About
Pirates of the Burning Sea
Pirates of the Burning Sea online game design by the United States Flying Lab Software development of the massively multiplayer online games (MMORPG). 1720 games to the Caribbean Sea and the coastal areas as the background, then the United Kingdom, France and Spain tripartite confrontation, in order to sea for the hegemony of wealth in the sea and launched on the life-and-death struggle. Such a body in the grand and broad in the world, players can not only sailing trips, can also choose to join the party, to participate in a large-scale sea battle.
Pirates of the Burning Sea have been in development since 2002. During the first few years of development, Flying Lab Software realized that this project required more attention than anticipated. Gradually, not only have they more than doubled their staff, but have also put an MMO entitled Delta Green (based on the role-playing game of the same name), on hold. Beta testing began on 14th December 2005, and ran until 1st January 2008.
Pre-release started on January 7th, 2008 for players who purchased the pre-order. The retail release date was January 22nd, 2008. The game is subscription based, and requires a monthly fee to play, except for the first which is free. It is also included in Sony Online Entertainment's All Access Pass, which is a monthly subscription service that provides access to all of SOE's games for a flat monthly fee. In April 2008 one time server transfers were added along with the announcement that the original server list was being reduced to 4, in an effort to increase server populations. As of 4/08 the four active servers available for new player creation and transfers to are Antigua, Blackbeard, Rackham and Roberts. All remaining servers have had new character creation suspended, and they will be deactivated "in a little more than a month" to give players a time to research the 4 available servers before moving their avatars.
Players will choose a Career for their avatars when they begin the game. The Career will determine what abilities and features he will accrue as a captain. The player will receive one point for his avatar's career on every other level gained. These points can be spent in various ways depending on which career the player has chosen. Once a career is chosen, it cannot be changed.
There are a total of 45 skills for each Career. The skill trees are composed of 9 skill chains, each 5 skills in depth. A player will be able to reach the end of a single skill chain by Rank 15, and is then considered somewhat equal to a Rank 50 in that skill chain.
The different careers for nationals (British, Spanish, and French) are:
Naval Officer - Focuses on defense, escorting duties, and direct, broadside-to-broadside combat. Naval Officers gain access to powerful ships of the line.
Privateer - Focuses on utilizing the advantages of smaller ships to outmaneuver and outwit opponents. Privateers have an edge in boarding combat and can learn a skill that enables them to use Pirate PVP zones.
Freetrader - Focuses on trading, production and economics. They have abilities to effectively evade opponents in combat. Freetraders may learn skills that increase their ability to gather resources and produce goods.
The different careers for pirates are:
Cutthroat - All-around capability including the special ability to take command of defeated ships. These ships only have one durability point. If a Pirate takes command of a class specific ship he will automatically be flagged for PVP. Before version 1.4 this career was called just "Pirate" and was the only career available to the 'Pirate' faction.
Buccaneer - More advanced career with more in the moment type skills. The command oriented "pirate", can use and collect captured ships deeds and can buff allied ships.
Players in Pirates of the Burning Sea will create up to six avatars per server to represent themselves in the game. All avatars will be captain of their own ship, and will fight either for a nation of their choice or as a Pirate (see below). As the player moves along in the game, the avatar will develop by gaining ranks. Through gaining ranks, the player can unlock new features, fighting abilities, and most importantly will be able to captain larger and better ships. The maximum rank a player can reach is 50.
When the avatar is first created, the player chooses a faction to join. This can be any one of Britain, France, Spain or the Pirates, known as the Brethren of the Coast. The Dutch are also shown throughout the game, but are not a playable faction. A player is restricted to one nation per server, and this choice can only be undone by deleting all of that player's characters on that server. Each of the four nations will have different starting ports, and therefore access to different resources at the start of the game. This remains somewhat controversial, as while a National character can have any and all classes (Privateer, Naval Officer, Freetrader), a Pirate player is limited solely to pirates on that server, and can only have cross-class 'alts' on a separate server.
The recent server merge (collapsing servers from 11 to 4, through character transfers) has further complicated the situation as, despite being open to all, different servers cater to different populations and have different peak activity (for example, Roberts is an 'EU' server, with high activity during it's corresponding time-zone). Only one semi-official European server exists, so the issue remains to be resolved.
After a player has chosen a nation, he will be able to customize the looks of his avatar. These will be alterable in-game and do not affect game play directly. There are thousands of different combinations available to the player, who can freely specify each of the 14 different slots. Most items allow color customization to further personalize the avatar's look. The avatar's appearance is also based on level; the more impressive and intricate clothing is restricted to higher level avatars. Certain items, such as peg legs or hooks for hands, must be earned through completing missions.