Arrrrrr Ugly Pirates

Posted by Stropp on July 10, 2007

A couple of months ago I discovered that one of my favorite movie series was being made into a MOG. Frankly, I was a little worried. Movie or TV IPs don’t tend to make good games. A game, especially a massively multiplayer game, requires a lot of freedom that most sequential story telling doesn’t really allow. It’s my pet theory that this is the reason that Star Wars Galaxies had most of its problems. Everyone wanted to be a Jedi in the time period when there simply weren’t any. But that’s another post.

So when I found out that the Pirates of the Caribbean universe was being turned into a MOG, I was a bit confused about how this could be done. After all, for the most part Pirates are at sea. And the sea is usually extraordinarily empty. Not much landscape except for the big blue wobbly. There will be land based content, but how much remains to be seen.

My other concern was the characters that I could create. After all the Pirates of the Caribbean were no Errol Flynns with dentist white teeth and neatly pressed puffy shirts. The movie pirates were all dirty and unkempt, with bad breath and no access to dental floss. If I am to create a character in the PotC MOG, I want him to look good and ugly with bad teeth and rags.

So today I saw that Disney had released a new screenshot of the game. I hadn’t seen any yet, so I headed over to check it out. The pirates are ugly all right, but not in the good way. As the image below shows, they’re ugly in the ten year old graphics engine way. (This picture isn’t the latest screenshot btw.)

I don’t consider myself to be a graphics bigot. Great graphics don’t make a great game. Gameplay is king. But, for an upcoming game based on a series of movies with such great visual effects as Pirates of the Caribbean to have such ordinary graphics is somewhat surprising.

It indicates to me that there isn’t a lot of love and care going into this game. It indicates that it’s more of marketing decision to capitalize on the success of the movies with a game, and since MOGs are flavor of the month due to the success of World of Warcraft, that was the type of game to make.

I mentioned the other day that I thought it was sad that a niche game like Auto Assault was being closed because of lack of players. I also think it’s sad that a great movie property like PotC that could be a top niche massively multiplayer game is not being given the development it deserves. Arrrr.

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