Troy Hewitt on Pirates of the Burning Sea

Troy Hewitt on Pirates of the Burning Sea

Feature

Flying Labs' upcoming pirate MMORPG is perhaps the most anticipated online title of the year. We chat with Troy Hewitt to learn all the ins and outs there are to learn.

Hooked Gamers: I have heard that in addition to the large number of ship missions there will also be a chance to have your alter ego partake in land based missions. Can you elaborate on the different types of land-based missions that will be in the game?

Troy: We have role-playing missions where you choose how to interact with important NPCs in order to determine the direction of the story. But the majority of our current game play is ship-based. We’ve always said that we’ll add avatar combat at some point, but we haven’t made an official statement as to the timing of it. Just bear in mind that the game is open ended and the possibilities are unlimited.

Hooked Gamers: I know that the game will take place mainly on ones ship, which will be at sea most of the time. However, will players be able to have a base on land such as a hideout or a town or will their altar on screen ego be confined to his/her ship?

Troy Hewitt on Pirates of the Burning Sea
Troy: We have numerous land areas that players can visit already, including a really unusual Pirate hide out! Being that PotBS is a pirate based or themed game we wouldn’t want to leave out the possibility of there not being a special place for pirates to go. So in a broad general way I would have to answer that question with an affirmative!

Hooked Gamers: Pirates of the Burning Seas' graphics are fantastic but such graphics take their toll on the video card. How does the game deal with large sea battles where many ships can participate?

Troy: At every milestone we’ve improved our performance, as well as our visual look. You might be surprised to hear that the fantastic water graphics that we’ve developed are actually much cheaper performance-wise than our original water! To address the specific question, we’re targeting 50-ship battles, and are looking to raise that number as much as possible. As the game matures over time and we make updates to it, I’m sure that new graphical adaptations will be implemented. It’s like a big evolving world.

Hooked Gamers: As a follow-up to the last question. Are there a maximum number of ships that can participate in a single battle? If so, how does the game handle this?

Troy: Originally, we had a hard limit of 50 ships (see above). But we’ve just recently started larger “adventure” zones so that over a hundred players can be fighting larger battles.