POTBS – The CEO Recounts Lessons Learned on The High Seas

One of the best interviews I had at ION in 2008 was not at the show, but rather offsite, with the CEO of Flying Lab Software. Russell Williams is a lot of fun to talk to, and more open than most in discussing issues they’ve had with their flagship game (pardon the pun), Pirates of the Burning Sea.

Coming out of a career with Microsoft’s Game Studio, Russell and his business partner were eager to do something innovative and creative. Working from a humble residential apartment that they dubbed their office, the fledgling studio managed to produce the award winning game “Rails Across America”.


Here be tha admiral hisself, Rusty Williams.

FLS then decided to start working on a game involving pirates and sea battles, something tactically based and limited in scope. However, as Rusty explained (he likes to be called Rusty in person but Russell on the phone - CEO’s get to cultivate quirks like that), the game kept outgrowing the original concept, time and time again. Once the new art director showed the company a bold new concept of gorgeous seascapes, the game bravely aimed for triple A status.

This would be a daunting task for any company, but the folks at FLS set upon a five year course which led them to publish Pirates of the Burning Sea. The team swelled to its present 70 person crew, and filled two floors of a sizable office building in the historic Queen Anne district of Seattle.


Some o’ tha swabbies wurkin’ tha decks at Flyin’ Lab.

There is an old adage that “everyone wants to be unique”, but this game really delivers. You can’t just read about it, you have to experience it. I did not fully grasp how different it was until I played it myself (as a PYRATE, o’ course), and completed several missions where I piloted my very own ship out on the ocean.


Here be me own crew… Oi am supervisin from tha stern. Lookit them liddle maggots o’ mine all over tha deck! Durin’ battle, ye kin see ‘em loadin’ cannon an’ bravely defendin’ me ship. Extry grog fer all!

It really is different. The seafaring battles are elegant, the ships reminiscent of great birds swooping across the waves… only firing all manner of metal at you, tearing your rigging, breaking your hulls, taking down masts, driving men overboard. Yeah, it’s rough, and dirty, and stunningly beautiful.

The shipboard battles, like the land-based missions, are more straightforward and recognizable to players of standard MMOGs, and are significantly less appealing to me.

The ships themselves are rendered in great detail, and are amazing to see on the move. A number of the ships have been created by players, under the “user content” program. This program deserves a whole article of its own, and I promise I will deliver on it. Player made ships, sail designs and flags – the best mini-games ever!


This be tha sail design Oi recently had approved fer use by tha dreaded pyrate Brakk Beerd (yeah, the Troll). Him an’ his wee ferrets are tha terror of tha seas! Err… if yer level 18 or less. Tha 50’s usually gank him on sight.

So let’s take a look at how things have gone for Pirates of the Burning Sea. Rusty and I talked a bit about the MMOG industry, and the broad appeal of pirates as the basis for a game concept.

Disney released their Pirates of the Caribbean MMOG last fall, of which Williams diplomatically said, “We think it’s great that they have a very different focus than we do, because they can go after the kids market, while our age range really takes off at 14. Below that is really what they are shooting for. They have followed the Toontown approach to what they are doing.”

On the popularity of the concept, he said, “I think it’s because Pirates seems like such a good idea. You think PIRATES, let’s do that! As they say in Hollywood, ‘and the story will write itself!’ There are a number of Asian games that have tried to do this, and the problem is that they have not re-thought the game to make it right for the genre. They just lump in the same mechanics they’ve always had, and it just doesn’t work for the genre.”

Is FLS happy with the way Pirates of the Burning Sea turned out?

“I think what we’ve done is, in many respects, the best approach, but it still has its problems. There are things that we’d love to be able to improve about the way we solved some issues.”

“When we were initially developing the game, we always thought that we could tune it so that travel took a reasonable amount of time and that combat would take a tactically interesting amount of time. When we built it and tried to tune it, we realized that we were completely screwed,” he laughed, “You just can’t tune all those pieces together. We went to a more instanced approach to the ship combats. I’d love to have a one world instance, but there is a certain overhead,” he paused, then added “I’d love to have no death too, but I am planning to have my head frozen.”

Rusty clearly got the desired reaction out of me with that last line as I squinted at him.

“Here’s my theory,” he explained, regarding the freezing of his head, “It’s not a very good plan, but it’s better than the alternative plans!”


Tha messiest storage area Oi ever did see.. tha folks at FLS call it "The Cave". Looks like me office back home. Oi bet Rusty’s frozen head will end up here… right by them bananas.

Travel time in MMOGs is a continuing problem. Back in 1999, travel time was slow and excruciating. As players, we didn’t know any better, and so we accepted it, because of our experience in MUDs and D&D. But now, games have evolved and the player base has broadened to encompass casual players, people who don’t have the time to sink into an hour of real time to get from point A to point B.

How does POTBS maintain the scope of the wide-ranging, ocean-faring game, without making it all take hours and hours to travel?

“The open sea really is our answer for that, and that is where we had to go with instancing,” Rusty said, “But it led us down the wrong path when we had to do avatars. We had so wholeheartedly embraced instancing with the travel and ship combat; it solved so many problems that when we were building up the avatar environments, we just took it for granted that of course we’ll do a lot of instancing. That’s a really easy way for us to get a lot of bang for our buck. The problem is that we really went a bit overboard with it.”

“So if you’re in let’s say a small fishing village. You click on a door, boom, I’m in the tavern. I run around and do my little tavern thing, I click on the door, I zone again. I’m in the street, I run five seconds, click on a door… loading screen again… (laughs) you can see the problem.”

Are you planning on changing that, I asked?

“We are. One of our goals is to create a combination of seamless transitions and instancing. So when you’re going into a high population, high traffic area, you'll see the tavern. You’ll click on the door, go down through this dogleg and into the main area of the tavern, so we can unload and load the graphics as you move. A very common approach.”

Right, this is an old standby of MMOGs and familiar to players.

“The thing about this approach is that this area then has to be a part of the city, so the city has to be physically large enough. So, a tavern? Not a problem. The places that you run to a lot will be seamless. A big church or admiralty office, that’s another matter. For those areas, we’ll still do instancing. “


Here me an’ som drinkin’ buddies hang oot at tha aforementioned tavern, or one like it.

Rusty continued, “The other thing that we learned was that we had relatively small towns for most of development. Then we thought, let’s do a really big town and see what we can do.”

You guys left that to the end of the project, I asked? You must have been way ahead of schedule.

“So… Tortuga! It’s gorgeous, it’s big, and we had this vision of doing it like a theme park, so here’s the docks and it’s got a color scheme and we move into the lava area and it’s got another color scheme and different content. We finished that and we were putting it in the 1.1 patch, and we were already working away on Point-a-Pitre, the French capital.”

Williams paused for dramatic effect, then said, “We released Tortuga and found it had a lot of problems. It was too big and hard to navigate. We’re geniuses, right? Before that, our issue was that our towns were relatively small, and we had never had to worry about navigation and size issues, and just hadn’t gotten it into our head that once you go beyond a certain scale, you have to pay attention to playability and usability of those pieces.”


A dev map o’ Tortuga. Yah. Just tha town itself, this… innerestin’ readin’ that particular Devlog, which ye kin find right here.

He sighed, “So we put up Tortuga and thought oh, yah. Duh. Problem is that Point-a-Pitre was already fully built by the time we fully realized the lessons of Tortuga. Suffice it to say, we really learned our lessons. Point-a-Pitre is this gargantuan area. We even put in a maze… it was kind of a subconscious cry for help, if you ask me.”

Hehehehe, I like this guy already.

Tune in tomorra fer PART TWO. Oi know ye all have a short attention span, so Oi’ll go easy on ye!