Pirates of the Burning Sea- OPEN BETA!

[HaemishM]

I'm in as a pirate named Haemish MacLennan. Course, I only got to play at lunch and so am only level 2. Graphic performance in the starter town is pretty shitty.

[Draegan]

I couldn't get into it right away.  The swashbuckling quests you do as a noob were very lame.  Plus the camera doesn't move fast enough with my mouse and it's very annoying.

I gotta give it another shot though.

[WayAbvPar]

I'm in as a pirate named Haemish MacLennan. Course, I only got to play at lunch and so am only level 2. Graphic performance in the starter town is pretty shitty.

Go into the preferences and dial the Visible Avatars WAY down (like under 20). You will still see the important ones, and your performance will skyrocket. It will still get choppy in some spots, but once you get out of Marsh Harbour it will go away.

I couldn't get into it right away.  The swashbuckling quests you do as a noob were very lame.  Plus the camera doesn't move fast enough with my mouse and it's very annoying.

I gotta give it another shot though.

They just added those swashbuckling quests in...not sure why; I guess so everyone could test drive the different styles? They are really dumb. Give it another try- run some missions until you get to 5th level (which is when you will get your first class-specific quest from your trainer and get sent out of the n00b town). Once you start piling up captain and swashbuckling skills (and upgrade your ship), it will be a lot more fun.

I am playing as Ginger Jack (red-headed pirate ftw!). Friend me and holler if you see me on. I am gonna be at work until approximately the end of fucking time tonight, but I am hoping to play A LOT Friday night.

[Xanthippe]

I'll give it a shot when I don't have to be a Fileplanet subscriber.

[lamaros]

I'll give it a shot when I don't have to be a Fileplanet subscriber.

Me too.

I'm hoping my Raedon 9800 and 2gig RAM will be able to manage at a bearable level. I expect not, though. :(

[Chenghiz]

I'll give it a shot when I don't have to be a Fileplanet subscriber.

Me too.

I'm hoping my Raedon 9800 and 2gig RAM will be able to manage at a bearable level. I expect not, though. :(

It ran pretty well on my roommate's machine which is basically the same. You will have to dial things down but it'll run passable fine.

[Draegan]

GIving it another go and patching, however it's telling me its a 9hr patch.

[WayAbvPar]

It will probably end up being like 1/3 of that. They seem to use WCS for their estimates, so everything better is a pleasant surprise!

[HaemishM]

My patch at home has been going since last night. It apparently quit on me sometime in the middle of the night, so I restarted. Then it quit on me during the day while I was at work, so I've restarted it again. Go Go SOE Shitty Patch System.

[Draegan]

Well it went from 9 hrs to 5.5 hours.

Joy.

[Sutro]

I gotta say, I got a kick out of the beta code acceptance form: "You have successfully consumed a key."

rough going down, but damn tasty.

edit: in other news, eight hours until yarr. yegh.

[geldonyetich2]

I have to accept that, on the second day I spent the entire day browsing forums instead of logging into City of Heroes, I'm probably not genuinely interested in logging into City of Heroes again.

So, I'll give this a spin.

[Sutro]

Jesus. Audio_s.pig, I hate you. HATE YOU. Third time it's hung up now.

They're seriously going to have to do something about their file distribution problems for patch day or it's going to be AO-esque disastrous, considering it's going to be over a 2gig release patch.

omg i'm going to elvis my monitor.

[taolurker]

I'm in as a pirate named Haemish MacLennan. Course, I only got to play at lunch and so am only level 2. Graphic performance in the starter town is pretty shitty.

Go into the preferences and dial the Visible Avatars WAY down (like under 20). You will still see the important ones, and your performance will skyrocket. It will still get choppy in some spots, but once you get out of Marsh Harbour it will go away.

The open beta version's lowest possible avatars IS 20. You used to be able to go as low as 10, but this isn't available anymore. The LOD slider is another way to improve the performance, but once you get below 5 (midway on the slider) it does get ugly and muddy.

I'm hoping my Raedon 9800 and 2gig RAM will be able to manage at a bearable level. I expect not, though. :(

It runs on my machine with those same specs, but don't expect it to be extremely pretty in the avatar department or smooth in busy towns (I recommend using 6 on LOD and the min number of avatars). Also with those specs, expect many times to see disembodied swords running around, because there's some issues with displaying avatars and a memory leak/caching issue (which unfortunately hits even people with nice machines). You can make everyone reappear by swapping from windowed to fullscreen (Alt-enter) or by opening and closing the preferences (which even without changes resets the graphics).

The ship combat is fun, and that part works extremely smooth, even on low end machines like ours.


For everyone having installation issues, make sure you have enough HD space free (around 7 gigs) because the launcher will sometimes hang when it's decompressing files, and not notify you of why it stopped, Although the game only requires 5 gigs, the patcher downloads them in a way that it requires extra space to swap and decompress temporary files.

[Sutro]

Still patching.

MASSIVE FAIL.

[Gets]

Lurkers agree with the consensus towards dissatisfaction.

[geldonyetich2]

If you're using the SOE patcher, you might need to restart it.  Sometimes it gets stuck and never resumes.  Fortunately, restarting will keep most the files.

[Venkman]

Yea, I decided to cancel at the 37 hour mark I'll pick it up again at some point, but there's too many other distractions right now.

[tkinnun0]

Remind me again why SOE's patch download system is is so much better than Blizzard's?

[Nevermore]

Well, the game just signed its death warrant for me with the new, extra retarded 'you can only have one nationality per account' change.  In closed beta, I was able to have a Pirate and French naval officer.  Now if I make a pirate I can never have a naval officer, privateer or free merchant of any nationality on the same account.  Way to make sure I'll never even consider this game again, Flying Lab. 

Edit: maybe it's like DAoC and it's only per server.  I wouldn't know since there's only one server up for beta.  Still something you'd think they'd have some documentation on.

[taolurker]

Edit: maybe it's like DAoC and it's only per server.  I wouldn't know since there's only one server up for beta.  Still something you'd think they'd have some documentation on.

It's this exactly, because of RvR, and PvP. It's documented on the forums, and if you want to try the other classes and nationalities, you need to either delete the pirate or try on the Test Server (which creates another 6 gig instance of the game).

[Cadaverine]

I was looking forward to the game.

Then I played in the stress test. 

But, I figured I'd give it some leeway, as they said it was a two month old build.  But now I'm playing the open beta, and it's the exact same thing.

So far, at level 6, ship combat has been either, take the crew down, then grapple and board, or circle the ship for 5 minutes till I punch through the hull.  Swashbuckling isn't much different.  Hit my basic attack a few times, and occasionally use the red attack for Captains, and the like.

Maybe at some point further on, it gets interesting.  But I'll be arsed if I can summon up the willpower to get there.

The ugly run animation, and the one Nationality per account thing are just icing on the cake.

[taolurker]

They just announced right now that they're opening a second server up today, because of the number of people in the open beta.

[Modern Angel]

Whoa, yeah. One nationality per account would change my mind chop chop. One nationality plus one pirate I could swing but if you go pirate you've essentially lost 3/4 of the classes for alting and seeing other stuff.

[Hoax]

I forgot I was going to try this, played some Rumble Fighter and put new RAM and my rig into its new case today instead.

[geldonyetich2]

So far, the impression of Pirates of the Burning Sea I'm getting is, "We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn.  Burn, motherfucker, burn."

But I haven't actually played it myself.  I was sort of banking on Fileplanet to provide keys to all subscribed players on Friday.  Apparently that means "paid us money to subscribe" and not "made a Fileplanet account" a I was hoping.  So far as I can tell, being a Fileplanet subscriber is actually 32 cents a month most expensive than being a "Founder's Club" member, so I can't see the point of differentiating them.

[Lantyssa]

Captain Siobhan Curlett with a letter of marque from King Phillip V.

[Modern Angel]

Pirate captain Diego El Guapo. I'm not on too much since too much time at work plus not wanting to get overly played out on it in beta but look me up. We are pirates, aren't we?

[Der Helm]

I have not played in a while and can't update my client.

I am stuck at "Connecting ..." #XX

XX being the number of connection tries, I think.

[HaemishM]

You can defnitely make different nationalities on different servers. Blackbeard went down once this weekend, so I made Pierre LaFouf, a Frenchie Freetrader on Reckham. I hit level 10 with my pirate last night.

I'll have a more in-depth review on my blog before Christmas, but so far: swashbuckling - meh, needs lots of work; ship combat - love it, even if it gets slow sometimes.

[Lantyssa]

Pirate captain Diego El Guapo. I'm not on too much since too much time at work plus not wanting to get overly played out on it in beta but look me up. We are pirates, aren't we?

Spanish Privateer, because everyone wants to be a pirate.  And I get royal sanction to pick on the English Navy.

[Soukyan]

I have not played in a while and can't update my client.

I am stuck at "Connecting ..." #XX

XX being the number of connection tries, I think.

You probably need to update your beta client if you were in an earlier phase before they started using the SOE LaunchPad.

[Modern Angel]

Pirate captain Diego El Guapo. I'm not on too much since too much time at work plus not wanting to get overly played out on it in beta but look me up. We are pirates, aren't we?

Spanish Privateer, because everyone wants to be a pirate.  And I get royal sanction to pick on the English Navy.

I can already call the pirates as being where all the tards are going to hang out at release. Chat's already a cesspool exceeding Barrens level quality.

[Nevermore]

I can already call the pirates as being where all the tards are going to hang out at release. Chat's already a cesspool exceeding Barrens level quality.

This is where being a niche game will help.  I doubt most of the tards will have the attention span to stick with the game very long.

[Modern Angel]

True but I've been surprised how many people are in the open beta and speaking highly of it. They may have more cash flow than anyone anticipated going in.