Questions by Cody
“Micajah” Bye, Managing Editor

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Answers by John Scott
Tynes, Producer




The open beta for Pirates
of the Burning Sea
has been running for several weeks now,
and hundreds of the early entrants into the open world are detailing
their initial experiences with the game. With all of the information in
the game now available to the general public, the Ten Ton Hammer
editorial staff was interested in how the development team at Flying
Lab Studios was holding up to the new challenges of thousands of
players interacting in this new world. To answer our questions, we sat
down with the producer of Pirates
of the Burning Sea
, John Scott Tynes, who gladly answered
all of our questions with extremely detailed and thorough responses.
Read on to see what he had to say!



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Ten Ton Hammer: Now that
the open beta is underway, how has the game been running with all the
players pouring in? Have the servers been handling the stress?
How’re the QA and GM folks doing with thousands more live
participants?



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style="font-style: italic;">At the time of this
interview, the development team had achieved a milestone of 2,500
players on one server.

John Scott Tynes:
It’s been great. We have definitely found some lag and server
stability/performance issues with so many new players flooding into the
starter towns. We’ve been busily fixing those issues and each
patch we release makes real improvements. We hit our highest
concurrency ever with 2,500 players logged in and playing on the same
server, which was great, and as we continue making improvements we
expect to beat that record like a drum.



Our GMs have been terrific. It’s a tough job but
it’s a lot of fun, too. And QA has been seriously busy
helping us nail down the remaining high-priority issues for launch.



Ten Ton Hammer: Are you
planning any events for the end of beta or the beginning of launch? If
so, what should we be looking forward to?




Tynes: We
are working on an end-of-beta event and will be talking about it soon.
We did for the closed beta where the devs spent an entire day in PvP
with any and all beta testers who wanted to take a crack at us, and we
had a blast.



Ten Ton Hammer:
There’ve been a number of games recently that have allowed
players to keep their open beta characters after the launch of the
game, are you going to allow this practice? Do you have a planned level
cap for the pre-launch participants?




Tynes: No,
open beta characters will be wiped. But if you buy the preorder, you
can start playing fifteen days before launch and keep your characters
from that period. There will be a level cap of 20 for those fifteen
days.



Ten Ton Hammer: While
we’ve all heard about the general details of the game (ship
and land combat, exploration, boat building, etc.), what sort of end
game features are going to be implemented in PotBS? Will there be
raiding, large group PvP combat, or other forms of end gameplay? To me,
raiding seems like a difficult thing to do in a boat-based world,
unless you have some sort of giant sea monster attacking
boats….




Tynes: Ha!
Well, the big high-end activity at launch is the Conquest system where
players wage PvP battles to take over the ports of enemy nations. This
is a major focus of the game and it impacts the game world in very real
ways. If one nation conquers enough ports we declare a sever victory
for that nation, hand out special rewards, and then reset port
ownership for another round.



We are already working on our first free content update which includes
a new repeatable group instance, The Bey’s Retreat, that is
targeted at a group of 6 level 25 players. It’s a massive
instance with multiple battles at sea and on land and it should take
two to three hours to beat. That first content update should be out in
March and includes lots of other great stuff as well. We’ll
be moving on to making level 50 group raids like this, and we have a
lot of soloable level 50 content planned, too.



Further down the road, we have major new game systems planned that will
involve high-level players, including player-created PvP events (like a
guild vs. guild battle or regatta) and player-governed ports so you can
set tax rates, improve defenses, and run for political office.


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style="font-style: italic;">According to Tynes,
the supernatural content begins around levels 45-50.

Ten Ton Hammer: In the
general previews that have been published about the game, most of them
say that the game is solid and fun. But some argue that the game is
shallow or lacking in a depth of content. How would you argue
against these allegations?




Tynes:
Reaction has been all over the map and that’s no surprise. We
haven’t made a game suitable for everyone. Our approach has
been to focus on fewer features and executing them to a very high
degree. So our ship combat is pretty fantastic, our player-driven
economy is unlike most anything else in MMOs, and our mission system
supports some very elaborate gameplay. It’s a great
foundation and people are starting to discover some of our more unusual
handcrafted content, like the roleplaying story arc: an epic, solo
adventure spanning 70 missions and most of your leveling career with
romantic interests, lost treasure, ancient secrets, and a big climactic
battle where you actually position your defenders across a town to
mount the kind of defense you think will work best. Few players in the
beta have yet discovered the supernatural content, too, which is mostly
around levels 45-50. Those offer some very unusual gameplay as well
that isn’t like anything you’ll have seen
previously in the game.



We’re confident there’s an audience
that’s right for this game and that will really enjoy the mix
of ship combat and economic gameplay we’ve built.
We’re not for everyone, but that’s okay.



Ten Ton Hammer: Will
there be any DirectX 10 capabilities on launch? Are there plans to
implement Dx10 in the near future?




Tynes: No,
we’ve made a very conscious effort to push our art style
based on aesthetics and vision rather than blur shaders and fancy
tricks. We actually removed normal maps from our avatars, for example,
because we decided the video memory overhead they demanded was better
spent on higher quality textures. Our art style is inspired by the
golden age of adventure fiction, pirate paintings by artists like N.C.
Wyeth and Howard Pyle. Those guys focused on dramatic, stylized
characters, bold colors, and vivid images of battles at sea. They are
our inspiration, not the technology.



Ten Ton Hammer: Player
made content seems to be something that the PotBS devs take very
seriously, especially when it comes to sails, screenshots, and other
items of interest. How are you going to continue to pursue this sort of
user-generated material once the game goes live?




Tynes: At
launch any player can design their own sail or flag graphic in Paint or
Photoshop or whatever and use it in the game, which is great. We also
have a community of naval enthusiasts who are actually modeling new 3D
ships for the game just for the fun of it, and in fact more than half
of the ships we’re launching with were created by our
community.



Going forward, we want to expand on our existing systems so that
players can operate shops to sell their sail and flag designs to other
players. We also have some entirely new areas of user content we want
to investigate down the road.



Ten Ton Hammer: Do you
plan on implementing more Web 2.0 functionality into the PotBS website?




Tynes: Very
much so. We are working now on delivering selected live game data such
as server status and PvP/conquest status, so you can check an RSS feed
to monitor which ports are under attack on your server. We’ll
be doing a lot more of this after launch as well, and of course these
features will be available to all sites.



Ten Ton Hammer: After the
game has launched, what are your plans for the near future? Should we
expect a major update to the game within a few months after launch?
That seems to be standard for most game developers these days, and will
PotBS be any different?



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style="font-style: italic;">Pirates of the
Burning Sea will have regular free content updates.

Tynes: We
are big believers in free content updates and we started working on our
first one two weeks ago. It includes the new French capital city of
Pointe-a-Pitre, reimagined and expanded with new content and art. It
also includes the Bey’s Retreat repeatable group instance I
mentioned earlier, a bunch of new handcrafted missions involving
treasure maps, and more. This first content update is scheduled to be
released in March but will be live on the test server before then so
players can check it out.



Ten Ton Hammer: Finally,
what sort of game should players expect come launch the launch date in
January?




Tynes: Our
ship combat is an amazing online gaming experience, both in PvE and
PvP. Our player-driven economy is a breakthrough and is really
engaging, with none of the pointless grinding you so often see in
crafting systems. And our stories are big, fun, and powerful, bringing
all the adventure of the age of piracy to life.



Really, we think we’ve made a great game and are looking
forward to playing it with gamers around the world.



Ten Ton Hammer: Anything
else you’d like to tell the Ten Ton Hammer readers?




Tynes: Come
play the open beta! We’re finally ready for you to set sail.



Have you tried out the style="font-style: italic;">Pirates of the Burning Sea open
beta yet? What are your thoughts about the game? href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?p=193002#post193002">Let
us know on the
forums!



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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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