Quasi-Review of Sid Meier's Pirates!

I've spent the past couple of days playing the new Pirates! (GameSpot review and offical site). Here are my impressions:

First of all, the gameplay is very close to the original. For the most part, you do the same things: sail from port to port, visit the governor, merchant, shipyard, and tavern, fight other ships (using your flagship), sack cities, try to keep your crew happy, divide the plunder, rinse, lather, repeat, and retire. The eras are the same, the nationalities are the same, the ports of call are the same, etc. Thus, for the sake of brevity, I'll stick to what has changed from the original:

There's More Stuff to Get

Ships. There are 27 different ships, composed of three variants of nine basic types: pinnace, sloop, barque, brig, fluyt, merchantman, merchant galleon, war galleon, and frigate. (If you're a fan of barques in the old game, you'll want a brig in the new game, as the new barques are not very good for pirating.) Each variation has a different number of max cannons, max cargo, and max crew.

Ship upgrades. Shipyard in different ports can provide differnent ship upgrades. They include: copper plating (turn more quickly), cotton sails (sail faster), tripple hammocks (carry more crew), iron scantlings (resist hull damage), fine-grain powder (longer gun range), and bronze cannon (improve gun accuracy). Plus, you can also upgrade to allow your ship to fire chain-shot (anti-rigging) and grape shot (anti-personnel) at shorter ranges. This is a really nice addition to the game, being that you now have more to shop for, and increases "pride in ownership" of you flagship.

Crew specialists. When you capture a ship, you have a small chance of "recruiting" one of eight specialists: carpenter (repair hull damage at sea), sailmaker (repair sail damage at sea), cooper (reduce crew food consumption), gunner (decrease reload time), surgeon (improve crew survival rate after combat), navigator (increase sailing speed), quartermaster (reduce desertions and mutiny), and cook (improve crew moral). Each of these specialists is very valuable, and you can go through an entire career without obtaining all of them.

Special items. There are 34 special items you can obtain (17 types with two gradations, each). These can be quite expensive and difficult to obtain; a governor's daughter can give you one as a gift, a fugitive can bribe you with one, or you can sometimes have an opportunity to buy one from the mysterious stranger in the corner of the tavern. Each improves you in one specific aspect of the game. For example: a concertina will impove your crew's morale, a puffy shirt will allow you to make quicker dueling moves, a lockpicking set will help you escape from the pokey, etc.

The addition of more stuff to get is the biggest single improvement over the old game. I'm a big fan of the "fight and shop" type of game, and now there's more to shop for (or steal).

Women Are Harder to Get

Gone are the halcion days when you could just show up and have the governor's daughter show you favor. You gotta work it. Governor's daughters now come in three "grades": plain, attractive, and beautiful. The higher the grade, the harder to get. Each will want you to be a particular rank before she will allow you to take the first step with her: escorting her to the ball. This is the only major addition to gameplay from the original, you have to be able to dance, which breaks down to pressing the right key at the right time according to the (sometimes hard to read) hand signal from your partner (oh, the more attractive she is, the harder her hand signals are to read). Mess up enough, and you fail. Fail, and you get nowhere with her. Before she will consent to marry you, you will be required to dance repeatedly, buy her jewelery (special items sometimes available from the stranger in the tavern), win a duel, and rescue her from evil pirates. Each time you succeed, you will be rewarded with useful information, or even a special item as a gift. Once you are married, you will be invited need to dance with her each time you visit, and if you succeed, you will get reward.

Graphic and Audio Improvements

Naturally, the graphics and audio have been updated. The best improvements are with ships, both travelling the seas, and in combat, which are now fully 3D rendered, though the view is still isometric (you can change to a chase camera, if you like). The best audio improvement is that each nationality has it's own soundtrack, which you can hear as you pass their ports in your ships (and you can hear the monks chanting in the missions, and the indians playing their primitave flutes, etc).

What I'm not so sold on is that they have replaced each still image from the original game with a (somewhat cartoonish) cut scene. When information is being related to you, the character in the cut scene speaks in a non-enunciated jibberish ("We are at war with the evil Spanish" is spoken "Blah blah blaaaaah, blah-blah.") I think they should have considered that less is more when it comes to actions you must make inumerable times during the game.

The graphics presentation of the duels is probably the one aspect I have the most problem with. Each duel starts with and ends with short cut scene, and there's an intermediate cut scene built into each duel scene (there are three different shipboard fight scenes, plus one for the tavern, one for the governor's mansion, and one for the city walls). Though the gameplay for duels is very similar to the original, they fully 3D render it to look like animation. If you drive your opponent past a certain point, they insert a cut scene of, for example, your oppenent backing up the stairs. This is all well done, and looks great in a demo, but can become grating with endless repetition.

Also, apart from the addition of a couple of special items, you cannot change your appearance in the game. To put it in terms of Pirates of the Caribbean, the look they chose for you is closer to Orlando Bloom's than it is to Johnny Depp's (which is what we all want, really).

Other Changes

More places to visit. Even though the ports of call are the same as the old game, there are four new types of (what are essentially) minor ports: jesuit missions, indian villages, pirate havens, and settlements. Each of these has its own subset of services and options available to the visitor, as well a few new types of missions, like escorting settlers from the jesuit misson, or a governor from a settlement, to one of the ports of call. Settlements and pirate havens can be a godsend when you need to repair your ship in the heart of enemy (read: Spanish) territory.

Harder to sneak into town. You can no longer automatically sneak into an unfriendly port. There is a new "sneaking into town" interface, where you must avoid the lanterns of the town guards, hide behind hay-bales, climb over low walls, and find the tavern or governor's mansion in unfriendly towns. The risks are high, as you are jailed if caught.

Easier searching for treasure. Landmarks, both at sea and on the land, help you find burried treasure, so you don't have to keep digging while finding nothing.

Improved city attacks. There's no attacking a city from the sea, anymore. If you show up with an overwhelming majority, you get to duel the captain of the guard for the town. If not, you have to attack from the land, and get to the gates of the city before the guards wipe you out. Here, the interface and gameplay is much improved from the original, but it's still clunky compared to today's land combat games.

Streamlined sea encounters. They eliminated the dialog-based interface for encountering other ships at sea. You sail around, and you can see other ships sailing by. If they have a message for you, it just appears as text superimposed over the ship. If you decide to attack, you go to a zoomed, in view of the area, but all the same features are there (shoals, towns, rocks, etc).