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Pirates of the Burning Sea

So while everyone was opening presents and drinking eggnog yesterday, I decided to forgo the whole eggnog hoo-ha since I was too busy playing the Pirates of the Burning Sea open beta!! WOO HOO!! What can I say, my peeps really knew how to gift me this year (and someone must have been listening when I said I wanted to be a pirate for Christmas).

I've been playing Lord of the Rings Online all year but quite honestly have been getting rather bored as of late. Don't get me wrong. I still love the game and have no intention of deleting my toons any time soon (all my kinmates can breathe a sigh of relief right now), but once you hit the levelcap all that's left to do is become the uber and raid, raid, raid. There's only so many raids a pretty elf-girl can take if you know what I'm sayin'. Here's the one big thing PotBS has going for it: they're, like, the next big MMO until the real next big MMO comes along (in a few months, er whatever). And who doesn't want to be a pirate, chase after booty and sail their own ship?!! Cuz I totally do.

The first screenshot was taken moments before my mighty ship, The Windzor, went in to battle with the British and nearly got its ass beat right to the bottom of the ocean. But do you see the size of my sails? Yeah, I still won. I'm a pretty badass pirate. Okay fine. I'm not really a pirate. I'm a saucy Spaniard but my allegiances are thin if you know what I mean.

This is my pirate, Peg-leg Meg. You can read a thousand reviews of this game (all written by men) but you probably won't ever read this: character creation is totally hot. You get boatloads of choices and once you log in it'll be clear why almost god and everybody decided to play female toons (it's because all the programmers are men, clearly). Check it, I totally caught this guy oogling my toon yesterday:

So far so good. Leveling is more fun than grinding 300 boars and you really do spend the majority of your time at sea in ship battle. One of the other huge positives about this game is your level 8 Frenchman can totally best a level 19 British Royal Officer as long as you out-maneuver him and have a little luck on your side. That pretty much won't happen in a lot of other games. We'll see how it goes. I'm only a level 9 and the RvR looks like it should be some pretty fun stuff (imagine mighty sea battles between the Spanish and the French -- YARRRR!).

Official launch date is January 22^nd but if you pre-order you'll get in the game 2 weeks early. I'm still undecided about buying this game for real (open beta lasts until the 1^st if you need to get your own sneak peek) but right now it's a nice break from everything else.