Bounty Bay Online is an interesting new MMORPG that reminds me of the old Nintendo Uncharted Waters game with a small number of differences. There’s little to do with ‘story’ beyond the 1500s where you’re the commander of a sailing vessel determined mostly by what you most want to do in the game.

Graphics: 80%

While not the best graphics in the world, it has mostly smooth textures (a few particular angles have a bit of a sharp pixel shape in a few places, most notable in the character creation and selection screens) and the usual ‘mitten with lines’ look for hands. I most like the ships and that they actually bothered to make the different types and levels of ships look different, as well as little changes such as installed ‘extra’ armor appearing on the decks. I didn’t find the usual ‘windowed or full screen’ options and some people might not like that. I personally didn’t mind much as I prefer my games to be in full screen mode anyway.

Placement of objects was done well enough that I don’t recall seeing any items stuck partially inside of another and with the exception of some of the fences did not suffer the disconcerting affect of walking straight through a tree or wall…I’ve always hated that in some games it only looks like there’s a tree there, but you can sit right where it supposedly is.

Sound: 65%

While there was nothing actually wrong with the sound, I didn’t really find anything spectacular about it either. There didn’t seem to be a lot of variance to the soundtrack and the wolves and such sounded like wolves, jackals, goats etc. and there’s a decent set for the ax and pickax actions. I was pretty pleased with the cannon sound affects, although that could just be the ‘kill’ in me.

Gameplay: 50%

While I liked the game, mostly because of the nostalgia of the similarities to the old Uncharted Waters game and the sea battle, it had various points that caused me enough twitches or irritations that it scored lower then it would have otherwise.

For starters, there’s a horrible set of weight limitations. Not only do they not list what measure they’re using (probably Kilograms considering it’s a European origin game) and while I don’t have a problem with the character starting with a 100 unit limit, I have strong objections to my ship having a 300ish starting weight limitation. We’re talking about a vessel meant to haul cannons and cargo across the Mediterranean, and I can’t hold more then 3-5 (depending on what ship class you’ve built) men worth of carry weight? On the plus side, gear you’ve equipped on your ship doesn’t seem to count toward the load, and neither does the crew. However, when the hat on my character weights 2 units…and the cannon balls weight less then 1 unit apiece, we have yet another problem. I’m not really sure how 1 unit of metal and 1 unit of wood turns into a 20 unit pistol either.

I also had some issue with their cost structure for a lot of things. It costs 50 or 100 silver (the only money unit in the game) to hire a single crewman depending on where you hire them and you can sell a sword that would have cost you 1300 for 130. It also runs about 500,000 silver to be allowed to use a warehouse in a town other than the one you’re nationality is connected to.

If you have a quest from the Adventurer’s Guild in Athens, don’t bother talking to them in London until you’ve finished the quest you collected in Athens, they wont let you have more. If you find a treasure map piece, I hope you’re already rich and don’t actually need it, because that’s 200,000 to get it looked at by the guy who tells you what’s on them.

For some reason, not only are you allowed only 1 ‘hook’ type piece of gear on your ship, only merchant vessels are allowed to arm mines. Normally that would be either a military attribute or an 'everybody' attribute, but whatever.

I did like the sea battles and the crafting system was fairly nice, except that drawings are somewhat hard to find or are terribly expensive and I have lots of skill points for a few skills that do not seem to be upgradeable which makes me wonder why they generate skill points like the other skills.

I was also displeased to see that while you can see what items do (basically) in the main shops, you have to go to the web page to find out what the black market items do.

Levels are strange. You don’t have typical leveling, you’re skills individually ‘level up’ and once they hit level 31, you can upgrade 7 of them to ‘phase 2’. I don’t really know what that is, as I wasn’t able to get any up that high in the two weeks I was playing it. Perhaps because I was trying to work on so many skills at once. I dislike this set up, as the ‘monsters’ (completely normal animals and the occasional person, as far as I’ve seen) have actual levels that are slightly vague on how strong they are…So do most of the gear in the game. It makes it a little hard to judge strengths and such.

Interface: 45%

I’m somewhat accustomed to being able to map certain of my keys in shooters and RPGs (whether on or off line) and it’s just not there in this game. For the most part it’s mouse click, although there are a few things you can hit CTRL and a key to do, very few. There’s also a skill bar where you can put things like ‘force attack’, ‘smelt’ or special skills like ‘snipe’

for when you’re using a fire arm. These can be clicked on or you can hit an f## key (F1-12) and you have 10 bars you can scroll through, one for when you’re on the sea, one for on land and such. There’s no easy way I’ve found to shift through the 10 skill bars though, you have to move over and click up or down on little arrows at the right side of the bar to change it yourself.

For sea battles, the controls are fine, and for basic movement they’d be all right if not for the exceptionally dumb ‘smart walk’ which will drive you straight into an npc, wall, tree, or any other object that is directly between your starting position and where you’ve clicked. For a keyboardless walk control, that’s not a good selling point.

There is also a problem with the translation which makes me quite worried about how English language made games might look when translated into other languages. If it contains as many grammatical errors as this, then I’m a little surprised they sell all that well in other countries. It doesn’t help that something in their program, whether font, translation, or some loss of code or something causes letters and numbers to not be there when you try and read what it is you’re supposed to be doing or how much they want paid. I found out how much recruiting sailors was going to cost me after I’d hit ‘yes’ and was told how much I paid. Even though it asked if I was sure I wanted to hire # sailors ‘for silver’. One of the quests has ‘wild wolves’ in its title, but when the quest giver informs you about it, he says you need to kill hyenas. Well there aren’t any…so fortunately the wild wolves it mentions when you click to ask about the quest are what you need to kill.

While character creation carries a few options, I was unhappy to see that you have 1 gender option for each class. If you want to play a male character, you have to pick the ‘warrior’ or ‘explorer’ types, for female it’s ‘pirate’ or ‘merchant’. There was a reasonable selection of hairs and faces for each, although there weren’t many hair colors for each style, and it differed a little between styles.

I did like the mini map steering. I could walk around between the inner city entrance to the blacksmith or tailor or whatever, all without having to leave the mini map and then having to go back to remember the directions.

There’s also no public channel use if you’re below a certain ‘level’ and the clicking sometimes has issues, it can take 6 clicks sometimes to make it understand that ‘yes, I would like to do that’.

Summary: 60%

While I liked certain aspects of this game, it’s numerous twitch triggers and fairly repetitive creature disbursement (I found reindeer in Alexandria. Why? Because it was a starter city and reindeer and bunnies are starter creatures for the game…) kind of lowered the score more than my interest in the ship-to-ship battles would have preferred. I’m not sure if it’s even being released in the US, where I run about, and the English version (available for sale in the UK, and apparently the same one that’s playable from the US) is going for £19.99 (about $40) with a £6.99 (about $14) a month subscription fee after the first 30 days free. This is about average for an MMORPG, and nothing special or surprising. I’d most likely get this if I could afford it (I’m poor) and could get a copy in the US.

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