A Bit of a Puzzle for Beginners, but Plenty of Pirate to Go Around
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A review of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates by Brook Willeford
Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates (just Puzzle Pirates from here on out) is an entertaining series of casual games tied together by a loose pirate milieu. Each of the games represents a particular piratical job like pumping out the bilges, trimming the sails, and the like. Several players at once can combine efforts to run a ship, or a single player can run with a crew of computer-controlled NPCs. Each job assists in the ship’s progress in some manner—trimming the sails allows the ship to go faster, carpentry repairs damage inflicted by enemy action, and loading the cannons allows the ship to fire broadsides more quickly.
When you get tired of working on ship, you can go ashore and brawl, swordfight, or play drinking and parlor games. In the early stages of the game, the only real purpose of these jobs is to increase your rating in each and to earn Pieces of Eight, which are the coin of the realm. Later on in your nautical career, a player can cast their lot with a scurvy crew and sail the seas looking for prizes. This is when the jobs become critical; as the ship needs every edge it can get against its opponents.
However, this divide between new players earning coin and more experienced players contributing to a crew is one of the few major problems of the game. In an ever-widening MMO market, getting new players involved with the persistent world that differentiates MMOs from single-player—or even most multi-player—games as soon as possible is critical, and Puzzle Pirates fails to do so. While the tutorials for most of the games are put together well enough, and the earlygames themselves are easy to pick up, there is no in-game explanation as to how to get signed on to a crew or exactly why you’re completing all these puzzles and gathering up Pieces of Eight. Additionally, players can easily take on one of the more advanced jobs before a tutorial has been offered for it.
Intro-level problems aside, most of the various games are incredibly entertaining, as they should be, given that they’re drawn from popular casual games (bilge pumping is essentially BejeweledBejeweled reviews
, rumbling is Bust-A-Move/Snood with a few tweaks, and sword fighting is Puzzle Fighter II Turbo with a new skin, for instance). It would be quite easy to simply wander around the world playing these games for hours on end without ever once interacting with another player. While this may be fun, however, it doesn’t utilize the key benefit of the MMO genre, the fact that the game is played in a persistent world populated by characters controlled by other players around the world.
As your pirate earns Pieces of Eight, different clothing options, pets, swords, and even ships and shops will become available. Most of the purchasable items have no game effect, but as you might expect, new swords give you a bonus to the sword-fighting game (one of the most important ones, as it allows you to loot a ship once you’ve run it down). Shops allow you to create items to sell to other players, actually contributing to and driving the game economy, which is exceptionally cool, and one very rarely implemented in other MMOs. Ships, of course, allow you to gather your own scurvy crew and scour the seas for ripe prizes. Unfortunately, only one crew member can be captain, and all the others have to just be crew, stuck pumping bilges, repairing holes in the hull, or setting sails, and there-in lies another problem with Puzzle Pirates. Just about every pirate worth his or her salt is going to want to captain his or her own ship, and so most crew members are just biding time until they can afford a ship of their own, meaning that there’s usually a lack of permanency to a crew roster.
Despite the difficulty in getting new players involved with the world at large, those who are already playing are usually extremely friendly, and quite enthusiastic. Pirate-ese is the order of the day here, with players greeting one another with “Yar” and “Ahoy” instead of the usual “kk gg gtg” leet-speak that drives most gamers over the age of 14 crazy. I’ve heard stories of crews who stick together through thick and thin and become scourges of the seas, well-oiled machines unmatched by fellow player or AI. There are other players out there, and they’re interacting with each other, however little it may look like it at first.
Just like most MMOs, you have to pay to play, but unlike most of them, you only have to pay to use some of the features. So long as you’re happy being a bilge rat and swabbing the decks (not literally, they don’t have a game for that yet), you can play for free; the basic games are entirely free and each day there is a selection of land-lubberly pursuits (fighting, drinking games, parlor games) available to play for free. If you want to captain your own ship, run your own shop, or play any game whenever you want, however, you have to pony up with the hard currency. Several servers (oceans, in Puzzle Pirate parlance) run on a subscription-based system, where you pay a regular fee for unlimited access to any of the for-pay features. The other oceans are on a micro-payment scale, which many MMOs seem to be implementing recently, where you only pay real-life money when you actually want to use a for-pay feature.
The art and music are a little cheesy, with your pirate and everyone else in the world looking like slightly-smoothed Lego people and most song loops seeming pretty short, but they definitely fit the feel of the game, which is light, cartoony, and fun. All in all, I think that as one of the first casual MMOs on the market, Puzzle Pirates has a lot to offer the Gaming industry in general and the MMO niche in particular, but I do think there is definitely some room for improvement, especially in new player immersion and effective use of the persistent game world.
Rating: 4 out of 5. Good clean fun, but not as elegant or newbie-friendly as it could have been.
There are a couple inaccuracies, one that is significant, in this review. The writer argues that crews will be unstable because of everyone wanting to captain their own boat.
The writer has confused captaining a boat with captaining a crew. Anyone who is capable of owning a boat and is an officer in a crew can ‘captain’ a boat. Indeed, our crew captain drives less than many of the rest of us because of the time she dedicates to crew and flag politics.
That said, his comments about helping newer players mature from ‘clueless’ to ‘clued’ are on target. It seems often difficult for new players to figure out the lay of the land and find themselves a good crew to be part of.
From the review, it seems like you played the free to play servers and not the subscription servers. I think that would explain the lack of interaction… most F2P games have limited actual social interaction unless the other person needs somethingof you or you need something of them.
“It would be quite easy to simply wander around the world playing these games for hours on end without ever once interacting with another player.”
One could possibly do that, which is a good thing. It gives that person the option to do what he wants without needing to be tethered to 7, 19, or 39 other people. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case ingame. Most peopel go jobbing on ships, sail with their crew, or play games in the inns. It actually is one of the most interactive MMOGs out there.
While this may be fun, however, it doesn’t utilize the key benefit of the MMO genre, the fact that the game is played in a persistent world populated by characters controlled by other players around the world.
“As your pirate earns Pieces of Eight, different clothing options, pets, swords, and even ships and shops will become available.”
Rank determines availability of items. Certain items are subscriber only, and certain items are only for officers of a crew.
“Most of the purchasable items have no game effect, but as you might expect, new swords give you a bonus to the sword-fighting game (one of the most important ones, as it allows you to loot a ship once you’ve run it down).”
Swords don’t give bonuses, rather they have different drop patterns dependent on the type of and color of the sword. Also, while there are hundreds and hundreds of items in the game, useful items to aid gameplay are available from the various shops of the game. Pretty much any shop that you can work at is a shop that produces useful and needed items (paints, dyes, weapons, mugs, rumble gear, ships, etc)
The issues with steering new players along once they are ingame are something I’m up in the air about. On one hand, one could say that since newer gamers really aren’t prone to interacting much, the handholding really should be added. On the other hand, the subscription servers seem to retain a more social and interactive crowd as a result of the current design.
A Bit of a Puzzle for Beginners, but Plenty of Pirate to Go Around…
A review of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates at MMO Gamer…
The single biggest factor of YPP for new players – which this review misses – is that the game now centers totally around poker.
Initially, the game offered a rich world, with a variety of equally rewarding paths for different play styles — solo or cooperative; casual or intense; economic or warfare or social. And the game was designed to synergistically engage all these interactions — a new player would join a crew, go on a cooperative pillage with new friends, then spend his money in a shop run by a solo economic-style player, who got his goods from a solo merchant/trading player.. or maybe wager his pay against puzzle competition players, etc.
As the best way to get in-game money was, for most people, cooperative pirating, there were always large and active crews looking to recruit and befriend new players, show them around the game, help them get started, teach them puzzling tricks, etc. The result: a vibrant, active community, with altruistic and helpful leaders, skilled mission commanders (resulting in more rewards for all) and thus a uniquely engaging and cooperative MMOG.
All this was destroyed with the introduction of poker to the game. The reason is not that is removed any functionality or potential from the game, but that it completely changed the social dynamic. Poker offers its big winners in-game income of literally hundreds of times more than the other venues (which, gave a balanced rate of income across the different play styles and interests) — and without nearly the requirements of time, puzzling skill, or social interaction that other “tracks” require. Of course, few people win that much… but the promise is there.
The result of its introduction was for all new players to see this “get rich quick” option and run to it, looking at other activities (such as participation in a crew and learning to do well at the cooperative, team puzzles) as merely something to exploit to get the next bit of money to gamble with. This attitude completely undermined the cooperative and skill-oriented nature of the game which had existed previously. As the society shifted, established players moved away or ceased to engage new players — meaning fewer opportunities for new players to get involved in the “human” side of the game or acquire pirating skills. This, in turn, made these game elements less fun and profitable for these new players.
The upshot, after some years of poker, is this:
* the community team-oriented spirit of the game is largely dead
* established players have little incentive to mentor or train new players
* the tradition of skilled & experienced leadership of crews is dead, resulting in less successful or rewarding or enjoyable group/team activities all around
* A huge gulf exists between the wealthy (now mainly the winning poker players – people often completely uninvolved in the rest of the game) and the impoverished players
* Very few venues remain for the new player to “break in to” the game, except by winning at poker, any more [precisely because the rewarding team-work activities led by skilled pirates have become far rarer and, those few which remain, often uninterested in taking on unknown new players].
The upshot is that YPP is now a fairly immature venue, which the majority of players using it either in isolation as a tetris-like-puzzles platform (for which it is still fairly good, though there are better and easier ways to play little puzzles), using it as a chatroom (for which there are far better and larger sites), or using it as a poker house (for which, again, there are far better and more active sites).
Though the old “functionality” remains – and even some engaging new functionality added in the last 2 years or so – the destruction of the society (leadership, skill, teamwork, community… and rewards for them) required for it to be truly effective has made that functionality largely unused or obsolete.
In short, other than for the player looking for a cute platform for some solo puzzle games (most of which can be found elsewhere, and without the cost or processing overhead), YPP no longer offers anything compelling – or competitive with other venues – to the new player… and no longer offers the established players the unique experience which first drew them to YPP.
In short: DONT BOTHER