Pirates of the Burning Sea Comes to AbleGamer's Shore

Russell Williams, CEO and Co-founder of Flying Labs Software puts down his hammer and the other tools you need to build a highly anticipated high seas MMORPG, Pirates of the Burning Seas, and chats with AbleGamers. (For the record, I think that he is hand stitching all the sails himself, his fingers look like they have seen better days)

AbleGamers: Thank you for giving Ablegamers your time, we sat down back in January of this year to talk about POBS, what has changed?

Russell Williams: Wow. So much has changed I can't really give much more than "everything!" There's not a single area of the game that hasn't been dramatically polished/expanded since January.

AG: As you know, AbleGamers.com is a site for disabled gamers, did anything we spoke about last time make you re-think how you may have implemented the way people interact with the game? Such as more robust key mapping or built in support for things like joysticks or game pads?

RW: The biggest change isn't so new features, it's reworking the features that we have. For example, since we last spoke, we now analyze the UI by applying different filters to simulate color blindness. About a month ago we finally replaced the fonts to something much more legible, and updated a lot of the colors to be recognizable by people who are color blind.

AG: I was playing in the latest beta release, what is left to do before you launch this ship (pun intended)?

RW: "Latest" for us is pretty much this week! In fact, we're just prepping a new update that improves server performance (we've already broken through our initial numbers, now we're seeing how high we can go), PvP fixes (so that group members can't hide in a port for an ambush), and over 170 priority one bug fixes.

The big things that are left to do are to put in the looping combat music (we have just doubled the amount of music in our game), new sounds in the towns that are nation-specific, and of course, bugs and balance tuning.

We've also started on our first patch, and are introducing some new gameplay systems (like to PvP but are tired of being ganked? Welcome to Events!) as well as improvements in basic systems and new repeatable group missions. Our goal for each one of these patches is to make sweeping improvements across the entire game, and to really put some efforts into a specific area so that players always get something cool and new.

AG: You have introduced something that I have long thought been missing in the MMORPG arena, a way for player created content to be introduced into the game, do you have plans to go beyond the flags and sails? You want to see the ones I submitted? (You can see them to the Left)

RW: We've already done that. The majority of our ships are modeled by our players. We were originally planning on shipping with 22 ships, and now we'll be going out with around 60 ships. The difference is the users, and not only do they make the majority of the ships in the game, but they also make the best looking ships in the game.

AG: I know the game is in beta right now, and I am sure there is a in house quality assurance team, do you know if any are disabled?

RW: Some of our testers have significant vision problems.

AG: Has anyone on the QA team tried to playing this game without a mouse and keyboard, using any of the hundreds of "alternative input devices"?

RW: Yes, with a joypad, but more to test that we don't break with other devices plugged in than to see how they are as alternative input

AG: If I took yours keyboard and mouse away, besides tavern trash-talk, how would you play this game? Could you?

RW: Actually, I was just on a demo trip where I wasn't able to use Zoom (mouse wheel) for the first demo, and I fell apart on that. It turns out I have an unhealthy love of zooming in on the game! But I'm assuming you're talking about replacing the keyboard and mouse with other input devices, as they're the only two inputs on my PC. And to answer that, I don't know, because I don't have a breadth of knowledge about the various alternatives available.

AG: I am impressed at what I see, I am sure that this game will be a great success, it is fresh, and very different than anything out there, is there plans for an expansion, or are we trapped in the Caribbean Sea forever?

RW: Pirates of the Asian Seas!!

AG: One last question, I am not sure how your live support will work, but can AbleGamers get a commitment from you all to have an email, a category on the forum, or other method, for feedback on accessibility issues?

RW: I think that's a great idea. Let me be frank about accessibility issues. Right now, the focus of our development is fixing the obvious problems we have, and expanding the basic content. In that, accessibility issues don't get as much attention as we like. But as we move beyond the basic process of launching the game, we have less and less "on fire!" issues, and more discretionary ones to address. That's when we have the overhead to really get traction on accessibility issues.

AG: Anything else you want to add before we let you go?

RW: It's really useful to have an organization like AbleGamers. Bringing accessibility issues up from time to time keeps them in our mind, and makes those improvements come a lot earlier than they would otherwise. So if you're playing the game, please don't hesitate to let us know if there's something that's especially problematic for you. I can't guarantee how much or how fast we'll fix things, but we're especially fond of paying customers :) so we want expand the game to let as many people enjoy it as possible.

AG: Thank you for your time...