Pirates of the Burning Sea to get skirmishes

Unfortunately for Flying Labs and players of Pirates of the Burning Sea, skirmishes are going to take a little bit longer to come to the game than previously hoped. Designer Drew Clowery explained the team had really “fought hard to include” the feature in the game, but the developer who had previously been writing the code unfortunately left the company.

Having skirmishes as an option would let players create customizable battles, in which they’d be able to, amongst other things, set the match’s objective and number of players.

“One of the funnest parts of our game is PVP, but it’s very inaccessible and high risk at the moment,” Bruce Sharp, the game’s art director stated. “Skirmishes are an opportunity to just go in and have fun without risking your ship, as you’ll be able to select the consequences for any battle failure, and that could be something like just gambling on doubloons.”

“Skirmishes make me very sad,” Clowery explained. “We had one guy working on them, but he got a great offer and left. It was an opportunity to work on a brand new start-up, and nobody could turn that down.”

“We’re short of developers at the moment,” said Sharp. “The real bottleneck we have is code,” Clowery interjected. “We have lots of assets, it’s just getting someone to implement them.”

In case you were wondering if this comment on the lack of developers is an indicator of things perhaps not going too well for the company, then don’t worry, Clowery is here to explain. “No-one is in game design for the money. What you’re looking for is creative control. We have an amazing creative environment, so we have a very small amount of turnover compared to other games.

“And there’s a plus side in that when people leave, they’re generally at the top, so it gives us a chance to promote people lower down who we hired because they’re really good, and they then bring a new perspective.”

It’s hopeful still that it won’t be too long till skirmishes arrive at least. “It’s something we want to do sooner rather than later,” Sharp commented.

Concerning the idea of an expansion, Clowery seemed hopeful, “At some point in time we will have an expansion – that’s my way of saying I have no idea when we’ll get on that. But we have a very healthy number of subscribers, so we’re not going anywhere.”