Pirates of the Burnings Seas

Last night as I was logging into EQ2 to do a bit ‘o crafting, I noticed that my Pirates of the Burning Seas account was active for the next 12 days. How weird is it that Sony re-activates accounts without any notification (unless it got lost to a spam filter)?

I’m sort of tempted to update my client just to take a peek in to see what improvements they’ve made to that game. In retrospect, my reaction to POTBS was a foreshadowing of my reaction to Warhammer. I enjoyed it until I’d got bored with the thin PvE content, did a bit of PvP, then left. Actually PvP in POTBS was a lot more hardcore than it is in Warhammer since you could lose your ship if you got ‘sunk’ enough times. More like EVE in that way.

I love the ambiance of naval combat in POTBS, but really the glory in ship to ship battle in the age of sail comes from fleet battles, not the one-vs-several battles that were offered in PvE, which looked great but quickly became routine. You could do small fleet battles in PvP but I just don’t have the heart to risk a few weeks of wheeling and dealing to get a ship built, only to lose it forever in a night’s play. Had I built the game, I would’ve had the players controlling a handful of ships, adding more as they leveled up.

The land combat, the swashbuckling, was terrible in POTBS. They keep promising to give that an overhaul but I’m not sure if they’ve done so yet. And the land environments were all cookie-cutter. When you entered your first town it was fun to explore, but then you’d travel down the coast to the next port and find that the town layout there was exactly the same. *yawn*

But there was a very rich economic component, and I’m still loving Nile Online. The problem here in POTBS was that the ultimate goal of the economic game was buying ships for PvP. Adding some kind of properties you could buy — a mansion or something — could make the game interesting from a purely economic point of view.

Maybe some of these changes have been made. It might be worth just taking a peek to see how the game is looking these days. I’m sure Bildo would be 100% behind me playing another MMO!!! 🙂

4 thoughts on “Pirates of the Burnings Seas

  1. I can’t believe this game is still running. Station Pass must really do wonders for titles. I actually have a copy and never activated the CD Key. had a decent time in beta I guess, not something I would play consistently.

  2. POTBS changed later so you were reimbursed whenever you lose a durability point, which takes some of the sting out of it. I thought it was a fun game, but I got bored after a while because it was a little too much cut and paste of the same maps, textures, everything over and over again. After the server merges happened, I stopped logging in. I’d love to see how its improved since I left. I’m only playing three MMOs right now, a fourth wouldn’t hurt.

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