Pirates of the burning CRAP!
"I am DEPRESSED. That thing I just read reeks as the decaying body of an old EQ-era MMORPG.
I gave Pirates of the B. another spin today and it struck me (again) for its resemblance with the old Sid Meier's masterpiece with just 1/10 of the fun in it.
My biggest gripes are easy and simple: this is a wasted chance. The old Pirates! by using randomized events made the world feel much more alive than it will ever be here, where it IS supposed to be (a)live. While in Pirates! the scrawny traveler in taverns provided everchanging infos from distant places, the governor had daughters to marry (or not) and the encounters at sea had stories to tell, here more than 20 years later you are stuck with thousands of players but a dead PREDICTABLE world.
I am not advocating the goodness of randomized events per se, just saying that the 16th century has never felt LESS exotic and mysterious to me. It's all scripted, all well-balanced. NPCs are stuck there as lampposts ready to hand you out the same identical piece of gossip over and over, forever. Events, in Pirates! fooled you into feeling that the world was real. Crew threatening to mutiny, long lost sisters to retrieve. Years passing and real historic events going on. You aged, you got sick, you died. Here the tavern is as fascinating as a Nativity scene or a wax museum. Neat!.
Yes, some of those things can't happen here. Time can't go on forever so that rules out historical events, and there can't be permadeath. Some other things are supposedly there, in slightly different forms. And it wouldn't be fair to blame something that is still the norm for MMORPGs or was text-based 20 years ago. But shouldn't I expect significant improvements in 20 years? I think they had large shoes to fill and they failed. And today when I was sailing towards Port Royal (it's like 30 minutes without doing nothing... I could call it "point and forget" as I watched my schooner sloooowly approaching the Port Royal waypoint. I actually went to the store to get some milk and when I came back I was closer.. but not there yet) I wondered why I was playing a less satisfying version of the old classic? Couldn't help it and I quit.
Once again the levels fuck it up (They didn't learn anything from the original Pirates! or just EVE), the people fuck it up and the industry fucks it up!
And back to that long rant from the Lead Designer, it's depressing. They bring up excuses for having you zone in and zone out 25 times (count them) in 10 minutes for the economy tutorial before the game is out. They bring up excuses for not having an endgame (repeatable high end quests? HAHAHA) and they bring up excuses for slowing your fun down and adding to the grind to stop you as you would probably cancel the subscription should you get to max level (and notice there's nothing to do there) too early.
This game had TONS of Potential. Now it's officially crap in my book. EVE for infants with a piratey tone. File under: boo hiss."
I gave Pirates of the B. another spin today and it struck me (again) for its resemblance with the old Sid Meier's masterpiece with just 1/10 of the fun in it.
My biggest gripes are easy and simple: this is a wasted chance. The old Pirates! by using randomized events made the world feel much more alive than it will ever be here, where it IS supposed to be (a)live. While in Pirates! the scrawny traveler in taverns provided everchanging infos from distant places, the governor had daughters to marry (or not) and the encounters at sea had stories to tell, here more than 20 years later you are stuck with thousands of players but a dead PREDICTABLE world.
I am not advocating the goodness of randomized events per se, just saying that the 16th century has never felt LESS exotic and mysterious to me. It's all scripted, all well-balanced. NPCs are stuck there as lampposts ready to hand you out the same identical piece of gossip over and over, forever. Events, in Pirates! fooled you into feeling that the world was real. Crew threatening to mutiny, long lost sisters to retrieve. Years passing and real historic events going on. You aged, you got sick, you died. Here the tavern is as fascinating as a Nativity scene or a wax museum. Neat!.
Yes, some of those things can't happen here. Time can't go on forever so that rules out historical events, and there can't be permadeath. Some other things are supposedly there, in slightly different forms. And it wouldn't be fair to blame something that is still the norm for MMORPGs or was text-based 20 years ago. But shouldn't I expect significant improvements in 20 years? I think they had large shoes to fill and they failed. And today when I was sailing towards Port Royal (it's like 30 minutes without doing nothing... I could call it "point and forget" as I watched my schooner sloooowly approaching the Port Royal waypoint. I actually went to the store to get some milk and when I came back I was closer.. but not there yet) I wondered why I was playing a less satisfying version of the old classic? Couldn't help it and I quit.
Once again the levels fuck it up (They didn't learn anything from the original Pirates! or just EVE), the people fuck it up and the industry fucks it up!
And back to that long rant from the Lead Designer, it's depressing. They bring up excuses for having you zone in and zone out 25 times (count them) in 10 minutes for the economy tutorial before the game is out. They bring up excuses for not having an endgame (repeatable high end quests? HAHAHA) and they bring up excuses for slowing your fun down and adding to the grind to stop you as you would probably cancel the subscription should you get to max level (and notice there's nothing to do there) too early.
This game had TONS of Potential. Now it's officially crap in my book. EVE for infants with a piratey tone. File under: boo hiss."
posted by Drew the Falconeer at 11:24 AM
2 Comments:
...please where can I buy a unicorn?
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