Pirates of the Caribbean
System: X-Box
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer:
Akella/1C
Released: June 2003
Genre: RPG
Capabilities: Memory Unit
Review Written: August 2, 2003
Bethesda’s Pirates of the Caribbean has barely anything that connects
it with the recently released blockbuster movie from Disney. It shares none of
the cast of characters in the film, nor do any of the likenesses of the actors
appear in the game. It’s a damn shame too since Johnny Depp is flawless in his
hilarious portrayal of Captain Jack Sparro in the film. This adventure-RPG is
really a sequel to developer Akella’s older PC hit, Sea Dogs, but near
the end of the development cycle Bethesda struck a deal with Disney and added in
a slew of elements to connect it with the movie. Now if it wasn’t for the string
of bugs that made their way into the final product (probably due to the
developers rushing the game out to meet with the film debut) we could have had
one of the premier titles on the Xbox, but this is still a solid game all
around.
PotC focuses on one Captain Nathaniel Hawk. He’s stuck in a chain of Caribbean
islands owned by various European powers like England, France and Spain, among
others. The story picks up right away as the French capture one of England’s
territories. After barely surviving the capture, Nathan reports this to the
English governor on a nearby colony and finds himself now working for the
English. There are plenty of plot twists and turns that keeps the chain of
events fresh. There are also a couple of tiny elements that are tied to the
movie such as the appearance of undead pirates and their godly-powerful ship
“The Black Pearl.” But other than those small factors, PotC plays out like its
own original game.
There are a few components that make up the gameplay of PotC. When on foot in
the islands, each one usually consists of a town and a small jungle to traverse
through to shores and other locations on certain islands like caves and canyons.
In towns you can walk up to practically any NPC and start conversing with them.
Usually the game will hint at which people for you to talk to next so you know
where to continue your quest. You can enter and exit to any building in the
towns as you desire because the game is completely open-ended, leaving us free
to do whatever we want. This ranged from me looting chests of citizen’s
households to downing a few brews in the tavern. Each town shares many of the
same commercial buildings such as town halls, taverns, stores, and shipyards.
Thankfully, the developers included a handy “fast travel” option to
instantaneously take us to that location which saves us from wasting all that
tedious time aimlessly walking around towns. For land battles your weapon
repertoire is limited to just a pistol, and a sword (both of which can be
upgraded later through the game).
There will be just as much time spent at sea than on land. There is third-person
persective of your ship whenever you sail off from the ports. The ship moves
extremely slow, but there’s a quick-time feature to speed up things just a hair.
For navigating the sea, there is an overhead 2D map perspective where fleet of
ships is represented by a tiny boat. As it maneuvers across the map other ships
will also be noticeable, most will just sail by but usually Pirates will battle
whenever they come across you. Whenever ship battles occurred the game switches
back into the third-person view. Handling ship battles isn’t as easy to learn as
the land battles, but I got the hang of things eventually. As you maneuver your
ship with the left thumb-stick you click in the right thumb-stick to get a first
person perspective of you running on the deck of your ship with a targeting
reticule. Accuracy is of the essence as you have to place the reticule near the
enemy ship and when it switches to red is when your cannons have the best chance
of hitting the enemy. Whenever the ship is close enough to the enemy, boarding
is possible where you go onto the foe’s ship and take out their crew and win
yourself a new ship in your fleet!
Besides from being a straight up action/adventure title, PotC has several RPG
elements within it. Nathaniel Hawk gains experience just like any other
character does in your average RPG. Whenever he gains an experience level, he’ll
get two attribute points to add on to one of twelve abilities such as melee
combat, sailing, and leadership to name a few. He also gets an ability point
where he gets to choose from a wide selection of abilities to gain like faster
gun/cannon reloading, character/ship defense, and the like. Officers can be
hired by finding them at taverns or certain others will join up with you as the
storyline progresses. When they join your crew it is like gaining an extra party
member because they always stick around with you, you can have up to three of
them tagging along with you at all times. However, their AI tends to be as smart
as a box of rocks in combat. They tend to loose duels in confrontations and end
up dying rather often and it only gets all too annoying way too fast.
You can assign officers as captains of other ships that you purchase from
shipyards or commandeer after successful sea battles. Unfortunately, your allied
ship’s AI in naval duels is just as dumbfounding as party members because
they’ll take a bulk of hits and do very little damage to your enemies in return.
You can give them orders from the quick commands menu, but maneuvering your ship
and giving orders for up to your other three ships in your fleet can make
matters get very complicated.
There are a few extra things to do in PotC instead of focusing on the main quest
ahead of you. There is a trading system where each colony specializes in certain
imports and exports like chocolate, rum, cotton, and whatnot. A trade book keeps
tabs on what the buying and selling prices are of each colony. So if gaining a
bunch of loot fits your fancy, than you can buy goods for dirt cheap on certain
colonies, and then sell them high in others and net a big profit for yourself. I
wouldn’t bother wasting your entire time trading because I find the whole
trading system useless since you get quite a bit of money from the main quests
instead, and I never found myself running short on money once in the game.
However, if you still insist on being a no good greedy scoundrel than go right
ahead!
By now I’m sure you have heard this game is glitch heaven, and you have heard of
all the stories of the bad game saves, white screen of death, and the
mysteriously disappearing game data. I have ran into quite a few of these, the
bad saves happened to me a couple of times, but I always made sure to keep an
extra save on my memory unit just in case the game decided to delete all my
saves off the hard drive like I heard it did to others. Thankfully, it didn’t
happen just yet(--knock on wood--). There were also weird moments in gameplay
where I had to redo entire quests twice because I made the mistake of talking to
a main character a couple of times. Once, before the quest who told me to go and
rescue somebody, and when I talked to him again expecting a thank you I got the
same story again and the guy I rescued disappeared and I had to redo the entire
quest. Grrrrr.
There are also numerous spelling and grammar errors in the story text throughout
the game. I was running across them in practically every conversation I had, and
I’m just pondering the fact if Bethesda’s main editor quit on them or something.
Either ways all these bugs are evident that the developers rushed the
development and decreased the polish cycle to get this game out before the
theatrical release of PotC. I can only hope that Bethesda’s quality assurance
department gets a flood of emails to one day fix the unacceptable amount of
glitches. I was wishing for Xbox Live compatibility for downloadable patches,
but none is to be found.
If there is something that was done remarkably well in this game, then it is the
beautiful graphics. Lately with gamers, whenever I mention Bethesda, they think
of the stunning water effects in Morrowind. Just like that game, PotC has
just as impeccable visuals. You can look to the bottom of the sea floor in the
sunlight, and gaze at underwater creatures like sharks and notice the ships stay
under the sea once you defeat them. The character and building models on land
look just as good. They all sport lots of detail, and have that convincing
Renaissance-age look to them. My only problem with the character models is that
I run across the same damn ones in each town! There is also one other problem
with the graphics, and that is clipping, and my oh my is there lots of it. I
would walk up to a rock or a wall and slash my sword at it expecting my sword to
just bounce off the rocks, but not only did the sword go through the wall, but
so did nearly the whole character model. But other than the abundant clipping,
the graphics are superb!
The audio is another well-rounded area in PotC. The background music fits the
tone of gameplay perfectly as it changes tunes from thunderous tunes that roar
during naval and land battles, to those friendly upbeat melodies that play as
you traverse around town. The dialogue isn’t in full blown voice acting as I was
hoping for, instead whenever I struck up a conversation with a character they
said a one line greeting (usually having nothing to do with the conversation
anyways) and then it was all text based from there. The sound effects are all
right on the mark with all the sword slashes and cannon blasts sounding like
they came right out of the film itself.
PotC took me around 25 hours to complete. I only did a couple of the side-quests
though, but there are plenty of others to be found to take your mind off the
main one such as rescuing kidnapped citizens from the Pirates, escorting
merchant ships, and going on assassin missions. There aren’t any extras to be
found or unlocked, which is quite unusual considering this is a movie licensed
game where you think there would at least be some trailers for the movie or cast
interviews like most of the other entries on Xbox (Enter the Matrix, LotR:
Two Towers, Blade 2) have. So after beating all the side quests, there is
little to be desired to warrant a second play through.
RATINGS
Graphics: 8.8
Sound: 8.5
Gameplay: 7.1
Replay Value: 5.5
Overall: 7.4
Pirates of the Caribbean fills in a noticeable void of RPG’s on the Xbox,
and while it isn’t a fully traditional RPG, it has enough elements thrown in to
be considered one. The time I spent with it was pretty enjoyable for the most
part and I wholeheartedly enjoy all the new elements of play Bethesda thrown in
the package. If you can get by the glitches and this type of game content is
your cup of tea then go ahead and add this one to your Xbox library today.