The folks at Flying Lab Studios are doing a lot of expanding lately! The company is adding more staff, and has also announced the first expansion for Pirates of the Burning Sea. The new expansion, "Power and Prestige", will allow players to take on the role of Port Governor, in what sounds like a bit of sim-style gaming, where players control the development of a port.

The expansion will be offered as a free download to all players and is set to release in Q2 2010. Until then, check out this interview over at ZAM for more details.

Going EVE style with a free x-pack AND expanding staff, sounds like a very smart move.

Might have to give this game a go again sometime soon here.

this sounds rather interesting. ill be keeping tabs for sure.  While not the most UBEr game out there i personally think it was pretty cool in its own right, ship combat was fun and looked nice to boot, plus the sound effects were very well done. While i still like ninjas more, im not really biased, pirates are pretty coolt oo, and in this game, thats what i played ^ ^. 

Definitely looking forward to this.

Looks intresting , keeping my eye on this.

Outside SOE own Everquest 2 i'd say pirates of the burning sea is one SOE better titles at the moment. i love star wars but since NGE star wars galaxies lost title as SOE best which is why i think NGE was born was hurting SOE's baby.

This all sounds like too little too late. People were asking for more depth since before the release instead FL concentrated on adding fluff to the game rather than actual depth to keep people playing.

This port governance is a step in a right direction of course, but sounds pretty basic and meaningless from that interview.

I liked ship combat and graphics, but its all this game has and gets boring fast.

Meh IMO half the reason this gme went so wrong was trying to forcefully overlay way way to many mechanics into the war and ports. needed to be much more free flowing an far less about doing X t meet Y requiement to get Z battle started, then the whole lottery thing..stupid stupid stupid. that and instancing, that was horrible for naval battles.

 Nice! Now all they need to do is break away from SOE.... 

Originally posted by Cristina1

This all sounds like too little too late. People were asking for more depth since before the release instead FL concentrated on adding fluff to the game rather than actual depth to keep people playing.

This port governance is a step in a right direction of course, but sounds pretty basic and meaningless from that interview.

 

I liked ship combat and graphics, but its all this game has and gets boring fast.

"We've been pushing all this new content to the game."  Uh.  Great.  New missions.  Missions are, like, downtime boredom relief or what you run to get the cash to build boats.  People playing this game are, for the most part, doing it for the PvP aspects (especially Port Battles) or economy stuff.  The missions were rarely a gameplay focus.

Now, unfortunately, FLS felt the need to 'tinker' with their PvP, providing more and more impressive griefing mechanics for the increasingly uneven server populations.  It sucks to be France, but it REALLY sucks to be France when you're outnumbered 2:1 and the mechanics in place are all about numbers.

Further, I absolutely agree that this is some seriously late-breaking enhancement.  I finally dropped my account in large part due to the lack of content.  Missions are content, but they're one kind of content and not even the kind most of us were playing for/trying to enjoy.  Stuff like port governance, society warehouses, and definitely a more comprehensive and interesting crafting system (ships were not made on an assembly line to come out identical) for starters.

So, yeah, for those of us who are not mission-centric players, this is the first content added in a year and a half.  Not good.  And I'm still going to wait and see how it pans out before I consider plunking down hard-earned cash again for a game the developers seem to go out of their way to break at every opportunity.  Like shaking an ant farm...