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Your Own Personal Hero Story

An Interview with Gavin Irby, Mission Designer for Pirates of the Burning Sea

By Cody “Micajah” Bye

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Everyone wants to be the hero. Whether its by participating in your local food drive or playing through your favorite MMORPG, most individuals have a supreme desire to be the leading man or woman. They want to be in control, want to garner all the attention and glory that the heroes of your favorite stories acquire as you watch (or read) about them progressing through their latest journey. If you don’t believe me, think back to your childhood: How many of us pretended to be Luke Skywalker? Superman? The Lone Ranger?

With this in mind, I sat down with Flying Labs’ mission designer, Gavin Irby, at the San Diego International Comic-Con, and I knew that I was in a treat. The number one objective for Gavin is to provide players with their own personal, unique, and customizable heroic journey. To do this, Gavin created the roleplaying (RP) story-arc; a set of missions that allows your character to rise to a heroic status from the beginning of the game to near the end of a

Over 70 story mission have been integrated into the PotBS gameplay.

player’s progression through the world. “I’ve conceived, designed, written, and implemented nearly all of this content,” Gavin said. “The only parts I didn’t touch were the technological elements that I had to ask other developers to handle for me.” While he’s been working on these missions, Gavin’s only desire has been to help players achieve their heroic goals in the gaming world and to help them feel unique in a sea of similar pirates and sailors.

In order to achieve this sense of uniqueness, Gavin had to separate Pirates of the Burning Sea from other MMOGs, which mostly feature non-individual storylines that rarely feel unique to the play experience of the player. “Most other MMOs tend to rely on narrative,” said Gavin. “And their narratives tend to be fairly abstract. There are world events going on, but you’re a very small part of that larger picture. We wanted to make a story where you are that singular hero, no one else but you.”

With over 70 missions tucked away specifically for the RP story-arc, players won’t have to worry about running into the end of their player stories any time soon in their gameplay experiences. At that number of missions, players will have more than one story-based mission per level, but they’ll still be able to reach the end of their story-arc before the end of their play experience. “Players will have to jump between story-arc missions and regular missions, and it wasn’t our intention for players to play through the entire game on story missions alone,” Gavin stated. Still, 70 story missions is quite the achievement for a single person working on a huge amount of story.

But how did Gavin get all of these missions set aside for the game, if he was the only individual truly focused on the RP story-arc missions? “I managed to finagle, beg, borrow, and steal a lot of content from my compatriots,” he said, laughing. “The other devs don’t even want to see me walking by anymore, because they know I’m going to be asking for something.”

Several roleplaying choices are awarded to you with each mission encounter, ranging from dastardly to decent.

Designing 70 missions for a singular element of the game was quite the monumental task that Gavin accomplished, and it would surely increase the replayability if the entire game. But I was also concerned that everyone within the PotBS world would be subjected to the same 70 missions and the individual nature of the storyline would be lost in a sea of similar pirates and sailors. Thankfully, Gavin reassured me that that would not be the case.

Instead, the story-arc a players journey through will be a compressed version of those 70 missions, with players – depending upon their choices in the game, altering or skipping over certain missions. “It all depends on what choices you make, in the dialogue tree and in other forms of decisiveness,” Gavin stated. “There are going to be several moments within your story where you’re going to be given the option of, ‘What kind of pirate do you want to be?’ and ‘What kind of outcome would I like to see?’ We wanted to include a bunch of single-player RPG elements into the RP story-arc, like branching dialogue trees, etc. We wanted to give you a taste of that sort of experience.