We at Coldfront have once again been given the wonderful opportunity to speak about our experiences within the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta test. It’s been a long time since the first article was written, and in that time we’ve been witness to a great deal of changes and had a wide variety of experiences.

We're very grateful once more to Flying Lab for letting us go public with our beta experiences.

"Garrick Pike"

The first beta preview article was written one year and 4 months ago. At the time we had no way of knowing how much longer the beta would last, but I doubt that any of the testers who have been lucky enough to be in the beta for the whole time could have foreseen that we’d still be in beta in July 2007.

The last article spoke at length how the game ran well on my modest hardware. As the development process has moved on the game has only become more stable and smoother - particularly in the Open Sea; avatar movement has also improved greatly. Pirates of the Burning Sea will comfortably scale down (by turning off anti-aliasing, reducing texture and geometry detail) to run on lower end PCs, though it does require a graphics card with pixel shader 2 compatibility.

One of the most surprising ways that PotBS has improved as the beta as progressed is in terms of general graphical quality – particularly surprising because the game already looked good in March '06. Nonetheless, Flying Lab have continued to improve the character models, and particularly the scenery, to ensure that PotBS’ graphics quality remains excellent.

The game itself has changed substantially for the better as time has progressed, with a greater amount of polish provided by in-game music, the tweaking of general mechanics, and the interface. The first large change we encountered was with the database wipe that came with the introduction of the in-game economy, requiring testers to build and maintain facilities in order to construct the in-game items.

This didn’t go off entirely smoothly, simply because the game economy is designed to work with a large server population that we didn’t have, so Flying Lab created Bootstrap Traders – NPCs who would sell the basic raw materials we needed to get started. These traders were a good example of the humour FLS have injected into every stage of the testing – they would talk about how miserable they felt being a temporary character who would be deleted in the near future.

Another example is the messages that came up when playing incomplete missions: “imagine some really cool avatar combat here”. Avatar combat itself has been available for us to test for a few months now, and it takes a bit of getting used to if you’re used to the way most games handle avatar combat. The key is to use preparatory attacks to wear down balance, and only then use a regular damaging attack.

As has been mentioned elsewhere, recently the game has gone through a major new build (requiring a database wipe, so everyone’s starting from scratch). The most significant things this build brings with it are avatar boarding combat and the Open Sea Spawn Manager. With NPC vessels sailing in logical but largely unpredictable patterns, conflict on a national level will very likely be a lot more interesting. Before this change, NPC vessels were placed along pre-determined routes – not a problem in itself, but it meant that not all ports could be attacked by every nation.

If it they had deemed it necessary, I think Flying Lab likely could have given PotBS a quick polish and released it about 10 months ago, maybe more – and had they been in a standard publisher/developer relationship then it’s a good chance they would have done. It is a great credit to Flying Lab’s credibility though that they have held off on the release until they felt it was ready. The changes that have been made recently to the game have made a massive impact to its playability, and the game itself is a lot more polished, and fun.