Blues posters are so fucking jaded....you guys need a serious dose of optimism. The pesimistic shit needs to go. I've been a reader here for many years and it's just degraded horribly recently.

The game stinks. I played the beta for quite some time and after the first 2 hours I was forcing myself to keep playing because I wanted to make sure the game didn't have something better just around the corner.

At level 15 or so I gave up, the game does not offer nearly enough things to do. The world is ugly. Graphically this game looked great in screen shots but once you sit down and play it you'll be shocked at how poor everything looks.

Combat being slow is not that big a concern to me, I expected it to be a bit slow. But it seemed like all I did was circle the enemy and press the space bar. I could load different ammunitions and do damage to the crew/sails but besides different colored bars moving up or down there wasn't much difference. Even if you blast the crew with grape shot all day they still regenerate somehow...

And boarding other ships seemed like the easiest way to win combat but the avatar combat system was terrible, I mean REALLY REALLY BAD. I hated doing missions or anything involving my little sword carrying guy. I hated how ever other level I gained I could only spend those points on sword fighting, so no matter what your preference you were forced to play a character that was balanced between sword combat and naval combat.

I hated that. I just wanted to be in my ship all the time, I hated running around on ugly island looking for treasure, or maps, or whatever.

Adding an avatar side to this game killed it in my opinion. The ship combat side of this game is interesting but looks and feels unfinished. The avatar side is tacked on and looks like no one really wanted to make it in the first place.

RIP POTBS. I was hoping you'd be competition for EVE Online, but I guess that remains the only place where you can get really good ship to ship combat going.

Ending Song on Portal:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjGfgV7rJHI