Yohoho and a bottle of rum! Mmm....rum. There's more piratey goodness
to be had on this fine day, and the Ten Ton Hammer crew has landed an
entire developer diary for all you wannabe pirates out there. The dev
diary in question comes straight from Jason Everett, one of the
developers working on Pirates
of the Caribbean Online
for Disney.
There's some great info inside, but we know you're all looking for the
screenshots, and we've nabbed a few of those as well! What are you
waiting for? Get to reading and viewing!


by Jason
Everett

During Phase 1 of the Beta
test I spent hour after hour with
Bilgeratte, an amazingly
durable Pirate who, considering his eyes and face, might be a long-lost
descendant of Sao
Feng – or, allowing for his Fu Manchu moustache and broken
nose, might be a pretty
recent descendent of some scary biker guy.

I kept a running diary
during the Beta for the game developers
– what was working and
what wasn’t, what was fun, what was confusing, and because no
self-respecting Producer
can resist, a list of things we just had to tweak. Here are a few
sample entries:

  • I got into a Mayhem PVP match with Allan today (and
    completely kicked his
    butt… he forgot to bring health tonics with him). I died
    during the match more
    than a couple of times, and each time I re-spawned with 0 HP. The
    recharge time
    to get back to full health from there needs serious tuning.

  • The bartender in the Faithful Bridge needs a rag
    – he's cleaning the bar with his
    palm. It would also be nice if the guy near the harbormaster on Port
    Royal
    flipping a coin actually had a coin.

  • The Black Mac quests need tuning. His initial dialogue needs to be more
    direct,
    telling the player what they are going to earn when they complete the
    quest.
    Requiring players to win 150 gold seems fine, based on the way the
    economy is
    balanced now, but I'd up the number of skeletons that need to be
    defeated in the
    second quest to the 10-15 range. Ideally, the amount of gold Black Mac
    makes
    you win and the number of skeletons you have to defeated should be tied
    to the
    card you’re going after.

After Phase 1 of the Beta ended, the development team spent two solid
weeks reviewing
everything we’d seen -- feedback from the beta players,
thoughts from the development
team, bugs, feature requests, balancing and tuning needing to be done,
game systems
needing refining, client and server performance and stability issues,
features that needed
to be added, and features that needed to go -- at least for now.
Here’s an overview of the work that’s gone into the
game since we closed the doors on
Phase 1 of the Beta test:

A lot of time has gone into
refining the UI and the
game’s control schema. Players don’t
need to use the TAB key to switch been combat and interface modes
anymore, and the
mouse-look camera controls are now optional. At the same time we did
this we also
improved the combat interface. The old radial menu that held each
weapon’s special
skills has been killed and replaced with a simpler interface
that’s always on-screen. It’s
faster now to get at your special skills and easier to watch your
recharge times – both of
which are good things when you’ve got a dozen undead Carrions
charging you.

We’ve already finished a round of play testing with the new
control system, and the
results were great -- it’s easy to use, and we’re
really happy with it.

The quest system got a nice polish pass as well, making your encounters
with Jack
Sparrow, Elizabeth Swann, Joshamee Gibbs and the rest of the
game’s personalities and
NPCs (Non-Player Characters) more cinematic -- and making the actual
interfaces you
will use to get quests and manage quests clearer and more intuitive.

Next up was ship boarding.
This has gotten much simpler --
now you can just walk up to
a dingy on the shore of any island and use it to row out to (read: pull
up) your ship,
already rigged and ready to set sail.

Crewing up got streamlined
at the same time ship boarding
was tweaked -- the definition
of a crew is now much looser than it was in Phase 1 of the Beta test
– now it’s really the
pirates who are on the ship. The trick is, to get onto a ship, you have
to teleport to one of
your friends who is already on deck. This can be someone on your
Friends List, a fellow
Guild member, or a mate from your Pirate Band.

The biggest and most
exciting improvement is the overall
sense of story that now
permeates the world of the game. There are little things, like the
behaviors NPCs have
now when you encounter them going about their daily business, the
presence of the
prison dog in the jail, and the richer palette of sound effects and
music. There are plenty
of big things too, like great new spawning and defeat animations for
Jolly Roger’s
undead army, a burning town deep in the jungles of Tortuga, and a Navy
mining
operation in the caves underneath Port Royal. All of this is
contributing to make the
experience richer and deeper, and the world that much more immersive.

There is tons more to talk
about -- more killer PVP game
play (And what is PVP, really?
Player versus Player or Pirate versus Pirate?), more polish in the
poker and blackjack
game systems, fine-tuning on ship-to-ship combat, an improved chat
interface, and
balancing and tuning for just about every weapon, from cannon shot to
the voodoo staff.
There is way too much to talk about -- you’ll just have to
experience it all firsthand when
you’re playing again.

See you in Phase 2 of the Beta!

- Jason (aka Bilgeratte)



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Ten Ton Hammer is your
unofficial source of Pirates
of the Caribbean Online

news
and
features
!



To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Pirates of the Caribbean Online Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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