PotBS - Wrap Report @ RPG Vault

RPG Vault features a Wrap Report (Post-release article) on Pirates of the Burning Sea, where Russel Williams speaks about the game's development history, reception and future:

Development began late in 2002. We had a number of scope changes during the project; they led ship dates revisions. This meant we were very tightly focused during development, which was both a good and bad thing. Though we went off-track a number of times, our focus meant we kept our eye on the ball, which led to keeping the budget in line with what we were trying to accomplish. The negative is that we made a number of decisions along the way that sacrificed some long-term benefits in favor of short-term gains, based upon ship dates that were later changed. Had we known what the final scope of the project was, and what the actual date would be, we would have made some of those decisions differently.

The biggest change, though, is that once we'd built the game and tested it, we found the nature of the ship combat in a seamless world meant either the battles would suck or travel times would be incredibly long. We could have soldiered on and shipped that game, but instead, we took a year, ripped it apart, and built it again using instancing. That's a key advantage of keeping a small prototype team until you're sure your game is solid; if we'd had the full team and its associated burn rate at that point, rebuilding the world would have been impossible.