Disney Online plans on releasing the game with two pricing tiers. The first one's subscription free, though not all of the game will be accessible to players. From what we were told, it sounds like you'll be able to create a character and learn all the game's skills, but certain zones would be inaccessible to you. The more dedicated or wealthy players can drop funds on a $9.95 USD monthly fee to get full access to the game.
Before jumping in to the game world, things start off at a character creation screen. Here you'll find loads of ways to customize your character's nose, pants, clothing colors and styles, eyes, hair color, and numerous other aspects. Though it's planned to be implemented before the game's release, there wasn't any way to enter your own character name in the build we saw. Instead, you had to pick a first name, then pairs of words to combine and form the last name. After tweaking appearances to your liking, into the game you go.
Though the demo we played started off near Governor Swann's mansion from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the final version will start you off in a jail cell with Captain Jack Sparrow. After a few training missions with Jack you'll meet up with Will Turner and others from the movies, and eventually begin your own open ended adventure to thwart the villain Jolly Roger. The world of Pirates of the Caribbean Online consists of a large expanse of water, as you might expect, dotted with numerous islands. Each player will have access to a cheap but buoyant boat right near the beginning, so they can either sail across the sea to other land masses, or use a teleport feature to instantaneously travel there.
Since Disney Online decided to forego character classes, they've implemented a skill system where the more you use a certain ability, the more powerful it becomes. Skills are broken up into a several categories, including cannon, cutlass, dagger, pistol, grenade, doll (magic), and staff. While these are all still being tweaked, each category incorporates a number of skills like flaming skull shot under the canon category and heal under doll. As skills from each category are utilized, an experience bar, called a notoriety bar in the game, for that category fills up. When the category levels, two points are awarded and can be spent on any unlocked skills in that specific category. There's also an overall notoriety meter that fills and levels up as all the individual categories improve.
For the sword combat, players can learn special abilities or chain attacks. Right clicking while engaged with an enemy brings up a radial menu that displays all available special moves. Aside from unloading one-hit specials, it's also possible to chain together sword swings by left clicking at the correct point in the swing. A successful chain brings up a combo counter, and successive hits do more damage. As you level the cutless category, you'll be able to chain together more and more attacks. We saw this system in motion against some skeleton pirates right outside Governor Swann's mansion. From a distance we could draw a pistol and had to aim a reticule at the baddies to shoot them. With grenades, we had to aim where to throw them. There was a magic system as well, which requires you to bust out a voodoo doll and select special magic attacks with the same type of radial menu as the cutlass.
We trotted down to the beach after wiping out a few skeletons and proceed to activate our boat. Disney Online had one of the larger and expensive vessels available for the demo, which up to eight people could party together and control. Numerous cannon turrets were scattered about the deck, which shifted the third person perspective of the game to first for aiming and firing. Each of the several cannon special attacks had different travel arcs and effects, like fire, lightning, and mast-snapping chain shots.
That's about all we got to see, but did find out a few details about the rest of the game's design. It seemed that a game like this with no character classes and an unrestricted skill system would mean all dedicated players would eventually be identical once they fully leveled every category. Disney Online is planning to address that by forcing players later on in the game to pick two specific categories to focus on, ensuring end game differentiation. The game will have a guild system, as well as several instances, though specifics have yet to be determined.
NPCs around the world will hand out numerous quests, which players can select and tell the game to search the rest of the server for anyone else pursuing the same task. Though the mechanics of how it works have yet to be sorted out, Disney Online is planning on making it easy for those players to then meet and complete the quest together. To take a break from questing, a poker game called Tortuga hold 'em will be playable in towns, which will include some kind of tell mini-game.
This game was designed to perform well on anyone's gaming rig, and it definitely showed. Aside from ship masts breaking apart in real time during ship battles, there wasn't much happening with the game's graphics that kept our eyes interested. Like the simple graphics, the gameplay seems much more straightforward than most MMOs out there. We couldn't get a very good idea of the ways to equip your avatar with different clothing or items since the paper doll equip menu wasn't working in this build. At the very least, Pirates of the Caribbean Online seems to be trying something a little different. We'll have more once we're able to sit down and play this game for a longer stretch of time before its release later this year.