from hours of dodging pirates.

The core gameplay is great, but they just went horribly wrong in design somewhere.

well there was some supernatural content, and that shit turned me off. Couldent care less if they want to ride they wave of pirates of the caribbean.
Give us some serious swashbuckling and get rid off the stupid mystique, its not necessary..

Even a game with Pirates has to be fun if it wants to get my subscription fee. PotBS just wasnt any fun for me.

Having played the beta, I was completely underwhelmed with the character creation and the basic gameplay. There was absolutely no way I was going to pay to play that game.

@masterdingo: I believe the tone was meant to be tongue-in-cheek...at least partially. Don't take it personally...unless the game fails, in which it's all your fault. ;)

WOW set the bar to high, so every other new mmo will have to fight a lot for a place. Mass advertising and trial periods will have to be included, otherwise theres not even a small chance to succeed.
Also its convenient that the game is fun and offers enough content not to get boring fast.
When i say "to get boring fast" i don't just mean lack of features, the fact that what they include is just like every other mmo, usually the parts we want to skip, like dull quests about gathering pieces of crap from 50 monsters over and over, doesn't really help to sell a new game.
I speak for myself here but i believe this is a general feeling, after 3 years of WOW, i don´t want another game that will make me level a character for a month with repetitive quests, then having to do the same for every new character i create. That instantly puts me off from any MMO.
Try different things, make it so its not that boring, advertise it like crazy and offer the chance to trial it just to that point you feel you need to buy the game to experience the rest. Ppl will play the game when that happens.

WOW was a big success because it gathered all the good things from previous MMOs and made it work together just right, but even that gets boring.

Honestly, this game really just isn't that great. Also, Disney just launched Pirates of the Carribean offerring pretty much the same atmosphere as PotBS (if not the same gameplay).

@Captain Impulse: Sweet! I've always wanted to be the reason a sub-par game croaks. Look out, Halo 3, you're next! :P

Despite my hatred of elves, fairies & the like I could not get into the whole pirate thing. I think I am just done with MMO's for now.

@masterdingo: Uh, joking, just a little. Though, now you mention it, I did play it for a bit, thought it was OK for an MMO. I hate MMOs, though.

I tried it for a week. The ship combat and trade was promising and could have gone somewhere. The walk around parts were very, very bad. Boring (and buggy, and unpredictable) combat mechanics, endless repetition, and animations that looked like they were produced by a first year 'Intro to 3d Modelling' class.

The big killer was that in order to progress on the shippy side, you have to wade through hours of these stupid, pointless, mind-numbing swashbuckling missions. Completely killed any fun that the other side of the game might have been. It was like some noob MBA suddenly decided, two thirds of the way through the game's development, that they just needed to be 'more like WoW'.

Free advice to MMOG companies: If you want to be the next WoW, start by designing a game that is as dissimilar to WoW as you can make it. The next WoW has to be a game that is so unlike WoW that nobody will have seen it coming.

I never bothered to pick it up because it seemed like Eve with a pirate skin. I'd rather fly past a moon than on the ocean : )

@Luke Plunkett: Cool, I respect that. I find the fact that Eve hasn't grown more in popularity than it has to be more of a disappointment than this game not pulling the type of audience that WoW has. So far, some good MMOs haven't taken off due to bad marketing / low resources (i.e., Auto Assault, Eve) but this one isn't really worth getting behind. Eve got something right that I feel needs to be expounded upon... you still level up skills, even when you're not signed in. There are 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week, and responsibilities that fill up at least 70 of the hours in that week. I would like to feel as though I accomplished something in a short period of time. That's probably where WoW / Guild Wars succeed and games like this and Lineage don't, it takes to long to feel as though you've accomplished something of worth. You can sign onto WoW with a new character and be level 5 within 15-20 minutes. In Guild Wars, you can either play through the main game, or take a fully leveled character of your design into PvP Arenas the moment that you sign in. Pirates are decent in concept, but boring in play. Even if you hit the more controversial side of pirating (raping, slave trading, murder of innocents, setting people adrift, kidnapping for ransom, shanghaiing for crew, etc) the actual life of a pirate was a boring day to day fight against scurvy. Games set in real history don't spark the imagination as deeply as games set in fantasy worlds, so games like this will continue to fail, even if their overall design is brilliant.

oops, "too" long*

You know, I had been very excited about this game until I actually got my hands on it. I mean, tactical ship-to-ship combat in a persistent world where nations are vying for port control? Sounds great!

The ship combat is great, but ends up being quite monotonous. Quite a few of the missions are just cut n' paste with names/places changed. That wouldn't be bad if you didn't run into them so often. Then you realize all of those "cool" tasks you hopped to accomplish can only really be done by large player organizations. Mix in an EVE-like economy system, and there's no reason for your average gamer to play.

Pirates of the Burning Sea isn't the next WoW, it's just another EVE. The difference being that both EVE and PotBS are boring on the 10-20minute scale, with the real fun lying in the metagames of economy and politics which few will put in the time to reach.

If you want a pirate MMO just go play puzzle pirates, it's free to play and download.

I agree Cordsie.

I'd be happy to buy a game, have fun and then move on. All that pointless grinding to unlock other aspects of the game is just artificially prolonging the game.

@Glazun: Thats precisely my problem with it. Also, there's the fact that when they had a beta and I got into it..it didn't run on my computer. I didn't bother tinkering with it to get it to work.

@cordsie: Agreed. That's how guild wars got popular. They took a lot of the elements of WoW and turned them COMPLETELY upside down (travel times, dependency on the best gear, and so on..) The next big seller will have to do the same..offer something that is a completely different experience. Also the graphics need to be pretty but not extremely dependent on video cards and on the fly rendering. A lot of games lately seem to rely more and more on the 3d modeling and less on the textures they put on the models and lower the system requirements. Examples: Tabula Rasa looked like crap on my computer. NWN 2 on the highest possible settings still looks like crap. Guild Wars and Lineage 2 look as beautiful on my INTEL "Graphics" laptop as they do on my gaming desktop. Too many people are buying computers with lots of space and next to no video card power. Making a game like Pirates of the Burning Sea, that will not run on this laptop but will run on my OLD gaming desktop which has half the processor and memory power, is like the game company saying "Hi, I want to shoot myself in the foot and alienate more than half the market from ever being able to play my product." Successful games like Guild Wars and WoW both go to great lengths to make their games as playable on as many systems as possible.

Heres why:

- Non consensual PvP.[1]
- One class is overpowered (naval officier)

[1] PvP become "almost" unavoidable.

Oh, I would love to play it. I just don't have the computer capable of doing so.

I used to play MMOs and I used to love it. My first was Ultima Online. As I played and experienced all the MMO's, it's safe to say that all MMO's in the end are all the same game, with different skins.

I don't play MMo's anymore. I noticed the more I played them, the worst I got in every other game. I lost my nice twitch response for FPS, my thinking skill for RTS. So...6 month out of a MMO now and I'm rocking the score boards again.

Anyways, that was off topic. PotBS was nothing new in the genre. Sure it had pirates, but it was basically EVE on the ocean.

Just because its an original attempt MMO doesn't mean its any good. There are numerous problems with the game, not to mention not a lot was heard about it.

@Tei: Unless something changed post launch, this is a crock. PVP is non consensual - IF you consensually enter a PVP zone. And considering how easy they are to spot..

Frankly, the game just didn't seem worth paying for.

I beta'd Pirates, and while, yes, they managed to make a pirate MMO, they also managed to make *a really Goddamned boring* pirate MMO. That part is important.

@macr0planet:I think you can say the same thing about all FPS's and all RTS's the drawing power of MMO's is the open worlds, the community, and a game that doesn't end. PotBS will last as long as the pirate craze, just as City of Heroes will last as long as superheroes are popular. The only difference is superheroes are becoming a popular part of the mainstream. But anything can change

1. Just because it's Pirates doesn't mean it'll have our money. If the game sucks, it sucks.

2.Make it for Mac and then we'll talk. If it is available for Mac, then I blame their marketing dept for not being informative. If it's not, then yeah, good, they deserve it.

Yeah... beta was horrible. They had some neat ideas, but after a few days ship combat got stale, which was the only strength in the entire game. The rest of it sucked. It was a very watered down eve online with pirates. Its not the fault of gamers for not liking it. It's the fault of Flying labs for making a crappy game.