wife-aggro.com talks with Rusty Williams of Flying Labs about their game, "Pirates of the Burning Sea."

Topics included:

• The development of PotBS. What design decisions worked well, which ones didn't, and what they're doing to fix those that didn't.
• What prompted the recent server consolidation and what it means for the future of the game.
• What it's like being a game developer in the post World of Warcraft MMO Industry.

Grab your parrot, raise the gang plank and ready the cannons with Pirates of the Burning Sea (PotBS), the hotly anticipated online PC game where players can clash on land and sea. This new title from Sony Online Entertainment LLC’s (SOE) Platform Publishing label, and Flying Lab Software LLC (FLS), is available today at participating retail outlets worldwide and as a digital download through www.station.com and www.direct2drive.com for a suggested retail price of US$49.99, with a monthly subscription fee of US$14.99 plus applicable taxes.

Players start by joining the French, Spanish, English or Pirate nations as a naval officer, freetrader, privateer or pirate. At sea, players can blow enemy ships out of the water. On land, players can engage in a world of action and peril rife with sword fights. A unique economy lets players become captains of industry, running mines, lumber mills, shipyards and other large-scale operations. Players produce all the various goods needed to supply others with the raw materials to conquer the Caribbean, one port at a time. A player-generated content system lets gamers create their own sail and flag designs and even model their own ships.

Pirates of the Burning Sea, the MMORPG featuring high seas action and adventure in a bold world of pirates and plunder, is scheduled to be available for pre-order starting Tuesday, October 23rd at participating retail locations.

Each instance in PotBS requires a fresh zone server to start up. We keep a number of these around in the Idle state, so generally there’s one ready to go when someone enters an instance. Normally, the next idle server in the list is told to load the instance, and then the player zones in. If there aren’t any available for some reason, no big deal; BigBrother starts them constantly, so another will be ready soon.

At least that’s the theory. Unfortunately once all those players hit the servers at the same time, it didn’t work out that way. A series of bugs conspired to keep idle zones from starting nearly quickly enough to keep up with demand. So three hours into the playtest we ran out of idle zones and very quickly every player on the cluster was waiting at a loading screen for an idle zone that would never come.

Many MMO's have introduced initiatives similar to the Boarding Party. I think folks who have followed my contributions to past projects will recall similar initiatives as well. However, this time around the Community Team's ultimate goal is to find and support all the different ways players can impact Pirates of the Burning Sea and assure they are truly meaningful with measurable results. At the end of the day, Flying Lab Software has a real commitment to communication- the Boarding Party is an initiative born of that commitment, and a signal to everyone that we have no plans of changing our philosophy of open and honest communication once Pirates of the Burning Sea goes live.

Most games would simply replace the pirate or brigand avatars with zombies or ghosts and call it a day, but FLS went a step further. For example, with ghosts, players quickly find they cannot just poke them with their swords and, what's more, the ghostly hands pass right through the players. In order to slice them up, players need to acquire ghost dust, which is material taken from the ghost's grave (and something players should usually stumble upon before they meet a ghost) in order to "solidify" their enemy. As more ghost dust is used, both the player and the ghost can do more damage, eventually allowing for victory ... or defeat.

Williams and Lebow showed me one mission where they wanted to achieve a stealth element without any "sneak" or "hide" skills. To do this, the developers got very creative. The figurehead gave me a mission to recover the skull of a spirit. I was transported to an island crawling with zombies - far more than any single person, or even a group, could hope to take out. Luckily there was only one zombie that saw me as I appeared, and I killed him to loot his innards.

By equipping the innards, my avatar was transformed into a zombie - but only in appearance! My avatar imitated a zombie walk (very slow) for movement - I COULD start to run, but it would break the illusion. Now safely disguised, I was able to walk along with the rest of the zombie parade to recover the skull.

The game's "supernatural content" will be inspired by the kind of superstition that was common on the high seas. You can expect to see voodoo magic, the ghosts of men wronged, and maybe even a ghost ship or two (piloted by shambling zombie pirates). This type of content will apparently make up about 10-15% of the game's total experience, and will be largely localized in the part of the world that has come to be known as the mysterious Bermuda Triangle. If you don't care to fight zombies or solve supernatural quests, you won't even need to visit the area, given that you'll be able to advance all the way to the game's initial maximum level of 50 through sea battles and economic trading if you care to instead.

Ship tuning is all about the details and numbers. We define ships in text INI files. Each INI file is a long series of values, amounting to nearly 500 lines in length for the biggest ships (many of those are blank lines). There is also a 100-line base file that’s included in all ships. A good chunk of the values are set once and left alone for a long time, and many of them are used for the ship art. Once those are stripped out, there are about 150 values (not lines) used in tuning ships. Obviously, we cannot show players every single one of those values in the UI.