Back on March 17th we got a chance to go and interview Flying Labs software about their game, Pirates of the Burning Sea. I got a chance to sit down with Russell ‘Rusty’ Williams, CEO, John ‘Rev’ Tynes, Lead Writer and Game Designer, and Troy ‘Aether’ Hewitt, Community Envoy. This is our first installment of the 20 Questions interviews.

I look forward to bringing more of these interviews as time progresses.

PotBS originally began as a much simpler design, with only 6 people on staff. It was originally going to be a no-avatar, combat and trading game, but as they got more into the pirate ideas, it just kept growing. Three years into it’s development they’re now up to over 40 employees, and are adding more.

Question One: Besides pirates, what portion of the game do you think really distinguishes Pirates of the Burning Sea from the other MMORPGs on the market currently?

Rusty: The combat model is just really, really interesting in that maneuver is always important rather than click-and-forget. You’re always maneuvering and damage changes the abilities of your ship, so if you lose a mast it’s going to affect your speed and maneuvering and you’re going to have a much tougher time getting where you want to be. If you were playing with a heavily gunned ship without much armor (such as the Xebec), you’ll have to change your strategy. Plus you can use different types of shot depending on the tactics you want to use, so if you want to board another ship you might use grapeshot against the crew instead of chain against the sails. The combat is what I spent all my time doing in other games, and I just wanted it to be fun, a little bit more interesting.

The other big thing is that we don’t take your rank into account in the combat calculations. A cannonball from a rank 1 player hits just as hard as one from a rank 50. It’s so huge because when you get into PvP in other games and say, you’re a rank 20, and you run into a guy who’s 42, you can’t even touch him. From rank 1 on you can contribute to PvP in our game. Granted, if you run into a much higher rank person one on one, they’ll kick your ass, but you can contribute at any rank as long as you play smart. In this, it’s always fun when you have a fun combat model. You don’t have to keep waiting for the next rank just to have a moment of excitement.

Question Two: Is there any pirate experience on staff?

Rev: There’s actually one of our designers, Taylor ‘Augustus’ Daynes, that’s been learning to crew on a sailboat.

Rusty: I think he actually crews on a sailboat that races in local races, but I don’t think he’s stolen anything.

Rev: I don’t think he’s actually drawn swords with anybody

Aether: We did dress John up as a pirate once.

Rev: That’s true, we had a ‘dress up like a pirate’ contest, fans submitted photos of themselves dressed up like pirates, and got a bunch of pirates dressed up together on staff.

Rusty: Should we maybe copy a game illegally or something?

Question Three: In regards to historical accuracy, will there be any of the more infamous pirates from history in the game?

Rev: There will be quite a few historical pirates in the game. One of the storylines we’re working on now is a serial story arc where we’ll be releasing a new chapter every month or so after the launch. That storyline uses lots and lots and lots of historical characters. Pirates, politicians in Europe, spies, saboteurs, and all sorts of historical characters.

Rusty: Google will be your friend.

Rev: Yeah, exactly. As you’re playing, you’ll be getting missions from some guy, you can type his name into Google and read about him.

Rusty: And really, we want people to Google and read about them. We’re doing the research to make this really interesting.

Rev: That’s one of the great things about making a game that’s based in the real world, is that there’s so much to draw on.

Question Four: Are there any specific items that give bonuses? Or special quest items?

Rev: There’s really two categories of equipment. There’s what we call outfitting which are permanent items that you can put on your ship. Then there’s consumables which are one-use items like repair materials. For all these items, you can capture them from defeated captains, buy them from other players, or receive them as mission loot. There are also special quests for if you want to have a hook or a peg leg. Those are high-level content, so if you see a guy walking through town with a hook and a peg leg, you know that he’s up there and has been playing quite a while.

Question Five: How much rum would you drink in a day as a pirate?

Rev: In the British Navy there was actually a rum ration that you’d get every day. It was something like half a pint of rum a day.

This of course meant that the sailors were often drunk. In the serial story arc there is this famous British Naval officer who thought of cutting the daily rum ration with lime juice and it became known as grog. So, rum plus lime juice equals, well daiquiri today, but grog then.

As a pirate, you’d probably chug down about a liter of rum a day.

Rusty: I’d expect it to be slightly different. There would probably be times where there would be copious amounts of rum, and then other times where it’s like, “Does anyone see a ship on the horizon? Preferably full of rum?”

Question Six: Has there been discussion if the servers are going to have routine periods of downtime for maintenance?

Rev: It’s hard to say really. We expect that we’ll have to reboot the machines often, as it’s easier to keep systems running if you can go and just reboot the machine when it needs it.

Rusty:Yeah, but restarting a machine means that it’s down for half-an-hour, not half a day.

Rev: Our process to bring everything down and back up again is a matter of minutes. The servers are actually highly segmented. Instead of having a server that does nothing but chat, or a server that does nothing but AI, we actually segment out a lot of that. So if a machine goes down, it’ll affect the people who are in that zone.

They’ll be popped out, and the main server process which runs across several machines will notice that these players are looking for this zone, so it’ll spin it up on another machine, and so, after a very short amount of time, they’re back in. It’s not like one machine takes out an entire world. We can even do in-place hardware upgrades.

We can tell a machine to stop servicing zones, and when players leave those zones, the machine basically has no responsibility anymore, so we can shut it down, and put the new one in its place. And when it boots up it starts handling zones again. It’s kind of the same principle as Google’s architecture. It’s designed to run on lots of relatively cheap machines.

Question Seven: Are there going to be any special awards for highly involved community members?

Rev:Well, there’s already the process that people can submit their sail and flag designs. Your name is carried on with that into the game, so when you purchase a sail design, it’ll say, “Made by So-and-So”. We’ve also had players that are submitting fully modeled ships. For the ones that have been accepted, we’ve given them beta passes for the game so they can see their ships in action.

We also have our realm versus realm system where players from one nation can band together and try and take over a port. It opens up a PvP realm around the port, and schedules a final battle 3 days later.

Getting into that battle depends on how much you contribute in those 3 days. This can be done by killing NPCs, delivering supplies, doing missions in the area. The points you earn also affect the abilities of the rest of your team in the battle by unlocking more spawn points, better supplies, etc.

Now as needed, there will be treaties signed that will reset the ports back to their respective nations so that one group doesn’t dominate over everything. When that happens, we’ll pick an MVP from each side and place a statue of their avatar in the town square, and that will be there until the next round.

Question Eight: What’s a normal day at Flying Labs consist of?

Rev: Well, every night we run a build of the game, and in the morning our QA people evaluate the build and see if everything is working, and they’ll let us know if we need to get the new build, or if it has too many bugs. Much of the day is doing bug work: finding bugs, writing up bugs, assigning bugs, fixing bugs, testing and verifying the fixes.

Each team has a weekly meeting where they go out and basically BS. My team’s meeting this week revolved around Iron Chef Baby, wondering if an Iron Chef show could be made featuring entirely baby dishes. What would the dishes taste like, what would the commentators would say, “Oh Shin-san, that baby looks delicious”. So, pretty much nonsense.

We also play the game company-wide twice a week. We play test on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Each run is targeted in a different way. We’ll choose to focus on an area, and make sure that those things work.

Question Nine: Are there any games that you feel have given you insight as to how to design PotBS?

Rusty: STARFLEET COMMAND!

Rev: Yes, Rusty’s very fond of Starfleet Command, as I’ve been hearing about for 3 years now.

Rusty: It’s that it’s an interesting combat model. Starfleet Command is always a fun experience for the player because it’s got a good combat model.

Rev: I play a lot of console games really. Lately I’ve been playing Full Auto on the Xbox 360. On the MMO side I was a big City of Heroes fan.

Rusty: City of Heroes was one of the first MMOs that I really enjoyed playing. One of the games that gave a fair amount of inspiration for our realm versus realm games was Battlefield.

Question Ten: Does anyone on staff have any sailing experience or have built their own ships?

Rev: Yeah, we got a pirate ship in the office. It’s built out of Legos.

Rusty: It might float, we’re not sure.

Rev: One of our designers, Taylor ‘Augustus’ Daynes, early on in the project actually did a tremendous amount of research and really immersed himself into the period. There’s this great set of books that we bought called The Seventy-Four Gun Ship, and it’s this four volume massive set that details pretty much everything that has to do with the people, the technology, the items, food, procedures.

Rusty: For example, one of the books, and they’re about two-inches thick, details everything that was ever on the ship.

Everything from the clothes that people wore, the medical kits, the utensils they ate with, their repair kits.

Rev: There’s everything that we ever wanted to know in those books, how they dressed, how they operated the guns, all the knots they used, fold-out plans for everything. Taylor is our lead designer, but he took the time to completely model out one of these seventy-four gun ships in 3D just to understand it, he really mastered that knowledge early on. However, we’re not going to have that in the game.

Rusty: The problem was that the seventy-four gun ship came about 70 years after we set the time period of the era. This is how nations competed in the world, so there’s a tremendous amount of inflation, so we’ve got a 104-gun ship-of-the-line and here’s this 74-gun ship that’s twice the size, so there’s this real disconnect by including a ship from a later era.

Rev: So, we have spent a lot of time studying that knowledge and putting it to use in the game. Which is great, because you’ll hear some of the designers arguing about something, trying to figure something out, and you’ll hear Taylor shout out, “But that ship didn’t have a bowsprit! What are you talking about?” All that great detailed knowledge has really paid off a lot.

Question Eleven: Reading on the forums, it seems that weather won’t be much of a factor in the game, but in sailing weather plays a major factor in the outcomes of battles. Are there any plans to add weather at a future date?

Rusty: Yeah… We haven’t said anything, but later on might be a lot sooner than people think. WINK

Editor’s note: I’m not sure why he was winking at me, he might have been coming on to me, not sure…

Question Twelve: When you get around to avatar combat, is it going to be more action-driven, or command-driven?

Rusty: I don’t know, we’ve just been doing early prototyping to see how we want to do it. Really we wanted to make sure that it is swashbuckling. We want the 3 Musketeers, Errol Flynn kind of feel to it, and we’re looking at what type of system we’d need to make it like that. It’s really just too early to figure that out.

Question Thirteen: Will the soundtrack feature authentic sea shanties?

Rusty: Eventually, yeah. That’s one of the things that I’m really aggravated that we don’t have in for the first release. They used the shanties to coordinate work, and we have a database of something like 3,000 shanties, apparently they had a lot of work.

We’ve got this great sound from Richard King, great battle sounds, ship sounds, but I want to hear more of the crew. It was originally spec’d for R1, but we decided that we just didn’t have the overhead to do the voice direction work to record more than just the one or two shanties that would start annoying users after the first time around.

Question Fourteen: Without magically-imbued items, will players still be able to obtain high-powered weapons as quest rewards?

Rev: Absolutely. There will definitely be rare and hard-to-find items. Something doesn’t have to be magical to be better, it just has to be really, really good. There’s lots of stuff like that in the game. We have what you would describe as ‘Phat Loot’, because we’re all about the loot in this game.

Question Fifteen: When you die or your ship gets sunk, is there any sort of experience debt?

Rev: There isn’t really any debt like that, the main penalty is time. You have to get back out to where you were, and for some people, that takes a lot of time, and that’s the real debt to them.

But what you can lose is cargo, if you have stuff in the hold of your ship, you can lose that eventually. There is no XP debt, we don’t take away your equipment. There’s this notion out there that death penalties improve game play, that they make you try and fight harder, but games aren’t balanced that way. You die all the time, it’s just normal in these games. To say that death penalties make better players, I don’t think that’s true at all, I think all it does is make it less pleasant.

Question Sixteen: In ship-to-ship combat, does friendly-fire come into play at all.

Rev: No. We just assume that your crew is smart enough to not fire upon someone waving at you going, “Hey buddy, how ya doing?”

Rusty: The reason we don’t have friendly fire is because of players who would use it to grief. There are so many things we would do differently if we could get everyone to sign an agreement not to be an ass. We’d put that in front of people, and they just wouldn’t be able to agree to it.

Question Seventeen: Will the economy of PotBS be a real-time economy?

Editor’s Note: With the recent announcement about the economy system from FLS, I think that press release covers the economy better than the interview.

Question Eighteen: Is there any implementation to protect against professional farming operations?

Rev: This is a problem that afflicts every game, and it’s hard to defeat, or else it wouldn’t be in every game out there. We have a server that can watch for any type of data, or data event that we tell it to. We can insert probes to look for, say, any player to player transaction over 2000 gold. We can be very specific with these probes. It’s all about having the right data mining tools to track and locate the data that you want. The first step is knowing about it.

Question Nineteen: How is the game going to be distributed?

Rusty: This is awkward.

Aether: We’ve been avoiding this question lately.

Rusty: There are a lot of things that we’re looking at.

Rev: There are a lot of ways to get a game onto the market.

There’s obviously the download market, you don’t need to deal as much with the physical package, and then there’s the store shelves, having a box on the shelf equals advertising. There are a lot of options that we’re looking at, and there may be others that we haven’t considered yet.

Question Twenty: What’s your favorite type of beer?

Rusty: When I was sixteen I went to a college party and drank many different types of alcohol, and got so sick that I puked in the hallway of the dorm and was sick for two days. Since then, I don’t drink. So, I don’t really have a beer I drink.

Rev: When I was sixteen I drank a large variety of liquors, but I didn’t stop. My favorite beer is Mac & Jack’s African Amber.

It’s a regional microbrew, you can’t buy it in grocery stores, they only serve it in bars.

Aether: I drink so many types of beer it’s hard to say. I’m drunk now, actually. I guess my favorite would probably be Red Stripe.

Rev: That works, that’s a Caribbean beer, it’s from Jamaica.

I should say, Mac & Jack’s isn’t my favorite beer. The problem is they stopped selling the beer in Washington State. It’s a beer called Xingu, it was a South American chocolate stout. It’s everything that I wish Guinness was. So, if there are any readers out there who want to send me a case of Xingu…

This article is (c) 2006 by Gamer Transit Authority, LLC. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.