Quest pacing, and why killing boars is cool.

Being part of the blog community, and spending a decent (read: too much) amount of time reading other blogs, you pick up on trends and common rants. Having been around the MMO block since UO, I’ve also seen my fair share of MMO launches and the general response to them. No matter how similar or different two games may be, a few common themes from the player base generally pop up, and today I want to break down one of those, questing.

In many ways questing has evolved a great deal since UO. Actually since EQ, since the ‘quest’ in UO was to get from point A to point B without getting ganked. (best quest ever IMO) EQ was not quest driven like most of today’s game, but rather the quests were side tasks you attempted while making your way to the level cap. In comparison, in WoW 1-70 almost every mob you kill, or location you see, is due to a quest goal. It’s very rare to just wander out and kill stuff for the sake of killing, be it alone or with friends. Different games today have varying degree’s of ‘must quest’, but almost all of them place a much greater emphasis on quests than EQ or UO ever did. EVE stands out (as it usually does) as the exception here, because much like UO, it’s skill based rather than level based, but even EVE has a questing system that many players participate in.

Along with an increase in importance, the overall quantity of quests has increased dramatically in today’s MMOs, with many games today having more quests than one character can complete before out-leveling them. With this increase in quantity, you very often see a complaint about quality. ‘Too many kill x, collect y quests’ is something you hear and read about constantly, the most recent example being AoC. Before a serious amount of content was added to LoTRO, a common joke was that each area featured its own ‘kill boars’ quest, each time for a different piece of boar, the quests being almost identical with the only difference being the size or color of the boar. PoTBS at launch (and maybe still?) did a copy/paste job with their quests, as each starting area had the exact same set of quests, making creating an alt rather pointless.

All that said, I sometimes wonder what exactly DO people want from quests? Almost everyone skips the flavor text in the quests, no matter how well written, so a better story would be rather tough. Any kind of tricky ‘go find it’ quest gets Googled rather than attempted, or just skipped if the reward is deemed not worth it. Tough group quests are bashed for ‘forced grouping’, so we can’t have that. Travel quests are old news, and we want instant travel now anyway, right? Well we want instant travel while still maintaining a worldly feel, but that’s another topic. So that leaves us with our good buddy the kill quest. Simple, focused, generally short, it’s not hard to understand why the kill quest is the most common type of quest we see in MMOs.

But is the kill quest really that bad, even when it’s for boar parts or rat tails? And what the hell would we do if suddenly all MMOs removed all kill quests, what would fill that massive void? Meaningful travel! Kidding…

The fact is MMO’s are generally one big grind, broken down to many little grinds in order to bleed $15 a month out of us. We love the abuse. And while we bitch and moan about kill quests, the fact is we love them as well. We love killing something and seeing our little quest tracker go up by one, or opening up the loot window to pick up one more tail/hoof/eye. How cool is it when you have 4-5 quests all revolving around boar genocide, and with one mighty kill you progress all those quests at once. Exactly, it’s awesome. We are MMO gamers, we are sick, and little numbers going up does it for us. The more +1 we get, the better we feel.

The key to questing, as well as life itself, is variety. If you do the same thing day in, day out, it’s going to get boring and old, no matter what the activity. Good quest design is not about removing kill quests, but pacing them correctly. If I just devastated the local boar population, the last thing I want Mr. NPC to say is ‘go kill more boars’. But I’m very OK with killing them in step one, then finding some boar relic, and finally facing off against some uber boar to finish it all up. And while I’m doing all that, if I also have a quest to discover some boar shrine, which just happens to be along the way, bonus for me. Just be sure to mix it up in the next area a bit (but not too much, we are creatures of habit remember), and I’ll happily continue to grind away.

Too WoW-like, a positive or negative?

Tobold has a post up today questioning the wisdom of designing an MMO with features too similar to WoW, speaking specifically about Age of Conan. His point is that why would someone play something WoW-like when they could just play WoW, which has 3+ years of development and refining behind it, not to mention the overall high quality polish and design that made it a hit to begin with.

While a good point, it makes me wonder how far we have to get away from WoW in order to be ‘different enough’, and what exactly are we aiming for here. The bottom line of course is to have a game that’s fun to play, regardless of which design you follow. Whether you go PvE, PvP, a mix, or something entirely different, the game has to just be plain old fun in order to work. It’s a bit of the EVE Online theory, in that EVE nails almost every design-related issue spot on, yet for many it’s missing that key component that makes it fun to log on and play consistently. For many EVE is more fun to read about than to actually play, which says a lot about the game, in both a positive and negative way.

But back to the original question; how much different does an MMO need to be in order to compete, and what does compete actually mean? As fans, I think we get too caught up in the numbers, looking at WoW and saying ‘the next MMO has to get 10 million subs in order to beat WoW’, forgetting that WoW has ‘only’ 4 million or so subs in the US/EU, and that the other 6 million or so are in Asia, where the profit margin is far, far lower on a pre-account basis. So are current developers focusing on that magic 10 million subs number, or are they just looking to make a quality game with enough subs to make a profit? After all, any game that makes a profit is a success right? The servers stay up, new content is produced, the company makes money, players continue to enjoy a world they like, and everyone wins.

Moving away from the bean counter aspect of MMO development, let’s talk about what really counts; what do fans want. Recent releases show us that WoW-like games (LoTRO) do well, while games that try to break the mold seem to struggle (PoTBS, TR), and that future releases (AoC, WAR) seem to be moving away from their original ideas and seem to be going the WoW-like route.

Now the above paragraph contains a slew of over-simplifications, and counter arguments can be made for almost all points, but the overall view of the current MMO space holds true, for whatever reason.

And finally, it’s important to note that everyone will have a different opinion on what ‘too WoW-like’ means. For example, many people wrote off LoTRO because they viewed it as WoW set in Middle Earth. Yet for Aria and I, we are really enjoying LoTRO right now (and did before when we played at launch), even though we still play WoW. While LoTRO is indeed similar to WoW, its difference enough to be fun, and in many ways (combat speed, graphics, community) it feels/plays better for us. The best thing of course is we have both; we raid casually in WoW, and quest/level in LoTRO, but if we had to cut one out, it would be WoW right now, simply due to having already done most of it.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I’m very excited for Warhammer Online, especially the PvP aspects. Am I worried that it will be too WoW-like to be fun? Not really. My one concern is that Mythic balances PvP on PvE and not PvP, but given Mythic’s track record and experience from DAoC, I doubt they will make that mistake, especially when WoW is giving them the perfect example of what a disaster PvP is with PvE balance, and what a hole that type of design puts you in. If WAR has WoW-like PvE elements, that will just be a plus in my book, as even PvP diehards like to take a PvE break once in a while.

With all that said, what’s my stance on the whole issue? Make a fun game that on day 1 is ready to go. If it’s WoW-like, it better have enough to separate itself and offer compelling reasons to play. It could be just one difference in design; if that change is good enough, people will play it. If it’s not very WoW-like, it better live up to the standard WoW set, as no amount of good ideas will allow fans to see past glaring errors, like fans did in the late 90s, early 2000.

Camping for a beta spot… no thanks.

Open beta does not mean what it use to in the MMO world. Back in the day, open beta for an MMO was not a big deal, and for the most part was quite similar to the most recent closed beta period. Generally all the die-hard followers of a game were already in beta, and going to open beta did not generate a flood of new players. Most importantly, open beta was still recognized as a beta, so things like bugs and missing functions were the norm. To be honest, back in the day the first few months of release were also a beta period, with bugs and crashes being common, but yea… Open beta was not looked as a marketing tool, but rather as a final stress test before going live.

Today open beta is much different, and this is mainly due to the growth of the MMO space and the amount of interest any major MMO builds before its release. Games like AoC and WAR have massive followings long before release, with hundreds of thousands of players following the progress of each game, all dying for a chance to play.

Closed beta today looks far more like the open betas of old, with more players just playing rather than actually testing, and with beta leaks become big business. The developers no long just put up one server with the whole world open and ask people to run around and test it, today they ‘focus test’ in stages, herding the beta testers from one area to another in order to gather the data they need. It’s a very defined and orderly process, watched closely by all parties involved.

But by far the biggest change to the entire process is the period of open beta itself. No longer any kind of test, open beta today is a marketing scheme to drum up interest and get hype to a boiling point right before boxes hit the shelves. Since the market has changed, so have the rules. The ‘beta’ part of open beta no longer applies, as most players today will judge what they see in open beta as if it were the actual game. If a game is broken or has key features missing, which at the open beta stage should be viewed as a huge issue anyway, players will react and respond, spreading negative word-of-mouth about the game, beta tag or not.

Developers need to be aware that they no longer cater to a niche market of the hardcore; gamers who accept bugs, server crashes, and imbalance as a part of MMO life. Today in order to reach the numbers some studios target, they must cater to the general public; the five minute attention span, one bug and I’m out gamer who has four other MMOs to fall back on should your game not deliver immediately and completely.

This brings me to the most recent ‘open beta’ with AoC. While AoC has done a decent enough job generating buzz, most view it as a ‘maybe’ product, especially given its M rating, it’s setting, and the rumored ‘twitch’ combat with a PvP basis. AoC is exactly the type of game that would greatly benefit from a flawless open beta, something that turns all those maybe feelings into buyers, and something that generates enough positive buzz to reach those that have looked past it. Unfortunately that’s just not the case.

For starters, my own personal feelings about AoC are very meh. The screen shots don’t impress me, nothing that I have read has really jumped out as a game breaker, and most of my ‘upcoming MMO’ attention has been focused on WAR, a game with a much stronger setting and developer pedigree. But since I already had a FilePlanet account, I figured I would give AoC a shot and try out the open beta, thinking maybe something about AoC will warrant dropping $50 on a box; only to find out that the open beta is not exactly ‘open’, even to those that have already paid for the FilePlanet account. FilePlanet has instead opted to release beta keys in waves on a first come first server basis. If the current wave is out, you have to wait until the next one opens, which happens at random during the day. AoC is basically asking us to ‘camp’ a website in order to ‘loot’ a beta key, an OPEN beta key. Now as much fun as camping a mob for hours/days is, I think we are well beyond that stage in MMO history, not to mention the fact that we are being asked to jump through these hoops for a game most already consider passing on. I’m guessing I’m not alone in the ‘one and done’ category here.

In addition to my brief but disappointing first experience related to AoC, we have the great reporting done by Keen and Graev. After reading their experience with AoC, it sounds like FilePlanet did me a favor and saved me however long it would take to download the 13gig beta. While they found some aspects of the game impressive, the general feeling I got from their site (which overall tends to have a glass half full take on most things) is that AoC has some serious issues, both in terms of bugs/balance and also with general design. When people comment that the PvP is broken during a PvP weekend, you have some issues.

It will be interesting to see what lessons are learned from the AoC beta experience. Tabula Rasa was crippled at release thanks in part to a poor showing in open beta, and is still trying to recover despite being a much better game now than it was back then. Pirate of the Burning Sea got a nice boost from positive open beta feedback, but then saw a crash a month or so after release when the shine wore off and the broken underbelly was exposed. The most famous open beta of course was the one for WoW, which played almost exactly like WoW did at release, and really generated a ton of positive buzz for the game (which already had a lot going for it, but open beta took that to a new level). It will be interesting to see how WAR handles open beta, considering the massive amount of interest for the game already. While a bad open beta might not cripple the game, an open beta on the polish level of WoW might catapult WAR and give it a fighting chance to hit the multi-million player level Mythic and EA are hoping for.

Understanding failure, the PoTBS story.

As has been well reported, Pirates of the Burning Sea is cutting down on servers, going from 11 to 4. While PR would like you to believe otherwise, it’s fairly clear that the game is underperforming, and the reduction in servers confirms this.

What’s most surprising to me about the news is people’s general take on the game, stating that it’s most similar to EVE Online, and that perhaps it could see an EVE-like growth rate in the future. The major problem with that growth prediction is that PoTBS is basically EVE-lite, attempting to keep the ‘fun’ aspects of EVE while removing some of the tedium. The recent server news confirms at least one thing; EVE-lite is not the game people want, nor does EVE-lite actually work as a game. The reason EVE itself works is because it’s amazingly balanced in all aspects of design. Crafting is balanced in regards to PvP, PvE is balanced in regards to the economy, character growth is well defined and a factor; it just all works. The problem for PoTBS is that it has 50% of the formula, removing the perceived ‘unfun’ 50% in an effort to improve the overall experience, and ultimately it fails. What the average game fan has trouble accepting is that while gate jumping 20 times itself is not fun, it’s necessary to ensure that the PvP remains balanced, and hence fun. When you mess with one side of the equation, you end up screwing both sides.

PoTBS is a great example of the overall complexity of an MMO, and why simply focusing on one or two aspects without consideration for others is a mistake. Sure zooming around the map almost instantly instead of having to travel for 30+ minutes sounds like a good idea, but how does that instant travel effect the economy, PvP, or PvE? Instancing everything does help with lag and leads to more controlled and balanced encounters, but what are its downfalls? How does instanced combat effect merchants, griefers, PvE players? Removing the tedium of sitting in an asteroid field and watching your mining laser go ‘voom, voom, voom’ for hours sounds like a huge plus, right? By removing the boring parts and letting players focus on the fun of buying/selling/trading sure sounds like a win/win on paper, does it not? Those are just a few of the perceived ‘advantages’ PoTBS implemented in order to make it a more friendly version of EVE, and yet each one is a cause for an overall broken formula with serious issues. The fact that PoTBS shipped with a primitive and somewhat broken avatar combat model did not help, but to think that is the major issue is incorrect. Players would deal with that system, flaws and all, if the overall game worked like it should. The major issues; a borked economy, completely broken PvP, a PvP game with an overemphasis on bland PvE, those are the issues that drive players away, and those are the issues that will take the greatest effort to fix.

The value of the blogging community.

Darren made a nice plea over at his site for bloggers to get into the WAR beta, or at the very least Keen. I support that (both the bloggers part and the Keen part), and can’t really come up with a great reason to keep bloggers out.

One reason that does come up whenever the whole ‘are bloggers press’ issue comes up is that the company does not want negative publicity about a game still in beta. Just like certain companies refuse to send PCGamer or other magazines pre-release copies of their games for review, some people think MMO developers apply the same reasoning to bloggers. The reason I have trouble accepting this is that MMO blogs reach a relatively small audience, and a very hardcore one at that. Regardless of your play style or game time per week, anyone who goes out and finds an MMO blog has long since crossed the threshold of casual and into hardcore status. True casual players are not even aware of official forums, let alone fan sites or blogs.

But let’s assume a developer wants to grab even the small hardcore population that does read blogs and listens to podcasts, is keeping the bloggers themselves out going to help? For one thing, bloggers tend to be a close knit community that respect each others opinion (for the most part), and take what is said into consideration. Unlike when I read a PCGamer preview and take everything said with a grain of salt, if I read something positive on a blog that I respect I take it as truth. When I read that Tabula Rasa ‘turned a corner’ and was actually fun, it put the game on my list. Based almost exclusively on Tipa’s writing, I went out and bought two copies of EQ2 to give it a try. Sure it did not work out, but it was two copies and three months of subs I would have never bought had it not been for her blog. On the other hand, while I was in the PotBS beta, my decision to see what the game was like in release was put on hold based on Keen’s PvP write ups, showing me that game was not yet ready for prime time. Of course, if in two months Keen makes a post saying all is well and PvP in Pirates is a blast, that could sway my opinion right back.

My point is that while bloggers do influence buying decisions among our small community, they do so with honesty. No one here gets paid to write glowing reviews or previews. If you have a solid product, bloggers will write that. If your game has issues, we will write that as well. Ultimately it comes down to the buyer; it just so happens bloggers and our readers tend to be better informed than the average gamer, able to see past the bullet point fluff and analyze the details. If everything checks out, you get our money. If you have some skeletons that you tried to hide, you likely won’t see many of us subscribe until you straighten those issues out.

Delivering the goods.

As 2007 draws to a close, we are left to reflect on what happened in the MMO space, and what lies ahead. Back at the start of the year, it looked like 2007 was going to be a great year for MMOs, with major titles set for release. Almost all of these are still in development, with a release date of 2008.

Those that were released, or are now close, have been somewhat of a letdown. Pirates of the Burning Sea has it’s many faults, and overall has not delivered on the promise of a fun casual game. Tabula Rasa encountered a rough beta period, and while some opinions of it are turning around, it would still be tough to consider it a clear winner. Hellgate:London has its share of issues, and does not really qualify as a true MMO.

This leaves Warhammer Online and Age of Conan as the major titles set for release. At least for me, the recent failures of the latest MMOs to deliver a solid product have placed more pressure (if that’s the right word) on these titles to deliver. Having recently gone back to WoW, I realized how different your gaming experience is playing something new rather than revisiting old content, even if you are going through it with friends and having a good time.

I hope WAR and/or AoC deliver the goods, giving us a great MMO experience, at launch. Hopefully we don’t get a PotBS scenario, where we see a nice game under all that gunk still attached to it. I hope they hit the ground running, giving MMO gamers something to sink their teeth into from day one, and giving us a game we can envision playing 6 months+ after we created our character, finally getting out of that ‘waiting mode’ rut I believe many of us are in.

Holding Pattern.

Dear snow, thanks for that four hour drive yesterday. Nothing like leaving work early, at 2pm, and finally getting home at 6pm. That was awesome…

On to a happy topic, gaming, I find myself in somewhat of a standstill. Currently I play EVE, WoW, and a bit of Puzzle Quest and online Poker. I have PotBS on my computer, but little draw to play it. NWN2 MotB is there, but I’m waiting for the 9000 series of graphics cards to come out from Nvidia before I return to that game. Same delay issue for getting The Witcher, or returning to LoTRO. I’m a bit burned out on Civilization 4, done with EQ2, done with Sword of the New World. Mythos is still there, but I just never find myself loading it up, and when I do, I find after about 30 minutes I’m done with it once again. Due to the 180 many people are pulling with Tabula Rasa, my interest has been raised, but I think I’ll wait a bit more before jumping in. Some people report boredom setting in after level 15ish. I have little interest in Hellgate:London, not sure why, but it just does not seem that appealing right now. Still waiting for WAR, and maybe AoC.

I think that about covers it. I know I’ll be playing Fire Emblem after Christmas on the Wii, but who knows for how long. I only play WoW about 5 hours a week, and EVE 4-10 depending on what’s going on. Basically I’m waiting for something to come along and really grab me, to make me look forward to loading it up regularly and being entertained each time. Hopefully WAR is that game, but with all the crazy stuff happening in the gaming world, I’m not betting the farm on that one. Anyone else find themselves jumping from game to game is small spurts, just stuck in a holding pattern?

Sifting through the junk.

Try as I might, I just can’t get into Pirates of the Burning Sea. Having taken a break since the close of beta, I logged in this weekend to find my old character wiped, and had to start from scratch. Out of all the MMO’s I’ve played, I honestly can’t remember dreading leveling up another character as much as I did with Pirates. Each quest feels like an awful grind when you do them for the 2^nd or 3^rd time, and the early game is so limited in terms of skills and tactics. I tried to break up the monotony by going out into the open sea and taking out random NPC boats, trying to level that way. Unfortunately in a starting ship, you can’t take out anything high above your level, and enemy ships will often chase you to engage, quickly sinking you and sending you back to town.

After some time, I just lost the desire to give the game more time, and logged out. Very disappointing for a game with as much praise as PotBS had. While I still think there is an interesting game in there someplace, its not there yet, and might not be even a year after release. Far too often the fun parts get bogged down by very weak parts, be it running around town, sword fighting, sailing the open sea, you name it. The great ship to ship combat gets sadly overshadowed by all the other attached junk.

Moving on to a game that gets ‘fun’ correct, our ‘former raiders turned casual’ instance group is having a good time with WoW again. Amazingly enough a few of our members have never played the Alliance side of the game (we raided as Horde), so stuff like The Deadmines and all the questing areas are new to them. I must say the Draenei starting zones are very well done, with interesting quests and good rewards.

Currently we have completed the deadmines, and are set to hit Blackfathom Deep this Wednesday, with a level cap of 21, just to keep it interesting. As we generally have more than 5 people online, we enter as a raid, hence the level cap being below the ‘recommended’ level. We had 7 people for our deadmines run, and that was somewhat easy even though we had a limit of level 18. With the recent changes to all the instances in patch 2.3, it’s a little harder to judged exactly what the perfect level would be to give us a challenge without setting ourselves up for failure. More to come…

When less is more, a lesson learned.

The upcoming release of Pirates of the Burning Seas has highlighted some interesting discussion points about MMOs and the importance of certain features. As is often the case, it is not until we see both sides that we realize how important certain aspects are, and how we perhaps over-value others.

We know now that PotBS was once VERY similar to EVE Online in terms of avatars and how much time you spend in your ship. Initially PotBS did not have avatar combat or land missions, and your character was represented in a similar manner to EVE, a portrait. At some point in development, someone at Flying Labs thought that adding land combat would make their game better, so after a lengthy delay we now see the fruits of that labor. Regardless of whether you like or dislike Pirates, almost everyone agrees the weakest part is the land combat, and by a large margin. The divide seems to be whether this feature breaks the game for you (as is the case for me) or whether it simply annoys you, but the other parts are enough to keep you playing.

When reading reviews of EVE, the lack of an avatar is often sighted as a negative; that players can’t relate to a ship in space. Before Pirates, it was hard to argue this point, as everyone assumed adding avatars could only be a good thing, right? Well clearly not, as Pirates has shown. When you have something that works, like EVE overall and the ship battles in Pirates, sometimes adding more detracts from your game, reducing the impact your good parts have and forcing players into aspects that you are weak in.

I can only imagine how much better Pirates would be if they had not added the avatar parts. Instead of running around a copy/paste town, would Pirates not be a better game if it handled towns like EVE handles stations? Would it not increase immersion to see an image of you rowing into town as you load, and then having access to all town functions (auction house, production, quests) from a menu, with the image of your ship docked at the harbor? If nothing else, it would certainly get you back into your ship and out to sea faster, instead of having to run from quest to quest, loading small rooms to talk to a shopkeeper or auctioneer. And would anyone really miss the sword fighting quests? If the sword combat was limited to boarding actions, it would not appear as shallow as it is, since its screen time would be greatly reduced.

Fans of Pirates must now hope Flying Labs improves sword fighting enough to make it worthwhile, and even then, will it really matter? If you want to play a sword fighting game you have a lot of options that are far more competent in the subject than Pirates will ever be. The appeal of Pirates is… well being a pirate and sailing the seas, engaging in ship combat using your cannons, or sailing the seas as a merchant dodging said pirates. It’s not running around a copy/paste cave or fort, using your two or three abilities to take down the same generic enemies until the game lets you get back to the ‘fun’ part, your ship.

Pirates of the Instanced Sea, mini-game madness.

Now that the PotBS NDA is officially down (oops…) plenty of opinions are popping up around the blogosphere, most along the lines of ‘fun game, but not the usual addiction you get from a new MMO’, and I completely agree with this. Even free, the game now sits on my desktop and is generally my 3^rd or 4^th choice when deciding what to spend my gaming time with.

I want to like PotBS, I really do. I think the ship combat is excellent, the game runs well, looks good, and overall has a solid feel. So why don’t I? Yes the sword fighting parts are very sub-par, the interface feels arcane and ancient at times, and there are still some bugs. But those are not the factors that are really driving me away.

My first major gripe is that you see the loading screen more than the game itself. The game is so heavily reliant on instancing that you get the feeling you just bounce from one room to the next, never actually getting a feel for the world. Gather a bunch of missions in town, head over to the dock, and fire off one mission after another off the list, until you are done. Then you head back into down to cash them all in, and you repeat until you are done with that town. For some reason, this feels far more unnatural in PotBS than it does in say WoW, or even DDO. At least in DDO, another instance-heavy game, you get the feeling that each instance is in its correct place, a part of the city. In PotBS, it feels like you teleport to magic sections of some random body of water to face a few ships, and then teleport back. I understand that they want to get you to the ‘good part’ as quickly as possible, but in doing so they really alienate you from the world, which brings me to my next point.

Many people complain about travel in EVE, how you have to jump multiple times and how boring that can be. Well I’ll take EVE’s travel over PotBS any day. Not only does Pirates feel slower, it also adds a somewhat ‘cartoon’ feel to the world, with ships the size of small islands zooming back and forth, reminding me of some hyper child playing with his boats in the tub. If the instance-jumping does not kill the immersion for you, the travel will. It just feels so unnatural. In addition, any fight that takes place between ships in this view is represented by ship icons to others, since any combat will place you in an instance once again. It would have been far more interesting, and immersive, if you could sail by ships in actual combat, giving you the option to join in or continue on your way right there, without zoning. In this regard EVE trumps Pirates easily, since during any gate jump you might go by ships fighting it out, right there in front of you, letting you see what kind of ships are involved and their status.

To me Pirates feels like a bunch of mini-games thrown together, each one being decent on its own, but as one packages it all does not mesh well. The ship combat mini-game is fun, but once it’s over you hit the magic button, and get placed in the ‘run around town’ mini-game. You then play a simplistic wack-a-mole mini-game, followed once again by the magic button and back to the town game you go. I think this disjointed style is the reason PotBS does not grab you like other MMOs do. You are constantly pulled out of the game, breaking any rhythm or flow you might have had, and I think this flow aspect is a highly underrated component to general MMO enjoyment. Pirates lacks it, which along with it’s other issues, is likely the reason why it’s icon is 3^rd or 4^th on my list of games to fire up. I’ll give it some more time, but unless something drastically changes, I don’t think Pirates will be a buy come launch.