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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.
The game is rated "Arrrr!" for pirates.
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Fresh on the heels of the Wired sex columnist who recommends MMORPGs as the place to cyber, we now have a pirate-themed MMORPG.
I guess it's time to put on my robe and wizard hat and, umm... HARRRRRRRRRR!
In other news EA has entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with the American Pirate Association. The deal, reportadly worth $5 billion US, gives EA a monopoly over Pirate Related games for a period of 250 years.
James Blackbeard, president of the APA declined to say which deserted island he would deposit the booty at.
It is not clear how this deal affects software pirates.
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.