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Ubisoft to Publish Puzzle Pirates
Ubisoft announced this morning that they have come to an agreement with 3 Rings Design to publish Puzzle Pirates in retail stores. This exciting news couldn't come for a better game, winner of the IGF 2004 Technical Excellence and Audience Awards for Online games. From the Puzzle Pirates site: "Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is an online game in which you play a Pirate character in an ocean world. Hundreds of your fellow player Pirates swarm these Isles and Sea-lanes. For Pirates who love acronyms, Puzzle Pirates is an massively multi-player online roleplaying game, or mmoarrrrpg." Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is available for Demo on PC/Mac/Linux.
Puzzle Pirates is a great game. I played it for about 6 months quite regularly and had a great crew of people from around the world that I played and chatted with. Lots of fun. Then I got a new job and had little time to play and my account lapsed. (Also, I installed World of Warcraft :) There's only room for one MMOG in my life at a time now.)
:)
Anyway, I highly recommend it if anyone's looking for a change of pace from MMORPG grinding. And, if any Marine Knights are reading, Rhodes didn't die, he just put his fleet into drydock for a while.
I played this game for a while. It has a lot of depth and it solves the BIGGEST problem in MMORPG - namely idiots with a lot of time can dominate you. With this game, intelligence counts for a lot - namely your ability to do tetris-style puzzles.
It also has a lot of teamwork - you need to work together to get a ship from port to port. It also has a big time element - it takes time to build new swords, to buy a new ship, etc.
Or if you want, you can just stand in the town center and duel people for money.
I've been thinking about opening the source to PirateTrader and PirateTrader OCR (http://dracosoftware.com/piratetrader/), because I'm too busy to do it all by myself.
They're assitants for Puzzle Pirates that are Terms-of-use friendly with the game.
Anyone want to help?
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Are all of the puzzles tetris-ish? Is it possible to play the game without doing any puzzles?
Can anyone offer some of their experience with it?
while there are a few dropping blocks puzzles, I would hesitate to call them tetris-ish. The main puzzle for swabbies, sailing, is very reminiscent of Dr. Mario, however.
I've found the puzzles to be quite varied and engaging.
It is not possible to play the game without doing any puzzles. Practically any task you want to do is based on a puzzle. And how well you do on the puzzle is reflected, both in how productive you were at the task, and in your personal reputation in the game.
Though you can freelance, a lot of people join a crew. Whether you've joined a crew or not, there are temporary crew positions open pretty much all the time. However if you are not in a permanent crew, you can't become an officer, which means no ships for you.
A ship needs a crew of from 6 to about 30 to operate. Any spots not filled by a person can be filled by a (generally average) AI bot, at the discretion of the captain. There are three main duties on a ship, sailing, bilging, and carpentry. In addition, you have the more advanced duties of gunning and navigation. I would highly recommend going on a naval ship to practice gunning as that's a skill that's in high demand, especially since if you need someone to gun on a ship, you need them to do it well. Kind of a chicken and egg problem.
Landside there are plenty of crafting type puzzles to do. Most pirates have a few landside jobs as well as their piratical duties. In fact, the economy is based on it. I personally love distilling.
There are a few versus mode puzzles, swordfighting and the drinking game can be played for a wager (swordfighting is also played between two ships when one intercepts the other) plus there's some in-game card games.
I've been a subscriber for a few months, logging on maybe twice a week. Every time I go in it seems like they've improved a part of the game. Updates are frequent, but relatively speedy over my broadband connection.
P.S. I'm Mrln in the game if anyone wants to say hi real quick.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
the community is mature, not the content. There is a default chat filter that turns most online and d00d speak into more pleasant piratey versions. 12 year olds find that they don't fit in well at all, unless they act more mature than kids their age usually do.
there is no level grind. While there is a wide range of levels (as in any RPG), it's all skill, not artificial experience points. You go up in levels by simply getting better at the puzzles.
there are no predefined classes of players, but there are many different ways to play. You can make money pillaging, trading, being a merchant, or even just winning swordfighting or drinking competitions. If one form of play gets boring, you can move on to other ones.
teamwork is a fundamental design goal, and all of the duty puzzles come together to make ships sail in a fun and intuitive way.
once you've gotten sick of just puzzling and pillaging, there is a vast political game to play. Players fight for control of islands in blockades that require weeks of planning and involve hundreds of people.
most importantly for the slashdot crowd, there is a good dialogue between the designers and the community. Developers have even been recruited from the player base, adding some valuable perspective. A few months ago they released the island editor for designing landscapes, and ran a design competition. The winners were invited to finalize the entries to make up one of the archipelagoes in the new ocean.
So give it a try if you are looking for something fresh. There has been quite a flood of new players with some new ad placements, but the players will still go out of their way to help you get aquainted with things.
five pirates have 100 gold coins. they have to divide up the loot. in order of seniority (suppose pirate 5 is most senior, pirate 1 is least senior), the most senior pirate proposes a distribution of the loot. they vote and if at least 50% accept the proposal, the loot is divided as proposed. otherwise the most senior pirate is executed, and they start over again with the next senior pirate. what solution does the most senior pirate propose? assume they are very intelligent and extremely greedy (and that they would prefer not to die).
(to be clear on what 50% means, 3 pirates must vote for the proposal when there are 5 for it to pass. 2 if there are 4. 2 if there are 3. etc... )
Solution
Puzzle pirates is simply the best MMORPG ever made. Only World of Warcraft can even come close to attaining the same consumer satisfaction. It is an everquest for those who hate everquest, but love the idea behind it. The absence of any discernable level grind combined with the presence of discernable but uncoded levels of skill make puzzle pirates the first game to even come close to achieving what pretty much everyone wants to have a shot at achieving when playing an online game:
The idea of the hero. There is no other game where a player can realistically hope to achieve heroic type fame. Granted, it is similar to hoping to become the best basketball player around, or the best chess player on earth, but the fact remains that you are not as hindered by a mixture of luck and hardcoded statistics as in everquest, world of warcraft, or any other MMORPG that has come out, ever. Puzzle pirates remains the only game out where this is an achievable dream.
I like the Monte Hall puzzle better, because it's less broken.
In real (pirate) life, if I was a low-ranking pirate in this logic game, I'd walk away with 25 gold and leave behind one dead senior pirate because I know how to make a side-deal which includes, "And after we kill the blighter, we stop messing around with this stupid voting nonsense. It's this way, or we all get screwed by so-called, 'logic'."
Game theory only works in controlled environments, (like computer simulations). In the real world of global politics, it only screws those who agree to play by the set rules, which is pretty damned stupid, considering where the rules come from. This is directly linked to such sayings as Tacitus' "The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws."
Long live Chaos!
-FL
As vitreolic as the parent's tone was, I would have to agree. This article really does sound like an advertisement. They tell you who is making it, what sort of awards it has won (which is why you should buy it), and what the game is about. Though this may be useful information, I can't see why this has any place on Slashdot. The "Games" section should contain information about new gaming technology, system upgrades, how to build a hot gaming rig, and so on - not "news flashes" about the latest game you should go buy.
I am scientifically inaccurate.