Never has a game’s success ridden on its community uptake like Pirates of the Burning Sea. I don’t mean in the sense that “If the game gets heaps of subscribers it will succeed – if it doesn’t it won’t…” That much is obvious. What I mean is that Pirates of the Burning Sea being a good game or not solely depends on whether people actually play it. The game is set up that way at its core. The player driven economy forces people to rely on each other to get better ships. The four separate factions immediately quarter the player base. The PVP relies on a giant scale group effort to see speedy results. The game requires heaps of players or else it simply is not fun.

It’s a crazy situation to be in - Catch 22 in the real sense of the term. Without heaps of players the game won’t be fun, but if the game isn’t fun it can’t get more players. Unfortunately for PotBS, it doesn’t have what you’d call a solid foundation for keeping its player base – at its core the game features a punishing learning curve that will unquestionably turn less persistent players away.

I’ll cite an example – I had a Pirate character who built his way through the ranks fighting everything he saw, soaking up every piece of information and eventually beginning the quests to start using the economy to my advantage at level 10 when I realised that I hadn’t been using my faction’s major draw card – capturing ships I’d beaten. Curious to find out what level I’d get that ability – it seemed important – I jumped on the internet and had a look at some guides… Pirates gain the ability at level five, but it’s either never explained or I missed it.

It’s like those JRPGs that practically require you to purchase the guide to get the most out of the game – once you get past this and you understand how the game works, the known world opens up to you. Which makes it that much more puzzling as to why they wouldn’t hand lead you to understanding in the first place. Nevertheless, the game is genuinely fun once you know what’s going on.

That’s not to say it’s without any other faults however. PotBS features two types of combat – ship combat, where you sail your ship about attacking either other ships or land based fortifications – and hand to hand, where you attack your opponents mano-a-man. While the ship combat is great – if a little slow – the hand to hand combat is clunky, unintuitive and generally unforgiving. It uses what it calls a balance system to determine the success of your attacks – from what I gathered being hit lowered your balance, which made it easier to be hit, which made it more difficult to land your own attacks. It’s broken, and thanks to poor AI you’ll typically find yourself relying on your vessel to kill as many people on the enemy’s ship before boarding for any sword fighting.

The ship combat can make up for this downfall in a lot of ways, thankfully. After getting used to the slow pace you’ll find yourself automatically taking into consideration wind direction, estimated range, speed and positioning without thought – it’s thrilling when you pull your ship broadside with your enemy just as they enter range to decimate their stern like it’s a second nature.

The player driven economy is a great feature – you create a base of operations and using “stored labour“ you can create stuff for yourself – ships and cannon balls – or just create goods for the open market to bid on. The real focal point for the economy though is encouraging players to work together.

Usually it pays to hang out with people who are interested in the same thing as you in an MMO – if you enjoy raiding you’ll join a PVE guild, if you’re a PVP nut you join a guild with other gankers – but in PotBS you really want to make friends with everyone. It takes a minimum of four players to control all the assets to fully create a ship without involving anybody else – that’s cutting the wood for the hull, mining the ore for the nails, a quarry for the cannonballs, a shipyard for the actual building – there are heaps of different yards you need to make. And that doesn’t even take into account someone to escort your materials around. It makes interaction an absolute must.

Graphically Pirates is hit and miss. On the open sea the game looks nice, in sea battles it looks spectacular and in hand-to-hand it looks like crap. The water effects are really nice, and the way the ships take damage is great, but once you get on board every thing looks blocky and the game has some strange collision detection – this is especially true in ports. Still, if you’re anything like me you’ll spend most of your time at sea or in sea battles anyway – it’s just disappointing the game couldn’t maintain the same level of polish throughout the entire game.

If you’re a brand new MMO player looking for that game to destroy your relationships and lose you your job, Pirates probably isn’t it – though this isn’t for lack of trying. Your average gamer will hate the learning curve and they may never give the game the time it needs to really get into it. Old school MMO players might not see a reason in PotBS to give up the level 70 WoW characters or their Eve Online Battle cruiser pilots – and there isn’t really. If you’re still having fun in your other MMOs there’s very little reason for you to go over to PotBS.

But if you’re looking for something new – something different to the boar killing or space-mining – you probably won’t get better then Pirates... eventually. With a revised starting 15 levels, AI worth a damn and enough players to make the in-game economy work Pirates of the Burning Sea will be a good game from start-to-finish. For now, it’s an above average experience… once you teach yourself how to play.