Originally posted by: TestedAcorn
I watched my friend's little brother play this game.... it's absolutely terrible. They pretty much spent about 0 minutes optimizing this game. The graphics look pretty bad and the game runs horrible. By the time you get on the ocean, you can move for about 2 minutes until the wind changes in a random direction and you get stuck in the same place for maybe 30 minutes. You are definitely NOT missing out on this game.
The game is not that good, but the sea is the best part of the game. The sea battles actually take a decent amount of strategy - from which direction do you approach the enemy? What ammo to use? Reduce the crew with grape shot? Sails with bar shot? Hull with round shot? It's not a point-and-click kind of game.
You'll never get stuck when sailing - whatever your friend's little brother was doing, he's an idiot. Don't try to sail into the wind next time.
The avatar combat (ie, swordplay) sucks something fierce.
The graphics are actually quite good and I noticed no lag when I played (quad core, 8800GTX, 4GB RAM). I know others with far less powerful systems who experienced similar response times, so it's not that my machine is uber. The requirements are expected to be quite reasonable.
I was in closed beta - lost interest and probably won't be playing it when it goes live, though.