Written by Mark C. Barlet, on 01-01-2007 09:53

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We had a chance to sit and have a chat with Rusty Williams, CEO of Flying Labs, makers of the highly anticipated high seas adventure MMORPG, Pirates of the Burning Seas.

ABLEGAMERS: MMORPG's are very attractive to people with mobility issues (may have issues getting around), most are very loyal to a game that they enjoy. People with disabilities have a level of freedom that they may not have in real life, things like running, jumping, dancing, and like most people, they consider their character an extension of themselves. What is Pirates of the Burning Sea going to offer all people, and people with disabilities specifically?

PIRATES: Pirates of the Burning Sea offers amazing ship combat, a compelling RvR system that changes the game world, a fantastic historical setting, sumptuous graphics, extensive player-created content, and coming soon, avatar combat. I�d also like to call out our story/mission system. We�ve got a personal story line that encompasses NPCs who grow and develop along with you, a grand story line that encompasses all the players and nations, and tons of interesting little plot lines and threads along the way.

There are really two answers to your question about disabilities. First, having a disability doesn�t fundamentally make you different than anybody else. People with disabilities still enjoy good stories, still thrill at great game play, and still enjoy playing with others. What is different, of course, can vary based on the disability.

For the sake of this conversation, I�ll address the most common challenges: motor skill and visual perception.

For motor skills, Pirates of the Burning Sea is friendlier than the typical twitch-style reflex game. Our ships move more deliberately, and there�s a lot more opportunity to think about what tactical move your are going to make next. That is very different than, say, an RTS, where mad clicking skill is more generally more important than tactics and strategy. However, PotBS is still fundamentally a game of skill that progresses in real time, and a person with disabilities, dependant on the severity and type, might find that combat is more challenging than other aspects of our game.

The second challenge revolves around the area of perception, most commonly any visual disability that would impair your ability to decipher the UI. As you can imagine, it is a significant design challenge to assure our UI can be managed by folks with a wide range of disabilities.

I used to work in application development at Microsoft, and while MS has taken a lot of steps towards addressing these issues, there�s a) a lot more to be done and b) only the biggest projects have the time and resources to devote to doing a great job serving this population.

The approach we�re using at Flying Lab is to address these issues as we move forward. The nice thing about developing an MMP is that we�re constantly able to improve on our work by releasing new versions, allowing us to address any UI problems as we identify them. While I can�t promise that we�re going to launch with a product suitable for a wide range of disabilities, I can say that making our game accessible to as many people as possible is something we will continue to work and improve on over time. This involves actively including individuals with disabilities into our beta testing process, so that we can get that feedback and engineer changes that make sense for those users.

ABLEGAMERS: Have you spent time on the social aspects of the game, emotes and so on? Any hints on what to expect?

PIRATES: An MMP lives and dies on how well the social aspects come together. There are a wide variety of small features throughout the game that facilitate better interactions (for example, being able to make a small comment on a user in your buddy list is a good way to remember why you added them to your list in the first place), and our economic/combat game play has been designed to encourage players to come together and form communities. For example, there are a number of users who like to play solo. In most MMPs, this results in them always playing solo because they feel no connection to the activities of their nation, and find it difficult to group without signing up for a guild. In our Realm vs. Realm system (RvR), solo players contribute to their national interests just as much as the group players so they feel that connection to their nation. Plus, the nature of the RvR combat encourages a loose sharing of goals, so you can coordinate actions with others without having to be part of explicit group.{quote_top}

And, of course, if you like guilds, we have lots of guild activities and goals to bring you all together!

ABLEGAMERS: If you were to go to the Pirates of the Burning Sea break-room right now, what would we expect to see, have you ever looked under the refrigerator?

PIRATES: A testing department! We used to have a break room, but we�ve been expanding so fast we�ve had to put desks wherever we could just to keep up with all the new people. As for the refrigerator, lord no! I don�t expect to until we move to our new offices.

ABLEGAMERS: A challenge many disabled gamers have is fine precision in using the mouse. Some games that require users to drag and drop things all over the place. An example that comes to mind is dragging an item from your inventory and onto an NPC, or a "sell" area of a merchant (DAOC is the worst for this). How much of this can we expect in Pirates of the Burning Sea, is there other ways of doing the same things that does not require the drag and drop?

PIRATES: We�ve been revamping the UI in this area, but I believe trades are done mostly by clicking on the item and hitting the more/less arrows. There is still drag and drop for equipping items, but they�re not done often or under pressure.

ABLEGAMERS: Image that your arm was asleep could you play the game? What about if it was shaking a lot, like you were cold, could you play the

PIRATES: Yes, to both questions.

ABLEGAMERS: What is one of your more humorous and embarrassing MMO moments?

PIRATES: I was playing a female character in DAoC, and had teamed up with a guy. I like to play female characters because, well, I like looking at girls. I�d never really thought about the implications of this, until my teammate started saying things like �Hang back, I�ll protect you!� Nobody had ever, EVER said that to me in a game, and suddenly I realized that the �What are you wearing?� question was going to be coming up soon. I�m much more sympathetic to the problems of women in gaming now!

ABLEGAMERS: We have many users that have some sight issues, can I resize the font in the chat box?

PIRATES: No, and it�s an issue for me on a large screen monitor. Having a range of font sizes would be great, and we�re doing a UI redesign right now, so I�ll mention it to the designer and see what we can accommodate.

ABLEGAMERS: People with disabilities such as Multiple Sclerosis (MS) have good days and bad days when it comes to what they are able to do. On the bad days, what is there to do besides killing beasts?

PIRATES: We have no beasts in the game (yet!) so we need something else to do on a good day as well! All kidding aside, there�s the economic system that we�ve just recently talked about. It�s huge, it feeds back into the game world and the RvR, and it�s a lot of fun. A lot more strategy than mindless clicking.

ABLEGAMERS: There are many alternative input devices on the market, mouse replacements and different keyboards, have you ever used one of them, and if so which one(s)?

PIRATES: I have a keyboard that�s split into two pieces that goes onto each arm of my chair. It felt great, but I wound up not using it because people would sit down to work on my machine and get freaked out by the keyboard. A number of our programmers use a keyboard designed to alleviate carpal tunnel, and I�m always screwed when I sit down to work on their keyboard. I�m a touch typist, so if I get my hands in the right position, everything goes well, but as soon as I have to hit a special key (which are scattered all over the place) I�m doomed.

We also have a number of track balls in use, again to fight our natural enemy, carpal tunnel.

PIRATES: Depends on what I�m going for. I�m not a tourist kind of guy, and I�ve already traveled across most of the world. I�d love to go back to Asia without as much business as I had to do last time. It was really a beautiful place, and lots of fun to see. For vacation, I�d like to go Disneyworld in Florida. And I�m looking forward to going back to the east coast to see my parents soon!

No, I don�t leave my laptop behind. Both my wife and I took our laptops on our honeymoon. Although my pocketpc phone has been treating me right these days, so I don�t have to carry around my laptop nearly as much.{quote_middle}

Quick plug: I�m a big fan of the tablet PCs, mostly because I like consuming information in slate form. Combine that with good speech recognition (which is finally getting to adequate) and you�ve got a great platform. I�m especially looking forward to the ultramobile PCs. Yes, their battery life sucks, and they�re too expensive, but when I see a great screen, 2.5 pounds, and the Tablet PC OS, I get really excited!!

ABLEGAMERS: Gamers who are deaf have a major disadvantage when a game relies on musical cues for things like Quest Advancement. Does Pirates of the Burning Sea Use Musical or Audio cues for these types of event?

PIRATES: We intend to have audio cues for supplementary information (such as categorizing how damage you did to someone), but that isn't critical to game play. We regularly play the game entirely silent. Our office is in a library.

ABLEGAMERS: Have you thought about how people with disabilities will play Pirates of the Burning Sea?

PIRATES: Yes and no. We�ve mostly been thinking about vision impairment, but we really haven�t done a lot of thinking on motor impairment.

ABLEGAMERS: Have you tested the game at all with a disabled employee or employee family member?

PIRATES: A member of our QA Team is legally blind, and we will absolutely include folks with disabilities into our beta testing process.

ABLEGAMERS: Which weighs more; a ton of Smurfs or a ton of Fraggles?

PIRATES: Fraggles � They�re not animated.

ABLEGAMERS: Thank you for your time.

Well there it is, the official Pirates of the Burning Seas interview. If you want to know more about PBS, you should visit thier web site . There is no word yet on the price of the application, or the monthly fee. As soon as we know, you will know

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Last update: 26-02-2008 19:48

Published in : Disabled Gamers News, Game news

Keywords : economic/combat, fundamentally, refrigerator?, specifically?, story/mission, supplementary, wearing?ï, categorizing, conversation, deliberately,

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