Suddenly pirates are back in vogue, it seems, thanks in part to movies such as Pirates of the Carribean (and its two upcoming sequels) and games such as last year's acclaimed Sid Meier's Pirates!. Now pirates are looking to invade the online role-playing genre with Pirates of the Burning Sea, from Seattle's Flying Lab Software. And as we recently discovered, Pirates of the Burning Sea will take the traditional parts of online role-playing games, such as creating a unique pirate avatar to wonder around various Caribbean towns and ports, and it will combine them with realistic naval combat that seems like it's inspired by the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

Live the life of a pirate or a naval officer in the 1720s.

Set in the raucous 18th century Caribbean, during the heyday of piracy, Pirates of the Burning Sea will let you sail for the major powers of the era (Britain, France, or Spain), as well as for yourself as a, well, pirate. The game will feature both player-versus-player combat and player-versus-environment missions, which will let you build a career as a dread captain on the high seas. The game itself seems to combine the town exploration of a traditional online role-playing game with the stylized world map and travel of Sid Meier's Pirates!, with a real-time ship-combat mode that's almost out of a historically based wargame. As such, it's certainly very different from the traditional online role-playing games, with their foci on fantasy worlds and races, not to mention swords and sorcery.

The first parts of Pirates of the Burning Sea are fairly conventional. You'll create a unique avatar by customizing your appearance, and then you'll find yourself in a starting town, where you can walk around, enter various buildings, and interact with players and non-player characters alike. We saw a couple of towns and admired the architectural detail, from the ramshackle pirate town, to the orderly European-administered port. If you're a naval officer of a European power, there are admiralty offices that you can visit to receive the latest orders, as well as to access navy equipment. There are also churches, taverns, shipwrights, and everything else that you might expect. You'll meet NPCs who have stories and secrets to tell (such as a priest with a pirate past), and these characters can then send you off on various quests. There are plans for two major story arcs, one dealing with your career as a pirate or naval officer and one presenting itself as something of a serial arc, with plans for a new chapter to be released once a month.

When you get a mission or when you just want to sail away, all you have to do is head for the docks and jump aboard your vessel. The game switches to the world view, and it's very similar in appearance and functionality to the world view seen in Sid Meier's Pirates! The goal in online role-playing games is to make sure that you're always doing something, because dead time can be lethal to a game's success. So instead of forever sailing from place to place, Pirates of the Burning Sea will give you a stylized 3D world that you can quickly sail from port to port in so you don't spend most of the game at sea. The idea is that you'll spend most of your time in port, where you can socialize with other players or spend your time in combat conducting a mission or engaging other players.

There's a bunch of scurvy knaves.

And it's the naval combat in Pirates of the Burning Seas that makes it vastly different from that of most online role-playing games, where the emphasis is on speed and where you can battle hundreds of monsters a night, easily. If you could illustrate the combat in the game, it would probably be best described as "stately," as the key to victory is to use the wind to maneuver your ship to deliver broadsides to the enemy. The attention to detail is impressive enough to satisfy history buffs. There are more than 20 types of ships, each with its own unique handling characteristics in terms of the wind. Cannons can shoot 12 different types of ammunition, from chain shot (to shred enemy sails) and grape shot (to shred men on deck), to good old-fashioned cannonballs (to puncture enemy hulls). Guns themselves have firing arcs, which put the emphasis on maneuvering. Smaller ships can dance around bigger ships, but bigger ships can deliver devastating broadsides. Currently, ships fall into three classes: scout, hunter, and dreadnought. Scouts are light, fast, and stealthy; hunters are the frontline "tanks"; and dreadnoughts are lumbering capital ships.