ZAM recently announced five MMORPG award winners from PAX:
- Best in Show – Star Trek Online
- Best Presentation – Star Wars: The Old Republic
- Most Innovative Gameplay – Star Trek Online
- Most Original Setting – The Secret World
- Best New Feature – Pirates of the Burning Sea
I guess this bumps STO up a few notches in my estimation — it’s a title that I haven’t been following too closely or holding great hopes for, but it’s starting to get some excellent publicity from hands-on experiences. And two awards, including topping TOR for Best in Show? That says something.
It’s good to see The Secret World get a bit of recognition, but the real shocker is Pirates of the Burning Sea — it’s one of those “off the radar” games that many have written off, yet it appears the devs are hard at work with some new ideas in its first expansion.
I was in the beta for PotBS and loved it – and would have been a happy subscriber – but the avenue they decided to go for Australia pretty much crossed that game off the list.
See, in Australia pretty much all of the telephone infrastructure etc is owned by Telstra. Flying Lab decided to do some sort of deal with Telstra for the Australian release. Great, one would think. Telstra must be doing Australian servers. Finally we won’t have 250-400 pings to an MMO.
Not quite. The sub fees would be paid to telstra (and I really don’t want to give them any more money for their horrid service) and Telstra’s servers weren’t actually servers but a gateway to the US servers… So the connection would be routed to Telstra’s gateway server and then to the US… which meant higher latency and more chances for service disruption. And we got US maintenance times that hit our primetime.
So yeah. No PotBS for me. It was a great beta, too.
Arrrr.
TOR wasn’t on the show floor this year at PAX so it didn’t qualify for the same awards that Star Trek Online did. You’re definitely right about Pirates though … quite the shocker. If Player Governed Ports are as cool as it sounds, that will definitely be something that brings me to the game.
I bought PotBS a few months back and only played the free month, but I did like it alot. The nice thing is that it’s not fantasy, not space or superhero, it’s pirates!
The core ship-to-ship gameplay of PotBS is fantastic. They got a little muddled in other features, but I would have played it more anyway if I’d had more friends interested. I think it’ll end up having longer legs than a lot of other MMOs because it’s unique.