Pirates of the Burning Sea

Staying Skin Deep

Graphics, like it or not, are an important part of a game and, for all my pretentious ‘game is art!’ arguments, even I have to admit that graphics play an important part in how well a game sells.

For MMOs, graphics are even more important than other games, believe it or not. Connect the dots; graphics make games sell and, for an MMO to be interesting to anybody, it needs to have a lot of players. World of Warcraft, with its stylised cartoony presentation and bright colours, is perfect proof of this and it baffles me that most developers haven’t cottoned on yet.

As an MMO, Pirates of the Burning Sea was never going to bowl anybody over with its graphics because a balance needs to be found between graphics and performance. Lagging out in the middle of a naval port battle is not an option. To make sure you get the most out of it though, we’ll run through the graphics options and illustrate what the most important tweaks are.

Texture Resolution

This option is configurable on a slider in the preferences menu for the game and controls the quality of certain textures in the game. The slider lets you choose one of three settings; 0, 1 or 2.

Higher numbers are better, but we’ve got pictures of all three below.


You can click to enlarge the images if you want, but the area where the difference is most noticeable for the different settings is on the floor, so we’ve zoomed in there.

The different in textures is subtle, but noticeable and the gentle blurring of the textures on the lower settings is something which you should really try and avoid if you can. There was no performance hit that we could detect in the game even with the highest settings turned on, but if you have a graphics card with very little on-board memory, this may be the first thing you want to tone down.

High Quality Shaders

This setting is also available in the preferences menu, but appears as a toggle rather than a slider. Shaders, which can potentially radically effect the look of the game, are most noticeable on the open seas.


Well, as you can see, the shader makes a massive change to the look of the water in the game and, though you may think the game looks OK with shaders off, we beg you to reconsider. This is a game that’s supposed to be about a burning sea – neon oceans are not an option to most experienced players.