Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Questions by Cody “Micajah” Bye, Managing Editor
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?

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.

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?

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.

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