So I’ve been playing through Pirates of the Burning Sea and I have a problem. It’s to do with being on rails. Not on rails like with what has happened with WoW quests since Cataclysm, (oh such a fitting expansion title), but a different kind of rails.
Literal rails.
You see, when you enter a town in PotBS your entry point is a dock. Funny that, seeing as you’ve arrived on a fucking ship. And you walk along the dock, and perhaps the dock turns, like into an L shape. On the sides of the dock there is now ground. Perhaps a town common with a comely wench lying provocatively on the grass. I know what I’ll do; I’ll jump off the dock, (it’s not high at all), and go and check out the chick.
But I can’t. Because I run into an invisible wall. I am literally on rails. The only path I may take, the only thing that I may do, is walk along the dock. I can walk anywhere on the dock that I wish, but I cannot jump off it. As a matter of fact I cannot even jump. I hate not being able to jump in an MMO, and I really hate invisible walls. Can I dive off into the water? No, I can’t. Can I enter the water? No? Can I swim in the water? Not a fucking chance. Well, what the fuck can I do? You can walk on the fucking dock.
Apparently Sony has been designing this game for a long time, like four or five years long. So what were they doing? I don’t know, because when you look at it the vast majority of the game world is water, (which you can’t swim in, or you can but I’m so stupid that I don’t know how). So the only areas of the world that they had to design were the towns. And they put you on rails. This is really lazy stuff. There are some great towns too. Towns set into sheer cliffs that soar above your head, with bridges that swing lazily from precarious drops. Can you jump off a bridge into the water? Nope. The houses, can you walk into a house? Only some of them if there is a quest that you are on. The majority of them are façades.
This is a façade of a game. Apparently my ship can do 45 knots on the open sea, which is amazing considering that historically it would have been pushing it to reach ten. There might be an intricate crafting and economic world going on here, but there is no immersion in this game. Sailing a ship is as simple as pointing in the direction that you want to go. Run into a cliff or a sandbank or a coral reef? Bump, oops, just keep going. How about the weather, the greatest enemy that ship captains and their crews had to deal with. The horrors of a lee shore? They don’t exist. So trundling around in your ship, the only danger is from some other player if you wander into a PvP circle zone, but seeing as I’m doing 45 fucking knots I can leave him for dead if I have a run on him already.
It’s disappointing, it really is. The ship to ship fighting is amazing, but it’s not enough when faced with this half assed excuse for a game.
May 2, 2011 at 6:28 pm
I think your on point about being on rails, jumping and the over all feel that the game in not open world…..I love the ship battles…but the game is a little confusing at times….What game would you recommend?
May 2, 2011 at 10:43 pm
I don’t know what to recommend. I’m still looking. Sometimes I wonder if this hobby has passed me by.
May 3, 2011 at 4:22 am
No mention of how the towns pretty much all use one of the three or so templates? It’s a bit sad that it has such a lack of immersion, since it at least has some sort of world, unlike WoW which seems dead set and keeping us in Stormwind or a random dungeon. So much potential, but I guess that’s how it goes when you’re not running with a WoW budget. Or maybe it’s just that Sony hates every one of us personally, like a reverse Jesus.
May 3, 2011 at 5:45 am
Yeah, good pick up about the three templates, I forgot that.
As far as Jesus is concerned, fuck jesus.
May 3, 2011 at 6:26 am
Don’t want to repeat myself, but ok – check out Fallen Earth. Quite possibly best mmorpg for explorers and freeroam players.
May 3, 2011 at 10:33 pm
Thanks for repeating yourself neko; I’m going to check it out this weekend.
May 3, 2011 at 12:20 pm
Pirates of the Burning Sea is a game of ship-to-ship combat built on a shoe-string. Do you really think it would be a good use of resources to let you kill yourself by jumping into the sea, or off a cliff? You would do it once, then get bored of it. Let me say it again: it’s a game of ship-to-ship combat, not a game of world exploration. I never heard you complain that WoW, with all its resources, didn’t allow you to sail ships out of the harbour, or fight other ships. Or even row rowing-boats.
As for ships travelling at 45 knots, well, it’s not a realistic simulation, any more than WoW is a realistic simulation of hand-to-hand combat. I didn’t ever hear you complain that WoW’s swords are too big to wield.
You seem to want Pirates of the Burning Sea to provide a more complete MMORPG than WoW, with a fraction of its resources. Be fair. The game is a game of ship-to-ship combat. Don’t ask them to spend costly resources turning it into WoW.
May 3, 2011 at 9:27 pm
It doesn’t matter how many times you say it’s a game of ship-to-ship combat, it doesn’t make invisible walls a better design decision.
And so what if it was made on a smaller budget than WoW? It just means the bad elements are in it because of money rather than poor design. It doesn’t make the game any better.
If they don’t have the resources to put in a decent implementation of getting off the ship, then maybe they shouldn’t have that in a ship-to-ship combat game at all. Eve has managed pretty good without it up until now.
May 4, 2011 at 11:33 am
They do have a reasonably decent implementation of life in towns (which is good because that’s where questgivers and economic life are).
In ,y opinion, the “invisible walls” are an excellent design decision for this game. They don’t annoy me in the least. In fact, I like them, and don’t consider them a ‘bad element’. I don’t want to have to worry about drowning by falling off the dock or off a cliff.
The alternative you suggest of redesigning the whole of questgiving, most of the quests and virtually all economic behaviour simply to prevent you getting off a ship, simply in order to not have to solve the invisible walls “problem” is really throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Do you really think such a massive amount of work at this stage is better than spending their developer resources on anything else?
If you’re just saying “well, I wouldn’t have developed the game like that in the first place”, that’s not very helpful at this stage, unless you are planning to develop your own version.
May 3, 2011 at 10:37 pm
Dacheng,
As others have said, if you’re not meant to explore a town then don’t put the town in the game. But to add to my post, the walls are just completely unnecessary as you can access all the points around them eventually. So why have them in? And you can get away with having big swords in WoW. But having your little sailing ship travel at the speed of a slick racing boat with twin 350 Merlins on the back is the equivalent of your sword suddenly being able to fire Stinger missles.
May 4, 2011 at 11:34 am
Oh, you mean like wands?
May 3, 2011 at 6:28 pm
Some points raised in the comments here are valid. But just look at the post again.
THE GAME HAS INVISIBLE WALLS. OH, GOD – THE HORROR.
I’m just going on how adam has described it: there’s an open space. An open space of fairly long distance. But there’s a wall. AN INVISIBLE WALL.
You could say there are invisible walls in WoW, too, but there not nearly this obvious or annoying.
I will say this once, and only once. Invisible walls are wrong. They are oppressive relics from a bygone video game age. They are immoral. They are enraging. Don’t put invisible walls in your game.
May 4, 2011 at 11:55 am
If it bothers you, it would be relatively easy to partially solve the problem by putting a visible fence or railings around the dock and other walkways, and on cliff-edges. Of course, there would still be other invisible walls, as you walk inland from towns but I don’t think these would be all that bothersome to most people, even Adam (who one must admit is never happier than when he’s whining).
If they are still bothersome, I suppose you could use WoW’s trick of surrounding everything with high mountains or fatigue-inducing seas. But why bother? If you’re playing the game because you enjoy exploration games, you’ll get as little joy out of it as you would get out of playing chess as an exploration game. Sorry, but you just can’t move your chess-pieces anywhere. There is an invisible wall around the chessboard. If you think you should be able to fall off the edge and come up on the other side, you’re playing the wrong game.
May 4, 2011 at 10:17 pm
Dacheng,
Wands are a very established part of the fantasy genre, which makes them totally appropriate in such a setting. By your comment, which is rather stupid and illogical, I’m beginning to wonder whether you’re just trolling this issue.
May 6, 2011 at 3:02 pm
Okay, let me try to less oblique. The speed of your ship in pirates of the burning sea is no more 45 knots than the speed of the starship enterprise is warp 5. In both cases it is a fictional invention. In the case of Pirates of the burning sea, your ship can move in open seas at 45 distance points per second, which the designers have called 45 knots to impart a nautical flavour to the whole affair. All other players can get ships that can travel at this exact same speed, if the want. The only thing that’s important is your speed relative to other players
Moreover, you really ought to explain to your readers what “Open Sea Speed” is, compared to “Battle Speed”. I’ll try.
Open Sea speed is the speed your ship travels when your just trying to travel from some point in the caribbean to another distant point on the map. The designers conveniently decided to let us skip the two weeks of sailing that this would normally take, so they speed the ships up for this bit of game-play. It’s somewhere in between a teleport in World of warcraft and a very fast flying mount. You’re generally using open sea travel mode to get from a to b. And you don’t have a 3d view, you’re just tracking your position on a map.
Of course, it is possible to find yourself crossing PvP zones in this mode, and getting knocked out of Open-Sea mode.
Battle speed is the more important speed for PvPing. This is the “real” speed of your ship when fighting with other players.
Anyway, to sum up, your speed is 45 movement points. The designers were pleased to give this a bit of saltiness by calling these movement points “knots”. Don’t take the name too seriously. If they wanted to, they could tomorrow decide to call 5 movement points a knot, without making the slightest impact on gameplay. In the same way that the designers of WoW could make your sword look a fifth of its current size on-screen with, again, no impact on gameplay.