1) First off, could you introduce yourself to our reader and tell us your role in the development of "Pirates of the Burning Sea"?

Hey everyone! I’m Taylor Daynes, the Lead Designer of this shindig we call Pirates of the Burning Sea.

2) Since ships will be single-player operated, I'm wondering how smart the NPCs are. Will there be any NPC controlled ships?pirates of the burning sea

In addition to a world full of NPC enemies, many of the missions in our game involve NPC allies. One thing we’ve learned from other games, it’s that if you are going to have NPC allies, they’d better be worth something. NPCs that just wander off and get killed, or worse, wander off and get you killed are a recipe for frustration. So we firmly believe that NPCs need to be competent. This is a tricky problem for us though, because unlike other MMOs, where NPCs can pretty much just run straight up to you and auto-attack, our NPCs need to know how to use the wind, how to present their broadside to you in order to attack, and how to stay out of your firing arcs. Brady “Jigmasta” Houck – our AI guru – has worked on our AI over the last year, and I’m happy to report that our NPCs are very smart. Surprisingly smart. They often startle me with actions or tactics that we didn’t program into them. For instance, one NPC in a fast ship planted himself right in front of me, waited for me to come to a stop after colliding with it, and then it boarded me now that I was an easy grappling target. Stuff like that makes your day!