14 DAY TRIAL // There's a great deal of novelty coming from the Penny Arcade Expo concerning Pirates of the Burning Sea, the historical MMORPG being developed by Flying Lab Software. To further polish the feature complete game, a decision was made to push the release into June 2007. Taking advantage of the extra time, devs can now look further into the newly announced feature of avatar combat, something they'd always wanted but never felt they had time to do correctly. Producer John Scott Tynes admitted that there is a playable internal version, but felt that it wasn't quite ready for public eyes.
Introducing three distinct archetypes, avatar combat promises to be extremely tactical. We learn more details via MMORPG.com. Musketry is the art of handling guns, where movement is the main thing to consider. High accuracy come at the cost of standing still, making you in turn more vulnerable to attacks. Fencing involves agile swordplay and seizing the opportunity away from the enemy. Swift moves are based upon an initiative statistic which everyone should control if they wish to prevail. Basically fencing is the art of getting the upper hand in swordplay. A more direct approach can be adopted with Brawling, the ever present movie archetype of burly pirates fighting in port taverns. This hand to hand combat style is highly dependant on combo moves and the way characters chain them together.
In a similar fashion, the game considers three major factors when determining your defensive and offensive capabilities as your character's effectiveness is highly situational. Thus moving targets will be harder to hit as well as having themselves difficulties in hitting opponents, regardless of combat style, since this applies to sword-play and brawling too. Positioning is important since it is possible to outflank the enemy, sending him with the back to the wall through feats, further decreasing his combat output by limiting his maneuvering space. The game engine considers a radius around the character stimulating players to be keenly aware of the environment. Since facing plays a definite role, players will be in deep trouble if they get surrounded.
No decision has been made concerning combat scale. In theory, you could have a crew of 200, although it's unlikely that they will render 200 players on either side. Once you kill the enemies and their captain, the ship and all their loot belongs to your crew, just like the old rules when you captured a ship. Developers are excited about the addition of epic adventure sites, zones to support up to 100 players and 100 NPCs, larger than anything they've done before. Should these spots raise high enough interest, there is a possibility to turn them into private instances, available to multiple massive player raids. El Dorado is the first of such zones, being showcased at PAX. The entire zone carries a distinct flavor and feel, in this case a return of Mayans, and provides players with a wealth of quests and team missions to complete.