Pirates of the Burning Sea Starts Beta

An anonymous reader writes "Pirates of the Burning Sea is a fresh thinking MMORPG that is not based on the typical leveling treadmill like so many others. You can find a podcast interview with designer John 'Rev' Tynes at MMORadio. From the site: 'Britain, Spain, and France are carving up the Caribbean with the thunder of cannon. Fleets lay siege to ports bursting with wealth, eager to claim them for King and Country. The sea burns with the fires of glory. From the haze of battle emerges the Black Flag, and into the chaos plunge pirates, bold and resolute. This is your world now, a world of battle and intrigue, and you will captain your ship through the pages of legend!'" It's great to see one of these more niche games getting out into the wild like this.

Source for start of beta news?

[Tyger]

Where is the source for the news that beta is started? The closest I can find is news that they are very close now, but the last report was that it had not actually started yet.

Re:Source for start of beta news?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.flyinglab.com/forums/showthread.php?s=& threadid=9487 [flyinglab.com]

Sorry forgot to put it in the article I submitted :)

Re:Noooooo

[Tyger]

It means you don't get into the first round.

Which, considering it is only 23 people, wasn't very likely to begin with.

Re:I loved that game!

[David Rolfe]

I didn't compare it to puzzle pirates, that was another poster... but anyhow. Puzzle Pirates doesn't have leveling either. There is no treadmill in Puzzle Pirates unless you count earning money (via pillaging or economy). You are rated in your skills against other players by how well you perform those skills.

Other than that they only resemble each other to the same degree that all MMOs do.

Well only if you mean to say "they only resemble each other to the same degree that all mmogs set in the Carribean golden age of piracy do" which currently is one game: Puzzle Pirates. With another now in beta: PotBS. Other mmogs don't feature sea-battling or pillaging or naval blockading at all.

I guess the similarity would only be obvious if you had actually spent any honest time playing Puzzle Pirates (i.e., participating in the navy, economy, politics, war, blockading islands, sea-battle with broadsides and sailing and gunning and repairing and bilging and grappling and melee, crafting, shipping, foraging, commanding a crew and vessel, building and owning a ship or ships, learning charts, customizing the appearance and dress of your pirate, injuries at sea for patches and pegs and hooks earned not chosen, furnishing your home(s) with player crafted goods, etc). You don't level though. You are bestowed a rank by other players and by the navy.

PotBS really does sound (from developer descriptions), as the other poster put it, like Y!PP but in 3D. Everything in their feature list is already in Y!PP except the DirectX requirement (Y!PP is multi-platform). When the beta is more open I'm sure plenty of posting will come out by players with extensive experience in both games.

I'll tell you what -- I've been playing Y!PP for like 2 years. Ask me about any feature that PotBS has and I'll explain how it works in Puzzle Pirates. That way we can determine what's revolutionary about PotBS.

I'll start off with one from the screenshots -- it seems that PotBS has day and night. In Puzzle Pirates it is always daylight on the high seas and it only night at an island when the undead walk. Night time lasts on the island until all of the skellies are defeated. The Developers of Puzzle Pirates axed day and night back in 2002 here [puzzlepirates.com] and here [puzzlepirates.com] from the feature list (it even sounds like if Puzzle Pirates was rendered in 3D and not pre-drawn sprites it would have day/night...). Pirates never sleep. :-D I'll expect that PotBS has accelerated time like in say, Zelda or GTA making the feature anything but revolutionary. Real-time day and night has already been featured in Animal Crossing (though that's probably not the first example).

We've been watching for the revolution for over a year now. [puzzlepirates.com] The PotBS devs must have been reading the YPP forums, because nowadays they are touting their 'no level treadmill' just like puzzling pirates were saying a year and a half ago.