Pirates of the Caribbean

by Bethesda Softworks

Product Features

• In this epic role-playing game, you'll travel to exotic locales and coplete daring quests for unimaginable treasure
• Engage in thrilling sword and pistol duels against other captains, and command your crew while laying siege to another ship
• Chase rumors of incredible wealth and you shift allegiances and look out for yourself and your men
• Open-ended exploration as you explore dense jungles, deep dark caves and entire towns
• Gorgeous graphics and realistic weather effects bring the world of pirates to life!

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00008V6TF
• Item Weight: 5 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: July 2, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,269 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Pirates Of The Caribbean gives you the chance to test your mettle against the legendary pirates who sailed the high seas!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars POTC = Prone Often To Crash, July 8, 2003

By 

DigitalMan - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pirates of the Caribbean (Video Game)

If this game was stable, it would easily be 5 stars. The fun of boarding ships and swordfighting is great. The graphics, especially sailing at night, are stunning.

But... the game has major bugs. First, you should spend your first 45 minutes or so simply walking around so the game can cache all of its textures. Otherwise, you will have frequent pauses/stutters.

Second, it's unfinished. There are many typos, and errors in character and place names. Some areas of the game appear to be permanently closed, though it seems obvious that *something* was supposed to go there. (There are several places where large piles of rocks block your way to what appears to be more areas.)

Third, it crashes. A lot. Especially as you get higher up in the game. Every time you board a ship, there is a chance of it freezing your Xbox. Every time you land at a port (especially if you have captured other ships) there is a chance of a lock-up. It seems like the larger your ship is, the more likely the game is to crash.

Fourth, it crashes even more... if you try to save your game, it might crash, especially if it has gotten "confused" about whether or not you have completed your current quest. Something also causes "Bad Save" to appear somewhat frequently above your existing games. We even got a "Cannot load U:\0000000" error at one point.

To try to fix it, we erased the entire game from our Xbox dashboard, loaded several other games (to clear the Xbox cache), then started Pirates of the Caribbean again. As recommended on their website, we completed the whole tutorial... every single step. We know it was re-caching because disk activity and stuttering were pretty constant. It didn't crash again until we were able to upgrade to a Galleon... at about character level twelve. Since then it has been pretty crashy still, but the thing is so addictive that you just deal with it and re-play what you just played. Over and over.

No doubt the programmers are disturbed, even hurt by all this. The thing is 95% complete, but that last 5% is so bad that it makes the game half of what it could be.

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Buggy but Great !!! (See Work-arounds, below), February 19, 2004

By 

Thomas J. Race (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pirates of the Caribbean (Video Game)

Yes, this game needed a few more months of debugging. Yes, it was probably rushed to market to coincide with the movie, and Bethesda should receive 50 lashes for putting revenue ahead of quality. (Consider buying a used copy rather than a new one!)

But the bottom line is - this game is a Masterpiece. It's a "Five Star" game with one star subtracted for bugs. (See my workarounds, below).

It's all there - the quests, the commerce, the sword/gun fights and of course the ship battles. All done to perfection. I will focus on the ship battles (below), because there simply isn't a game out there that competes with this aspect.

You can be whatever type of character you want to be - it's wonderfully open in that respect. You can be a pirate (of course), a pirate hunter, a merchant (yawn) or follow the main quest thread. I found the quests to be a "sideshow", but they do supplement the open game play.

Ship Battles: You have both a third person "god view" and an on-the-deck, look-over-the rail view. Both are needed. You use over-the-rail to get a sea-level view, with zoom available through your "spy glass" which yields additional information on the ships around you ,e.g., number of cannon, crew, sail damage, hull damage. You get better spy glasses as the game progresses, reveailing more and more information.

You use the "god view" when you're doing tight manuevering and trying to avoid coliding with other ships, e.g., when boarding.

And what are you looking at?... simply the best ship graphics ever programmed in a video game. Wind blowing the sails in the right direction (and wind determines speed if you get the default setting off of "arcade", set if to "realistic"), holes in the sales, cannon flashes in the distance, exquisite water splashes when the shots miss, and your own cannon smoke blowing by your face in the over-the-rail view. You can almost smell the gunpowder!

Refreshingly, the ships move at realitic speeds - in other words, they're very slow. No turbo-ing to avoid cannon balls, you have to play the wind and do what sailors did for centuries, learn to sail.

Like Morrowind, you have 10 Skills and about 25 Special Abilities that enhance your performance and those of your officers. The skills of you officers complement yours, e.g., you typically have high Melee and Leadership, a Cannoneer has high Accuracy and Rate of Fire, a Navigator has high Sailing, etc.

WORKAROUNDS:

1. Corrupted Saves - do NOT overwrite an existing saved game. Always delete it to create a new save location. Problem solved.

2. Missing Officers - this one is annoying. You can only have (8) eight officers in addition to yourself on your own ship. Any officers added beyond 8 will cause one of your existing officer to disappear. So manage that carefully. I lost a lot of good officers in my first game until I realized they were "deserting."

Also, if you hire a new officer, and try to put him on another one of your ships (you can have 3 ships in addition to your own), the program deletes one of the officers on the additional ship. In fact, it creates a duplicate of the new officer on both your ship and the additional ship. The only way to deal with this situation is to avoid putting more than one officer on the additional ships (the Captain). The captain is unaffected by this bug. I typically make the captain a Cannoneer.

3. Difficulty - like Morrowind, this is a very difficult game at first. Many of the complaints about the game are simply a result of not figuring out how to play well. For example, Luck plays an incredibly important role in surviving on the open seas, when sailing from one island to another. With a "Luck" skill of "1", you will be hunted down by pirates and blasted by storms every 15 seconds. With a "Luck" skill of 10, the Carribean turns into your private lake. I always invest heavily in the Luck skill right at the beginning of the game.

Another complaint is that the Officers get killed in sword fights. That occurs when you are outnumbered (use lots of grapeshot before boarding) or send great cannoneers into a sword fights who have a Melee skill of 1 (duh!). Hire enough officer to allow your officers to specialize. You can only have three of your 8 officers active at any time, make sure you activate the ones needed for the current situation. For example, use your Navigator and Cannoneer for the sea battle, then replace them with your Melee fighters to board vessels; insert your Quartermaster when your ship needs repair after the battle, or when purchasing goods at the store on land.

4. Land Movement - this is awkward. You use the left thumbwheel to move in all directions. You use the right thumbwheel to look up and down in the "Forward" view option, and in all directions (independent of movement) in the "Directional" view option. (My guess is they did this to facilitate sword fighting. Evidently the "A" button is better to swing your sword than the right trigger. When your right thumb is always punching the A button, you can't be using your right thumbwheel to change your view.)

You can look in all directions while on land, contrary to some other reviewer comments I saw posted here. You simply have to turn your character around to see that way.

There is also an annoying "feature" with doors and walls. When you stand next to them and turn around, the view changes 180 and you see the front of your character instead of the normal position behind him. This is hard to get used to.

5. Miscellaneous - there is an occasional lock-up, so save your game frequently. (I always save before I board my ship.) This may occur once every 20 hours of play.

The "dissappearing officers" can lead to bigger problems in quests. One of the main quest characters that was supposed to join my crew was lost in my first game. That ended the main quest thread.

Sometimes a merchant will ask you to deliver cargo to the wrong island. You're supposed to deliver it in less than 30 days, so you may have to save it and figure out which island is correct.

Enjoy!!!

TR

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars ATTENTION RPG Players, patience & saving, wins the game!, September 20, 2003

By 

forrie (Nashua, NH United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pirates of the Caribbean (Video Game)

I just completed BETHESDA Softworks "Pirates of the Caribbean". and it is an awesome game. The 4 stars is because of the limited land exploration & very dufficult early character development (survival) Patience and attention to your environment will lead you to hours of fun. Plan your work/quest, Work/quest your plan!!!!

NOTE: If you follow the lengthy scenario (working for the English Governor of REDMOND) you will enjoy a complex story leading to a great sea battle with the "BLACK PEARL". Solving the mystery of undead pirates parallels the Disney film. So Matety, to become worthy you must follow this detailed/complex open ended RPG game carefully.

NOT MORROWIND, why would it be, the real saga is at sea!!! This is a shipboard adventure. Once you learn & develop your character to be the superior swashbuckling sea captain the adventure truly begins.

The "Pirates of the Caribbean PRO's are; The unbelievable ships, magnificent seascapes/realistic caribbean water, realistic naval battles (using your spy glass(buy the best for advantage)), cannon telemetry, boarding skills, open ended sea exploration (you must open/discover clues allows you to explore new areas). Each city & island are different and fun. Complex movie story line.

The CONS; No auto-mapping (like Morrowind), Frequent dying in sword fights (SAVE OFTEN), Limited/restricted camera angles, game crashes occasionally (NEW SAVES & SAVE OFTEN), Sea BATTLES/STORMS can be to frequent causing death/ship being sunk (KEEP YOUR LUCK HIGH). Limited exploration on land, cave, dungeons, beaches, islands, etc. If you want the movie tale you must explore everywhere, talk to everyone and go to REDMOND and work for the Governor & begin a very complex and lengthy journey to discover the "BLACK PEARL".

I had a fun, sometimes frustrating, long journey to the Pearl. But it was worth it. Now I can be the Pirate who reeks havoc in the Caribbean. Enjoy.