Part of a city trip, besides museums and culture, for me is always also some shopping. So on this trip I was browsing computer games in a shop and found a MMORPG I had never heard of, named Bounty Bay Online. Cost 30 Euros, one month free, then 10 Euro per month. And the feature list on the back of the box read like Pirates of the Burning Sea. Bounty Bay Online too is a game where you can pirate or trade in the Caribbean, have ship-to-ship combat, and all that. Sounded interesting, but I smelled a rat. I'm normally reasonably well informed about MMORPGs, so how come a game is already on the shelves and I never heard of it?
It turns out I did well to not buy it. Because Bounty Bay Online is just a European version of a game called Voyage Century Online, which in turn is the US version of some Asian game. And while the Euro version costs money to buy and a monthly fee, the US version is apparently free to download and free to play. In a typical Asian business model, you can then buy things like "double xp scrolls" for real money.
Of course I much prefer this US/Asian payment scheme to the European pay-before-you-try version. So I will leave Bounty Bay Online on it's shelf and rather download Voyage Century Online for free when I come back. Reviews say that the game isn't so bad, although I doubt that it will be as good as Pirates of the Burning Sea.
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