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MOPGL has an interview with Flying Lab's Taylor 'Augustus' Daynes. This lead designer shares info on their upcoming game Pirates of the Burning Sea.

Since ships will be single-player operated, I'm wondering how smart the NPCs are. Will there be any NPC controlled ships?pirates of the burning sea

In addition to a world full of NPC enemies, many of the missions in our game involve NPC allies. One thing we’ve learned from other games, it’s that if you are going to have NPC allies, they’d better be worth something. NPCs that just wander off and get killed, or worse, wander off and get you killed are a recipe for frustration. So we firmly believe that NPCs need to be competent. This is a tricky problem for us though, because unlike other MMOs, where NPCs can pretty much just run straight up to you and auto-attack, our NPCs need to know how to use the wind, how to present their broadside to you in order to attack, and how to stay out of your firing arcs. Brady “Jigmasta” Houck – our AI guru – has worked on our AI over the last year, and I’m happy to report that our NPCs are very smart. Surprisingly smart. They often startle me with actions or tactics that we didn’t program into them. For instance, one NPC in a fast ship planted himself right in front of me, waited for me to come to a stop after colliding with it, and then it boarded me now that I was an easy grappling target. Stuff like that makes your day!

You can read the interview here.

More Pirates of the Burning Sea news.

It's always interesting to get a Developer's point of view from E3. Is it as crazy for them as it is for us? Absolutely! Read it in the latest Dev Diary to come from Pirates of the Burning Sea.

E3 is a beast. 60,000 sweaty gamers descend on Los Angeles to compete for swag, face time with devs, and the glory of seeing new stuff first. Over in the NVIDIA booth, six of us from Flying Lab -- myself, Rusty, Isildur, Aether, BSharp, and Heidi -- demoed Pirates of the Burning Sea to everyone who walked up, including press and business contacts.

Get it right here.

Yarrrr!

The sea, the sea, the sea is on fire!
MMOZ.com is giving away a Pirates of the Burning Sea Beta Key. In other news, we would appreciate pictures of our readers wearing eyepatches and/or parrots on their shoulders.

"The tireless team at Flying Lab Software have generously offered up a Beta Key to their upcoming MMORPG Pirates of the Burning Sea along with some rare pirate booty for a few lucky MMOz.com visitors."
Shiver me timbers, whatever that means. You can read all about the Pirates of the Burning Sea Contest at MMOZ.com

• More Pirates of the Burning Sea News

His name is Brandon Walker he's the new guy. He's got a new Devlog on the official site.

Since I've started here I've been fortunate enough to work on some cool projects. One of the first was to add flags to the ships. I was excited to add flags because they add some character to the ships AND more importantly they show what the current wind direction is (which is very important when in the middle of a battle). Originally, I thought this was going to be a trivial task that would only have minor implications in the game. I soon discovered this was not the case. Everytime I thought I had the flags working perfectly I discovered I had forgotten something: flags not falling with the masts, main mast flag not matching player nationality, flag scale not appropriate on all ships, etc. Most of the bugs are fixed now, but I'll be doing small tweaks here and there over the next couple of weeks. I also look forward to setting up a content import system that will let the community import new flag patterns into the game. I'm excited to see what people come up with.

More Pirates of the Burning Sea News.