One of the feel-good stories of 2019 came from the corner of the MMOverse belonging to Pirates of the Burning Sea, when the remaining Portalus developers admitted they were being forced to sunset the game over a lack of financing and coding support. Players, however, stepped in behind a company called Vision Online Games to essentially rescue the game from doom, keeping the servers up and maintained and even improving the game’s infrastructure and online presence.
So how’s it doing as of 2020? Even better, if the game’s latest newsletter is any indication. Vision Online Games has released a brand-new game installer and launcher to replace the ancient one, new physical servers, a new patching system, a proper build update pipeline, the 2.17 update (and Halloween content), and a new modern website. On the downside, the team has archived the forums in favor of Discord. And as for what’s still coming? An automatic chat translation system, more work on the new wiki, and a full-on marketing campaign intended to boost the game’s population – and eventually, its development staff. They’re even planning a legacy server.
“The goal of these next steps are to steadily increase the game’s population, which in turn will allow Vision to add more Staff to the project team. The first new staff to be added are expected to primarily consist of additional Customer Support team members and Programmers. As growth continues, the Programming team will work to restore the creation of additional content. Once the above steps have been completed, it will be time to turn our attention to the Legacy Server (along with all of the systems required to support it), and provide Captains a taste of the earlier days on the Burning Sea!”
The newsletter was also loaded with screenshots, which we’re including here so you can see how the game looks here in 2020. Not too shabby!
