MMORPG Reviews: Part 1 – Pirates of the Burning Sea

Before the release of Smash Brothers Brawl, I found myself looking for a new video game to play. It had felt like a long time since I had really gotten into a video game. It was then I realized that there was usually at least some MMORPG that I always had to play in the background. Thats what was missing. I didn’t have any MMORPG in the background that I enjoyed playing, so I started my search for the new Big MMORPG that will hopefully fill those moments of boredom when im not Smashing, Haloing, COD4 ing, or of course Colleging. In my search I ran into alot of ones I had already played and came up with my own ideas of what would be cool, so i decided to do a long series of posts about which games I thought were cool and which ones could have been better, ones Im looking forward to, and some that I think would be cool.

Enough ranting lets get into the good stuff. Pirates of the Burning Sea is one of the latest MMORPGs out there. If you can’t guess, your character is a Pirate, and well your goal is to explore and capture the Burning Sea. If you check out the website you don’t actually get much information that I could find on there. You can start out as a pirate or a member of one of the 3 major naval powers of the time, Britain, Spain, and France. From there you can be a Merchant, Naval Officer, or Mercenary. The class you pick determines your sword fighting style, or Swashbuckling, Fencing, and Dirty Fighting. These can be changed later on in the game.

Now lets start with the cool stuff: Character creation was indeed sweet. You have a wide range of stuff to truly create your own pirate or sailor. Your story starts off right as you are in a sea battle, and your captain has fallen, so whose to command the ship? You of course. After the first battle you head to port and welcome to your first town. The game is pretty cool in that its fighting is cool looking. Actual implementation of everything you wanna do is a little rough, but this is expected of any MMORPG. Sea battles were fun and exciting at first. Then when one drags on for a hour or so it gets a little repetitive, but it didn’t stop me from playing. I enjoyed most aspects of the Sea Battles. The intricacies like wind direction, boarding, broken masts, and you quickly get used to having to pull up side the other ship to fire all cannons.

The Bad Stuff: It just seemed like a Beta version or a Demo. The problem was it was the actual game. Now my roommate and I played the two week buddy version, but still, to both of us, the game simply felt unfinished. We asked our buddy who has the actual game and he said the main thing he has enjoyed is the huge PvP Naval battles, so that may be the game’s drawing point. The fighting was rough and the quests just didn’t seem very complete or in depth. It was usually just go out in the ocean and kill this guys ship. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Most of the moves you can learn lacked information and explanation. An Overall lack of information about the game, characters, quests, and moves + abilities annoyed me. Random glitches like when people attack your port you often see the ship going through the port.

The game idea was a really cool one and got my hopes up, but fell short of my expectations. There were a lot of small things thats added up that annoyed me, and although its hard to explain, the game simply felt unfinished to me. Hopefully the creators will be able to add much more depth to the game in patches and expansion packs. More involved quests, and much much more information about the game in general.

cout << “T Evans”