Ubisoft to Publish Puzzle Pirates

Ubisoft announced this morning that they have come to an agreement with 3 Rings Design to publish Puzzle Pirates in retail stores. This exciting news couldn't come for a better game, winner of the IGF 2004 Technical Excellence and Audience Awards for Online games. From the Puzzle Pirates site: "Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is an online game in which you play a Pirate character in an ocean world. Hundreds of your fellow player Pirates swarm these Isles and Sea-lanes. For Pirates who love acronyms, Puzzle Pirates is an massively multi-player online roleplaying game, or mmoarrrrpg." Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is available for Demo on PC/Mac/Linux.

Multi-platform, eh?

[Paolo DF]

Strange, I just finished reading the 8-pages comments about Mac VS Wintel, where someone stated that good games don't get published simultaneously for PC and ;ac, and then we read that this new game is published at the same time for PC, Mac and Linux. Good!

What a terrible idea

[FortKnox]

Seriously... what a horrible idea. It was great as an online subscription game. Free game, $10 a month to play (much cheaper if you buy quarterly or yearly). But to charge people another $20? I don't think they'll recover the cost to produce/box/ship the game. They should simply sell it as a CD in a CD case for like $5 as they do with some demo discs for those with slow broadband connections.

Plus the PC game market is falling prey to the console market with its teenage-type games, and the only people look for is graphics.

I've seen far too many 'really good' games die off because they thought they'd play well sitting next to the latest fad game (ie - grand theft auto).

Re:Multi-platform, eh?

[Tobias Luetke]

This is because its written in Java. A fine choice for this kind of game I want to add.

Its great to see people using the right tools for the job.

Re:10 dollars a month

[chris09876]

I disagree. Movies are about the same cost, and you get a lot less entertainment out of them. Obviously it depends on the person - some people like playing online games, and some people don't. ...but for those people who like it, $10 is quite a deal.

I do agree that they should (a) make the game free to download if they're going to charge monthly, and (b) do some scaling on the price, so if you play less than 1 hour/month for example, you get the month free... ..., but you can really get quite a bit of entertainment from a multiplayer online game.

Re:Great Game

[TheSpoom]

Agreed. Honestly, it's the best community I've ever seen in an MMORPG (mostly because it seems to be a bit of an older one, attracting both men and women in their mid-20s). It has an entirely player run economy, very active devs and player support staff (OceanMasters are always on and always available to help), and it generates a sense of teamwork I haven't seen in any other game (effectively, you puzzle together to keep a ship afloat and running well).

Give it a try, you can download the client [puzzlepirates.com] and play it for a week free.

- Spoom
Captain of the Monkey Hunters
Prince of Angels and Demons
Evil-Eyed Peglegged Monkey Pirate

Re:10 dollars a month

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a lot cheaper if you buy in bulk. $75 for a year, or $20 for the first 3 months - which drops the price quite a bit.

-Liz

Cross-platform via Java

[Rescate]

From the Installation FAQ [puzzlepirates.com]:

Puzzle Pirates has been developed in Java. This has given Three Rings a lot of advantages, in particular being able to run on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying this makes it awesome, or that Java rules, or that it couldn't be done another way, or that cross-platform Java doesn't have its problems, etc. etc. etc. I'm just shedding some light on how it was "published at the same time for PC, Mac and Linux," by quoting directly from the FAQ.

Serious fun, Win or Mac

[David Rolfe]

I loved Puzzle pirates, and have been kicking myself for a year for not taking them up on the lifetime membership that was offered to beta testers. I'd love to play it, but just can't justify the monthly fee.

I'm really happy for the guys at Three Rings.

If it's not mentioned somewhere else, the Mac performance is weird (graphic trails, messed up transparency), but it's not Three Rings' fault, the JVM in Panther (so far) doesn't completely support the image object they use. I forget the name. I talked to the java-dev mailing list about it and a forth coming JVM will fix it. I don't know anything about when :-D Still very playable though, it's just not as polished as when running under the Sun x86 Jvm, I guess be forwarned if you are running out to the store to buy it.

(Caveat, never tried running it under Linux)

Re:Perfect solution for the MMORPG problem!

[David Rolfe]

Or you can stand around in bars AND DRINK. :-D MUaha.

Yeah, if you loved Puzzle Fighter you will LOVE sword fighting. And the team sword fights on the high seas are awesome. I totally agree with the parent poster -- Puzzle Pirates is to fun because it's not about you being 'level awesome' and me being 'level suck' because it's really about wits and spatial relationships. It's kinda the same thing that makes (forgive me) Counter-Strike fun, because it's not about how great your character is, or your +39 Sword of Mole Slaying or whatever...

Another plus is that it's not as Urgent as other mmmorpgs (or even Trade Wars ;). You can just pop on whenever, team up with your crew, or job with a friendly Flag and just have some fun and community.

Re:... All the avatars look like ...

[Drawkcab]

The graphics are intentionally cartoonish. I would have said they look like fisher price people. The game has an intentionally light atmosphere, so if you want to look intimidating its the wrong place.

You really can't play if you don't like puzzle games. Each of the games is different though, so its possible to play if you don't like any one particular game. You can choose which role to play on a crew based on which puzzles you prefer. But the one puzzle that you really can't avoid is the sea battle puzzle in which the entire crew participates. Fortunately no matter how poor you are your team still has a decent chance.

Re:Puzzle Ninjas is better

[Anonymous Coward]

You're just jealous that ninjas have real ultimate power.

http://www.realultimatepower.net/index4.htm [realultimatepower.net]

Re:Great Game

[cowscows]

There is a lot of competitiveness, if you go looking for it. And it manifests itself on a few different levels. There's things like one-on-one sword fighting and swordfighting (or drinking) tournaments. There's PVP sea battles. On a larger scale, flags (allied groupings of crews) can wage war on each other, and battle for control of the different islands in the game. There's actually some pretty intense political wrangling going on within the game, if you wish to get involved in it.

As for character development competitivness, there's an ingame economy, so there are of course people who's whole motivation is to amass more money than everyone else. The game does also give you stats on your performance in different puzzles, although you're ranked in more general categories (novice, able, respected, master, ultimate, etc...), instead of seeing a numerical value, sort of like how karma works on /. now.

Usually when there's insults flying, it's good natured, except on the puzzle pirate forums, which I tend to avoid.

Re:10 dollars a month

[mogwai_merritt]

Puzzle Pirates *is* free to download, with Win, Mac, and Linux clients. What are the Prices? Pricing for Puzzle Pirates is as follows: Monthly: $9.95 / month. Quarterly: $19.95 / first quarter, $24.95 / subsequent. [ $7.90 / month average over a year ] Annually: $74.95 / year. [ $6.25 / month ]

Game has multiple levels

[diagonti]

I've been playing this game for about a year now. I run a small crew of skilled pirates.

One of the things that keeps me coming back is the way this game has so many levels. When you first start playing the game, it is all about mastering different puzzles. After a while, you realize that their are ships to run. And you move to the level where you are not only doing a puzzle, but managing a ship and other pirates. You then spend your next chunk of time learning to do this well. It is often an exercise is multitasking combined with a bit of being social. After a while, you realize there are things to do and places to go with your ship. You start exploring the ocean and investigating how the economy works. This leads you in to investigating running a shop. At this point you start playing the economy game -- running a shop, managing labor and raw materials, and selling goods. Puzzle Pirates has a real, working, complex economy. Evenutally, you'll realize that your crew is in a flag and that your flag is involved in politics. And these politics can be fascinating.

And that's the level I'm at. And I suspect there is something more out there, but I'm still looking. At this point, I sometimes log in and just play the economy game - no puzzling involved. At other times I log in and puzzle for a couple hours. And sometimes I just log in to chat with all the interesting people I've met in game.