Pirates of the Burning Sea Updated Impressions - Ghost Ships and Zombie Voodoo

Although your traditional fantasy online role-playing game puts you in the role of some kind of elf who has to go bash orcs for a while until you can gain a level or buy a shinier sword, Flying Labs' Pirates of the Burning Sea charts a completely different course. In this unusual game, you'll play as a seafaring captain in the Age of Sail who seeks great adventure and even greater riches in order to purchase larger and more-upgraded battleships to conquer the seas and rid them of dastardly pirates. We recently had the opportunity to see some of the game's "supernatural content," which will offer landlocked tales that could've come straight from Treasure Island, or maybe a certain multimillion-dollar-selling motion picture series.

The game's "supernatural content" will be inspired by the kind of superstition that was common on the high seas. You can expect to see voodoo magic, the ghosts of men wronged, and maybe even a ghost ship or two (piloted by shambling zombie pirates). This type of content will apparently make up about 10-15% of the game's total experience, and will be largely localized in the part of the world that has come to be known as the mysterious Bermuda Triangle. If you don't care to fight zombies or solve supernatural quests, you won't even need to visit the area, given that you'll be able to advance all the way to the game's initial maximum level of 50 through sea battles and economic trading if you care to instead.

For those who don't mind going ashore in search of treasure that may or may not be haunted, you can expect to spend much of your time on foot, trudging across dreary beaches under a stormy sky, or exploring gloomy caverns by torchlight. In this part of the game, you'll take on quests from such unlikely sources as haunted mastheads left over from shipwrecks. Apparently, the Bermuda Triangle is ruled by a group of voodoo gods, some benevolent, some evil; different quests may require you to act in the interest of the good ones while thwarting the evil ones. Quests that we watched required us to, among other things, retrieve the skull of a dead voodoo priestess, rescue our possessed crew from the clutches of a malevolent spirit, and make our way through a herd of reanimated zombies.

The game will put an interesting spin on the "you're all alone against a whole bunch of zombies" scenario made famous through countless horror movies by letting your character pick up the remains of a slain zombie and equip them as a disguise. Should your character break into a run, the zombies will detect you and attack you; if you walk instead, your character will shamble like a zombie and can actually sneak right past any number of them to reach your goal. However, zombies won't be the island's only inhabitants. Crazed voodoo priests who move at disturbingly fast speeds will also lie in wait for you, and they may possess the ability to hamstring your character, which will prevent you from otherwise fleeing the horde of slow-moving ghouls.

Combat against these supernatural foes will also take an unusual turn. For instance, an individual zombie enemy will be extremely tough and hard to kill, though it won't do much damage to you at all. However, if you've been hamstrung by a different enemy, and can't outrun the armies of undead, you'll find that the damage from the zombies' attacks adds up quickly. Likewise, in some cases you may be required to spar with insubstantial ghost enemies who can't deal much damage, but that are also largely immune to the swings of your cutlass or a shot from your flintlock pistol. However, before you encounter a ghostly foe, you'll have the opportunity to pick up a handful of dust from the deceased's grave; using the dust will cause the spirit to become more substantial and more vulnerable to your weapons, but the specter will also pack a heavier punch against you.

Aside from running land-based quests in the Bermuda Triangle, you may also encounter ghost ships in the surrounding waters. Though we weren't able to watch an actual naval battle with them, we did see a player sight a ghost ship, with its ragged sails and dozens of gray-skinned sailors in tatters on the bridge. Ghost ships will apparently figure into the game's quests, though exactly how remains to be seen. This unusual massively multiplayer game seems more distinctive and quirky each time we see it. The game is scheduled for release in 2008.