Gamespy held a dev chat with a few of the FLS guys last night which I unfortunately did not attend. I haven’t been able to find a complete log of the chat but here’s a link to one missing the first ten minutes. Given what was included in that chat log it doesn’t look like much of anything new was said that can’t be found already on fansites. I don’t really blame the devs; most of their answers were fine. The questions though were really bad and it makes me wonder if the people were just simply not interested in new info or if they were really uninformed. A few things did catch my eye though that aren’t new but worth talking about more so that those who were not in the beta can have a greater understanding of the game.
[19:49:04] <[Admin]Angelic> *Dvour-gs* Is a lot of the content instance based?
[19:49:50] [FLS DEV]: Ok, I see a lot of confusion about ‘instances’ in our game, so I want to try to clear this up.
[19:50:19] There are two things you might mean when you say ‘instance’. One of them is what WoW does with instancing: gives you and your group your own private copy of an environment to play in. The other meaning is just ‘a separate environment for some element of the gameplay. We do a lot of the latter, and not as much of the former. Here’s some examples: If you attack someone at sea, you go to a ‘ship battle instance’. All that means is that we move you and your target to a ship-scale battle room. We leave a marker behind on the open sea so other people can see there’s a battle taking place. In fact, if they get there quickly enough, and it’s a PvP battle, they can join in. If you go into a tavern, we move you into another room — the ‘tavern room’. That’s not an ‘instance’ in the sense of it being a private space just for you; it’s a shared, persistent space that happens to be on the other side of a (short) loading screen. I see a lot of people calling that an ‘instance’. On the other hand, in our missions, we make pretty extensive use of ‘instances’ in the first sense of the word: private spaces. For example, you might have a mission to defend the town, which is under attack by pirates. When you emerge into the town, it’s an instanced private copy of the town in which the attack is taking place. We do this mostly for story reasons, so that we can tell a coherent and sensible story. But when someone says ‘PvP in PotBS is all instanced!’ I /facepalm, because it’s not, at least in the sense they mean. So hopefully that clears up the instance issue. Probably not, though. 🙂
The dev said they do a lot of the latter, but having played the game I would say that much more of the game is truly instanced – as in private encounters. You enter combat with a player or a npc and it’s private (some pvp encounters can be unlocked for others to join). If you want to do a mission you’re swept away to a private encounter. Those things account for well over the majority of their game. Instancing or “loading/zoning” is a given in PotBS and most games these days. You want to go into a port or out of a port? You zone out. You want to enter a building? You load. Basically anywhere you go you load (instance, zone, whatever the heck you want to call it). I don’t so much care about the loading. We’ve been doing it since EQ and we’ll continue doing it.
I’m irked by the manner in which they use instancing and zoning which leads to the destruction of immersion that drives many players away. When you’re sailing the open sea in what I call “map mode” you don’t get to sail up to a port and tie off your ship. You get close enough to click on it and be instantly loaded in. You “pretend” that a longboat rowed out to pick you up and drop you on the dock. Now that you’re in the port, what if you want to do a mission? You receive this mission to go attack a port or save a ship or ANYTHING and guess what? You simply click the NPC, click the name of the mission, and BAM you’re there. Are we supposed to pretend that we somehow got here?
I understand the use of private encounters to tell the story easier. I understand the use of loading. I don’t understand the way in which they utilize both. I WANT to sail to the port. I WANT to find the enemy ships out in ocean. I appreciate the instant gratification and removal of what is considered by some a time sink but what it’s done is over simplified many of the actions that make these games what they are.
Check out the dev chat log and definitely keep researching the game if you’re on the fence. I plan to write at least a blog post a day about various PotBS topics covering both positive and negative to help you on the way.