Difficulty levels can be adjusted, but even on the allegedly easy default setting you never know whether a mission will be ridiculously simple or almost impossible. In part this is because one-on-one fights grow thin pretty fast, so there are numerous NPCs in many missions. If the ship you are escorting decides to sail into the crossfire of several enemies, the mission may well fail no matter what you do.
Another issue with naval missions is that they can go on for an almost agonizingly long time. You often come up against NPC captains that want to pound it out to it very last hitpoint rather than abandoning ship, in which case you might as well put a brick on your space bar to keep your cannons firing and go plunder a sandwich in your kitchen.
The Open Sea
An accurately-scaled Caribbean with a realistic sailing model probably wouldn't be much fun, as it would take days or even weeks to travel between ports. When you enter the "Open Sea" in PotBS, you go into a miniaturized version of Caribbean with greatly increased ship speeds, which makes it possible to get around in a reasonable amount of time. It still takes quite a while to traverse the entire map, and wind is a factor here as it is in battles.
There are NPCs and other players on the open sea, but when you engage them you once again enter an instance, and players outside your group see only a battle marker. Once inside the instance, you can decide between fighting it out or trying to run away. NPC pirates will attack you on occasion, and if you're in a PvP zone you're fair game for enemy players.
Economy
The player-driven economic component of PotBS is a great deal more complex that what most MMORPGs offer. It has some similarities with Eve Online, in that it revolves around building ships and the location of goods can effect their price. However, raw materials are handled very differently, with no equivalent to Eve's mining.
In PotBS everything is produced in abstract structures that aren't part of the 3D world, although they are tied to ports. These structures accumulate labor, which can be combined with recipes and dubloons to produce items of all sorts, including raw materials. This system is incredibly deep, with an assortment of ship parts large enough to serve as an education for anyone that doesn't sail.
Nation vs. Nation
You'd never know it from the early levels, but PotBS is centered on a player vs. player war over territorial control of Caribbean's ports. Players other than Pirates fight for either the British, Spanish, or French. Pirates are a sort of nation of their own, with different rules when it comes to capturing ports. When one side wins the map resets, but your character and ships persist.
Rather than having fixed PvP zones, players create these zones by raising unrest in enemy ports. Completing certain missions and sinking ships of a particular faction increases unrest until a PvP zone is established around the port, which can eventually escalate into a 25 on 25 battle to decide ownership of the port. PvP zones appear on the map as big red circles and they often encompass more than one port.
In practice this system walks a troublesome line between almost forcing you into PvP, and not providing enough PvP opportunities to those that want them. Although you can, for most part, avoid the red circles, it's limiting when there are a lot of ports under contention. Within a PvP zone you're at a real risk of getting sunk, unless your ship is either very big or very fast, or you have a well-armed escort. The penalty for being sunk isn't light: your unsecured cargo goes to the victor and your ship loses a precious durability point, unless you have none to spare, in which case it can also be lost. Lower level players naturally tend to avoid PvP zones because they quickly become cannon fodder, and even high level players sometimes keep cheaper ships around for PvP so they don't have to risk their extremely expensive ships-of-the-line.
Of course, it's all tied to the economy and the cost of replacing ships, and the benefits to be reaped from PvP encounters, which currently seem way out of wack. In short, the risks far outweigh the rewards right now and the formula will likely have to be tweaked to encourage involvement in the war. A big part of the problem is that it takes a great deal of PvE to replace a ship lost in PvP. This is a tricky issue because PvP reward systems are often exploited, although there are ways to keep it to a minimum.
Other shortcomings in the war between nations is that it relies heavily on server populations and the nation populations on those servers. The sides are very unbalanced on most servers, which affects a nation economically as well as militarily. The fewer people there are on a server, the longer it will take to bring ports into contention. On top of that, given the win conditions, I'm not sure the pirates have a reasonable chance of victory in the international conflict.
The Bottom Line
Quite frankly, this review doesn't touch on half the problems facing PotBS. It's an unusually ambitious game, and Flying Lab is sailing into uncharted waters, so it's bound to have rough spots. It also requires a considerable amount of patience. A lot of people will be bored or frustrated sick long before they get a decent ship and start making a meaningful contribution to the larger PvP conflict. Even if they survive they lower levels, they'll have to cope with population imbalances, a stumbling economy, dysfunctional PvP mechanics, and a host of other issues.
Yet, there's something about PotBS that makes you want to overlook all the game's weaknesses and keep playing. When the naval combat is good, it's really good. The setting and the wooden ships are irresistable, and at the end of the day, there's just nothing else like it right now. This may not be enough to save it from obscurity, but I sincerely hope that the game does find an audience, because there's tremendous potential for fun here that falls outside of standard online RPG formula.
