We announced Power & Prestige, the first free expansion for Pirates of the Burning Sea, at the Penny Arcade Expo last year. We’ve spent almost all of our time since then working on new features and content for the expansion, which is due for release this summer.

We’re now ready to talk about exactly what those features are, and today we’re going to give you a broad overview of what to expect.

Power & Prestige™ Feature List

• Port Governance

  Become the Governor of a port! In Power & Prestige™, players and player societies can spend influence to elect Governors in ports throughout the Burning Sea. Once elected Governor, you can:

  • Display your name under the port’s name in the Open Sea, or choose to share the glory with their whole society. You can also set a message that greets anyone who enters the port.
  • Take important economic and military actions such as setting the tax rate of the port, improving the port’s infrastructure, reducing the port’s unrest, and boosting the port’s defenses.
  • Draw a salary from the port’s coffers.
  • Display a special title while you are governor, and access an exclusive shop to purchase special governor-only items.
• Content

  We are adding over 60 new missions to the game, using new techniques to produce content that is even more exciting and challenging.

  • We have added new content to ensure that you can reach Celebrated reputation with your favorite player-friendly factions and be rewarded for it!
  • We are introducing four new “Pirate Hunter” factions: the Board of Marque, the Men of War, the Salon d’Aventure and the Corsarios del Rey. Each of these new privateering factions has unique storyline missions available to all nations!
  • Factions will have shops that offer outfitting, customizable clothing and sails to players who have earned sufficient respect.
  • We’re adding new repeatable missions as part of Port Governance: Governor’s Requests! Complete the bonus objectives to infuse your favorite port’s treasury.
• Avatar skill revision

  We’ve giving our Avatar Combat skills an overhaul, and we’re separating out Brawling to be its own fighting school.

• Ship Combat Tuning

  We’re giving every ship in the game a significant revision, and we’re adding new features to help combat troublesome outfitting stacking!

• Career Improvements

  Each of our five careers is getting a complete revision, which will include the addition of new skills allowing for more tactical gameplay.

• Character Lighting Improvements

  Character lighting in towns and other environments has been overhauled to look more realistic.

Over the coming months we’re going to flesh this out via a series of more in-depth developer logs so hopefully we’ll be able to answer any questions you have. We’ll also be talking more about some of the smaller changes we’re making (like the economy changes needed to make Port Governance work, for example).

We’re going to gather some of the questions from the comments thread for this article and tackle them in the next Ask FLS podcast, which we will be recording later this week.

The Beta Test

The other thing we’re ready to talk about is the Power & Prestige™ beta test! We have a long tradition of giving our players a preview of features before they go live, and we’re continuing that with Power & Prestige.

We usually use our Testbed server for milestone releases, but since we’re continuing to release milestone patches during the development of the expansion we’re going to be using a new server for the beta test: Sandbox.

In order to access Sandbox you’ll need a Power & Prestige™ beta key, which will only work if you have an active Pirates of the Burning Sea™ subscription.

You can apply for the beta by clicking here. We’ll be announcing the exact dates of the test in the coming weeks, so keep your eyes peeled!