Pirates of the Burning Sea

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A Massivly Multiplayer Online game based on pirates, financed and developed by gamers, and distributed through Steam. After reading through this, I'm thinking this game will be really cool. It's currently in Alpha testing, no sign-ups for beta have been listed yet. Here's what the website has to say, along with a picture to get your mouth watering:

 

 

The year is 1720, and the wondrous New World has become a battleground. The three great powers of the day  Spain, England, and France  vie for control of the valuable islands of the Caribbean, exploiting their resources and competing through both massive merchant empires and blistering naval cannon. Centuries of European grudges and intrigue now play out in the churning waters of the Burning Sea where valiant naval captains, savvy merchants, and rapacious pirates battle it out for riches and reputation.

 

Be Who You Want

Choose your side and seek your fortune. Which crown do you serve? Spain has the richest ports. England’s navy is unmatched. France’s ship design is the best in the world. When they go to war, no one is truly neutral.

 

No limiting character classes. Don’t get stuck investing all your time in a class you’ll get tired of  be who you want to be with our skill-based system. You could pursue a merchant career, either as a free trader or working for a powerful trading company, then sign up with the navy when war breaks out and work your way up the ranks of the officer corps. When war ends, get revenge on your enemies by rejecting civilization and becoming a dastardly pirate. Then do it all again! We’ve taken the shackles off of RPGs and given you the freedom to pursue your own destiny.

 

Skills, not levels. Tired of the level treadmill, where you have to kill 10,000 rats before you stop being a loser? We don’t do levels. Instead we have an extensive skill list with numerous specializations for you to explore. Skills are measured both on knowledge and practice. You’ll need a combination of book learning and hard use to master the highest specializations in the game.

 

Reality, Not Fantasy

Thousands of miles of ocean, islands, and adventure. The entire Windward and Leeward island chains, from Puerto Rico down to Grenada, are modeled with dozens of ports, islands, and cays. Make your fortune in the Spanish trading stronghold of San Juan, sack the French colony on Maria Galante, or heft an ale in the English taverns of Jamestown, Barbados.

 

The Caribbean is a whole world of danger. Each of the three great nations wants to be the wealthiest and most powerful in the region, and Heaven help any who stand in their way! A sophisticated international relations system models punitive tariffs, alliances and betrayals, and declarations of war. Your actions in the game directly affect this system, contributing to peace or to conflict. Harass Spanish merchants and raise tensions, or make the sea lanes safer for all and encourage harmony.

 

Play It Your Way

Command your own ship right away. Other MMORPGS have you beat up endless sand crabs and badgers to gain levels. We give you a cool ship and turn you loose in the world to start making friends and enemies, living the life of adventure you deserve. With more than twenty different ship types, all modeled directly after real-world historical vessels, there’s no shortage of play styles you can try. In a small, swift sloop you can make lightning pirate raids or fast delivery runs. With a 74-gun ship of the line you have awesome firepower. Eventually, you can sail them all.

 

Fully customize your ship. Want more speed, or more cargo space? Install opulent staterooms for higher-paying passengers or more pumps to survive battle damage. There are dozens of different modifications you can make to your ship, so you can tweak its stats to just the kind of performance you need for your play style. Your ship is an extension of your character.

 

Structure or Freedom? Work for a trading company and work your way up the promotion ladder. Get exclusive missions, company-wide chat, access to bigger ships, and competitions against rivals. Or strike out on your own, taking trading and bounty-hunter jobs as you like, even serving your country as a privateer during wartime  you call the shots but you take the risks. And as always, the choice is yours to make whenever you want: you could reach the pinnacle of success within the company and then go into business for yourself, or switch back and forth as needed to pursue your own goals and respond to the state of the world.

 

Join the navy and go to war. As a naval officer, you’ll command the fiercest ships on the sea in heavy action against pirates, criminals, and enemies of the crown. Patrol distant colonies, blow scurvy dogs out of the water, and whenever war breaks out join large-scale naval engagements to tilt the balance of power. As you increase in rank you get a higher salary, better ships, and more responsibilities. Rise to the top  and then defect to the enemy and deal your former friends a crushing blow!

 

Scour the seas as a pirate. The oceans are yours to prey on, but your targets are your own. You could be a bloodthirsty pirate to the Spanish and a national hero to the English. Ally with other pirates and become a force to be reckoned with, or turn on your brothers for gold and infamy. Fight battle after battle, looting and pillaging as you go. And then have a change of heart, work off your crimes, and join the navy as a valiant officer with a shady past!

 

Hardened criminal or occasional scoundrel? Griefers beware: our legal system tracks crimes and witnesses, then applies penalties based on the severity of the crime and who saw you commit it. So take down a ship with no one around and you may get away with it  but attack the gold fleet in San Juan harbor and all the forces of the law will be turned loose on you.

 

An economy as dynamic as the world. Towns produce and consume a huge variety of goods you can buy and sell. Each town’s prices rise and fall with demand and supply, giving you a dynamic economy in which clever trading and information-sharing can make you a fortune. Tariffs on international goods can increase tensions between nations, but it makes fencing a profitable enterprise for the savvy. Load up your ship with cargo and seek your fortune in a turbulent, challenging world.

 

Detailed ship combat and damage. You can deal flaming death on the high seas with more than two dozen cannon types, ranging from small quarter-pound swivel guns to massive 48-pounders. Choose from nine different ammunition loads, including Round, Star, Expanding, Canister, Langridge, and more. You have direct ammunition and fire control over each battery of cannons on your ship. Link them into hotkey groups or just order Independent Fire and let your officers do their thing while you focus on tactics. Our sophisticated damage model means each piece of the ship  every sail, every mast, every spar  can be independently damaged or destroyed, and a single shot can cause multiple damage instances across each piece of the ship that it blows through. Shred your enemy’s sails with Bar shot to slow them down, hurl Canister shot at the crew on the top deck to take them out, or pound their hull with massive broadsides of Round shot.

 

Team up and rule the world. It’s never lonely on the high seas. Our best-of-class chat system keeps your buddy lists, org chats, and arbitrary groups ready for instant communication. Our grouping system supports descriptions, invitations, applications, and leadership designation. Group leaders get access to the command system, issuing tactical combat requests to individual group members that are fully implemented in each player’s user interface. Give each group member a different target, put a couple on defense, and lead your team to victory!

 

Missions that don’t suck. Tired of endlessly blathering NPCs who make you page through an entire book just to get a delivery mission? Our system supports dozens of different mission types in location-based job lists that are visible to all players and updated dynamically. Visit the Courthouse and transport a convict to the national capitol. Go to the Magistrate for a rush delivery of secret documents. Slip into the Black Market and take a contract kill on a distinguished naval officer. And every mission in the game supports either solo or group acceptance, with proportional rewards. Get a group of buddies to hunt down a pirate or solo your way through a delivery of needed medicine to a plague island. Mission lists update in real time as players take the jobs  if you snooze, you lose! But if they fail, the mission goes back on the list with a higher reward.

 

Key Features

A game for serious gamers. We’re not making this game for whiny twitchers and punks with six-year-old hardware. It's broadband only, for the no-lag performance you demand. It uses the latest graphics technology like DirectX 9 and PixelShader 2.0, so it looks fantastic on the newest video cards. And with Vicarious Vision's Alchemy engine pushing as much as a million polygons per frame, we expect to require a very fast PC.

 

Amazingly detailed ships. We’ll make one very simple promise: you’ve never seen playable, in-game sailing ships with this level of detail before. When it came time to make our ships we joined forces with Akella, makers of Sea Dogs, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Privateer’s Bounty. We turned them loose with huge polygon counts and texture budgets and they delivered the finest ship models ever seen in gaming.

 

Player-driven development. Thanks to Valve’s Steam technology, your computer will download new game content as soon as it becomes available. Future downloads will add avatar play, crafting, supernatural secrets, property development, and more. At every step, our discussions with the player community will drive our development goals and implementation. Get in on the ground floor and help us to build the game you want to play.

 

True indie gaming. We are financing, developing, and publishing Pirates of the Burning Sea ourselves. There’s no publisher, no retail box, no corporate meddling. We make the game we want and release it to you directly online. It’s the future of games distribution, and we’re making it happen now.

[Guest k3n]

It's a spin off of SWG, but I loved how SWG did skills instead of levels to gain power. Am thinking of buying this and being a Navy Captain then switchin to pirate and make da French walk da plank

 

argh

[huhuh?]

sounds like the water version of dawn (dawn never made it past beta but it was basically a world and then everything was created by players)