As promised, DrewC has delivered the second part of his developer log on the swashbuckling feature in Pirates of the Burning Sea. The second part of his developer log discusses the different skills you can choose as you level up. DrewC goes on to discuss the six categories of skills, how these skills work during combat, what sort of weapons each sword school uses, and some other random tidbits of information.

Swashbuckling combat will be, at release, a sword fighting system. We fully intend to expand this system to include other types of armed and unarmed combat, but that will have to wait for the future. There are three schools of sword fighting: Dirty Fighting, Fencing, and Florentine. Each school will make use of a single type of sword: Cutlass for Dirty Fighting, Rapier for Fencing, and Small Sword and Dagger for Florentine.

The decision to link sword type to fighting school was a difficult one. On the one hand we want to allow as much player flexibility as possible. On the other hand we want swashbuckling to look really engaging, and the different fighting schools to be visually distinctive. Ultimately we decided to slightly limit player item selection in order to create a system that looked right. A swordsman holds a rapier very differently from how he holds a cutlass, and use of the weapon is entirely different. So if we want a particular attack to be usable with any weapon, we have to do three animations for it. Instead we decided to limit our animations to a single fighting school for each animation, but include a much wider range of animations overall.

You can find DrewC's developer log here. If you missed the first part of his developer log, you can find that here. Want to share your opinions? Click the comment button and tell us!