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Features
Blistering Naval Combat
Maneuver your ship in real time, turning one way to unleash a broadside and then cutting back to guard your damaged armor. Drop sails and heave to while your opponent sails forward so you can fire at his vulnerable stern. Work together with your friends to choose your targets and your aim points: small, fast ships can swoop in close to rake the enemy crew with swivel guns while your bruisers blow chain shot at the enemy sails. Once you've crippled his ability to move, send in a boarding ship laden with armed men to grapple, board, and seize the prize.

Ship combat in Pirates of the Burning Sea has all the action, intensity, and tactical gameplay of a single-player game. Speed, direction, and facing all matter, and you fire and dodge in realtime. As captain of your own ship you balance your crew health, sail integrity, hull armor, gun reload speed, and maneuverability, making decisions moment to moment and planning what's going to happen in ten, thirty, or sixty seconds. It's a white-knuckle experience, whether against determined NPCs or wily players.

PvP-Conquerable World
The Caribbean of 1720 is home to many dozens of ports belonging to the three great powers: Britain, France, and Spain. Each port is a valuable source of goods, equipment, and mission patrons. Players use PvE missions to destabilize a port, making it eligible for conquest by their nation. With enough players doing enough missions, the conquest mode begins and the ocean for many leagues around the port becomes an open PvP environment. This unlocks new PvE missions to smuggle in supplies, destroy fortifications, and tilt the odds in your favor. Scheduled PvP battles culminate in a final conflict to either save the port or conquer it.

Every day, each nation receives victory points on the basis of its port holdings. The first nation to reach the goal is declared the victor, and celebrations and awards ensue. Then treaties are signed, ports revert to their original sides, and a new round of conflict begins.

Cutting-Edge Graphics
We believe video cards are made to be pushed. Our extensive, custom library of DirectX 9 pixel shaders give us a photorealistic ocean, normal-mapped avatars, and dynamic self-shadowing on ships and characters. Pirates of the Burning Sea looks great on current hardware, and will look even better on the next generation of video cards.

We've learned to stop fearing high polygon counts. Our ships are intensely detailed, with poly counts in the tens of thousands for breathtaking fidelity. Animated crew fire your cannons, work the sails, repair damage, and keep lookout in the crow's nest. Roiling cannon smoke, showers of impact splinters, and massive ship explosions show off PrometheanFX2, our custom-tailored particle effects system. Painterly lighting and adventurous art direction bring it all together, resulting in the stunning in-game screenshots featured in our gallery.

Sophisticated Missions
Our mission system gives you a starring role in your own epic. Each player accumulates a personal supporting cast of NPCs, including old enemies, new friends, lost loves, and treacherous allies. No two players have the same cast, and their stories will take them to different places and fight in different battles. And since each NPC can have multiple roles, the pirate who is your arch-nemesis may be the good friend and ally of an enemy player. Your long-lost cousin may turn out to be your best friend's sweetheart - or a treacherous spy! We bring the plot twists and the bold adventure of classic adventure fiction to life every time you play.

Ship battles aren't just spawn camps. Our AI personalities and dynamic goals ensure that no two battles are alike. Unexpected reinforcements, nighttime stealth missions, and optional secondary objectives mean you get gameplay as intricate as any handcrafted single-player game level.

Dramatic Avatars
You don't have to look like everyone else. Our avatars are built with more than a dozen customizable slots. Choose hair, faces, footwear, hands, coats, hats, belts, jewelry, and much more, selecting from a library of parts and textures and assigning the colors you want. Most games with customizable avatars use flat gray textures that are then customized with flat, featureless colors. Our full-color customizable textures mean we start with gorgeous, photographic color and then apply your custom shades selectively, preserving details such as gold buttons, fabric coarseness, or bloodstains while still allowing for tremendous creative freedom. And of course, you can choose from the eyepatches, hook hands, and peg legs that every pirate craves.

Action For Every Play Style
Whether your interest is in ship combat, piracy, commercial trading, or adventure, you have a role to play, and all your adventures take place in a dramatic world of conflict and change. A dynamic commodities market provides opportunity for clever traders to turn coin, navy missions throw you into the thick of combat, and pirates have ample targets for plunder. Our strategic gameplay keeps the world in flux, offering ample opportunities for both PvE missions and PvP battles & ambushes to affect the ongoing struggle. The Caribbean of 1720 is a world at war, and all players can take part on their own terms. Whether you want to join a major port conquest battle, pursue smuggling missions to help your side in secret, or organize your guildmates to bolster a port's defenses in the face of enemy plotting, you can be sure your efforts are meaningful and the stakes are very real.