Honestly? I’m bored of MMORPGs.

Everyone else is mega-experienced, meg-rich and mega-better than me. And there are only so many rats (and rat variants) I can kill before my head lands heavily upon the keyboard; weak with bored fatigue.

So when Flying Lab Software invited Gamer’s Daily News on a guided tour of its new online role player, I’m embarrassed to say we didn’t leap at the chance as enthusiastically as perhaps we could’ve done. As it turns out, the show was quite spectacular, and for a few wonderful moments we dared to imagine a new wave of MMORPG goodness washing over our jaded computers.

I say a few moments, because Flying Lab also provided us with a key to the beta test, which has been played heavily (and heartily, me old sea dogs!) across the Christmas period and convinced us remarkably quickly of a new world in online gaming that’s finally worth a visit.

Pirates of the Burning Sea is an MMORPG in every way – precisely as seasoned online gamers will want and expect, with standard fare gameplay and tactics that will allow net gamers to pick it up and play without reading a single instruction. While this is no small feat, it’s also kind of expected, so there won’t be many gamers ready to pour praise on Flying Lab for providing the established shell in which such mega-experienced, mega-rich, mega-better than me realities are built. So if you’re a skilled online role player and World of Warcraft or, perhaps a little more closely related, Eve Online has waned in excitement, then Burning Sea is quite simply the next logical port of call (yes, that was a pun, but it’s also true).

Likewise, people who’ve thrilled for the last couple of decades over games like Sid Meier’s Pirates! Will find Burning Sea to be a brilliant evolution of the sea faring adventures they’ve come to love, with the exponentially greater depth that a persistent online world can offer.

It’s got the questing, trading and warring in vast abundance and a plethora of variant opportunities for gamers to build themselves a reputation and an empire. But for the more casual gamer (of which I count myself when it comes to MMORPGs), there appears to be an equally exciting world of opportunities bubbling beneath the surface of Pirates of the Burning Sea.

Naturally, I’m forced to make comparisons to Disney’s trilogy (you know the one – it started off great, then went to hell for the last two thirds when it drowned in a violent sea of unnecessary special effects and shallow depths of storyline) since Burning Sea builds on the newfound swashbuckling vogue admirably and, thankfully, without asking for permission. The character selection is wild and varied – allowing gamers to adopt the role of the wonderfully effete pirate captain, sexy warrior queen, stalwart commandant or any combination of superb rumbustious characters we’ve come to associate with the colonisation of the New World during the last few years. There’s even ghost ships ahoy, piloted by the damned, judging by screeshots so the comparisson, I think, is a fair one to make and gives gamers the right idea of what to expect.

If anything, Pirates of the Burning Sea picks up after the first Caribbean film better than either of the sequels did, and does so with far greater finesse and credibility. Just when we at GDN thought we were all pirated out, Burning Sea couldn’t have come along at a better time to reinvigorate our interest in this wildly romantic aspect of modern history. It also got me drinking rum again, though I’m not quite sure whether that’s good or bad at this point.

Anyway, back to the gameplay. As already stated, this is an MMORPG in every way, shape and sense, but it’s the divergent nuances in character progression and new range of variations in gameplay which is so immediately captivating. Perhaps it’s the fact that the cities, towns and ports lend themselves to the concept of public hubs so much better than a fictional space station or weird and wonderful fantasy realm we normally find in online multiplayers that makes Burning Sea more immediately absorbing, but there’s something about the moment when your ship first makes birth in a rugged port teeming with organic activity that ignites the imagination.