Pirates to Get a Bit More Polished!
A devblog was released earlier that I wanted to share: Environment Revamp Revealed!
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it or not, but one of the only things I’ve disliked about Pirates of the Burning Sea thus far has been that there seem to only be five or six town models. If you’ve played World of Warcraft, you’ll remember how almost every city, town, village and settlement was unique. Things like farms tended to be re-used, and deserted towns where no NPCs other than mobs were around, but every real ‘place’ was different.
In PotBS, town models are recycled and re-recycled leaving only national capitals like Tortuga or Port Royal with rich, unique layout and architecture. While not game-breaking, this was annoying. Not to mention that it contributed to a sense that the game’s developers had left off some of the finishing touches, so to speak. But now, those finishing touches are being applied and the game is going to feel a lot more polished because of it!
A lot of people have been making comments suggesting that Flying Lab Software has or is soon going to give up on PotBS as a potential profit-generating platform and leave it to slowly rot and die on SOE’s Island of Misfit Games. But with so much time, energy and money being put into both function (the complete AvCom overhaul that is already in playtesting) and cosmetics (redesigning all of the towns? Huzzah!), I don’t understand how anyone can continue to say things like that without deliberately and willfully ignoring what’s going on.
Last week, FLS did something uncharacteristic of game developers – they published their internal Vision Statement. On the forums, FLS CEO Russell “Rusty” Williams made another uncharacteristic gesture in talking a bit about Flying Lab Software’s unusual business model and financial situation. While he didn’t go into every intricate detail, from reading his posts (which were made to debunk some random poster’s claims that the purse strings for PotBS development were held by Sony Online Entertainment and that SOE had already given up on the game and pulled their money out of it) I got the impression that the Williams’ were already rich and that while every business venture is expected to be successful (wealthy people don’t stay wealthy by pissing money away), Flying Lab Software and all of its projects are more a labor of love and that though there may be investors, there is nobody that FLS is beholden to other than themselves.
While this may or may not be a 100% clear and accurate picture (like I said, Rusty didn’t provide screenshots of the corporate bank statement), it’s damn sure a reassuring picture. I came away from that thread feeling a lot more confident in the FLS team and the future of the game that I’ve decided to commit my money to every month. And now this announcement! Things are looking really, really good for Pirates of the Burning Sea!
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Odd, I don’t remember making a post like that last week, but it is, in fact, true. Flying Lab is self-financed via its founders, SOE doesn’t hold any purse strings. We’ve just brought aboard two new developers, and a new environmental artist, and we’re working on the plan for the expansion, which is essentially a second Conco team.
But I expect some people might get ideas from the current milestone release, the Calm Before the Storm. We knew it was going to be light because the whole team’s focus is on the avatar combat revamp, which is a huge, huge project. It requires not only the development of the system itself, but also the retuning of every avatar combat mission in the game. This is why we haven’t been revamping these missions (we knew this was coming) and why we haven’t been creating new content in the last few milestones. The Conco team, however, does have a new storyline starting up post-revamp that looks pretty cool.
And hey, skirmish! It’s puttering right along, though we haven’t talked about it much since we’re focusing on the avatar combat revamp.
It’s crazy, I’d swear I just read that on the forum this past week, but after digging into your post history, I can’t find it… I must be mistaken; it may not have been you that posted it but somebody with their name in red did, I wish I could remember the exact thread…
You know there’s no shortage of “FLS is dying” threads on that forum lol… reminds me of the EVE-Online forums. Everyone seems to think that “Because *I* don’t like feature X, the company is going bankrupt tomorrow from people quitting the game by the thousands.”
One example would be how I don’t like the skirmish idea, but I don’t think PotBS is going to ‘die’ from skirmishes. I’m just very, very against loss-free, risk-free PvP. To be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in a FLS post that skirmish will necessarily be risk/loss-free; it’s just sort of implied. I’m hoping I’m wrong about the whole skirmish thing, honestly, and I probably wouldn’t /ragequit over it, but… meh :P