Ahoy! Release date off the starbord bow!

That’s right! PotBS has an OFFICIAL release date! So when can we expect to set sail? From BurningSea.com, the Official site:

Here it is: January 22nd, 2008!

That’s our launch date. For Real.

It’s been a very long trip. We started this project in the fall of 2002, so by the time we launch, Pirates of the Burning Sea will have been in development for more than five years. Even our closed beta program has been running since December of 2005, so that’s coming up on its two-year anniversary.

During that time we have grown from a handful of people to more than seventy full-time staff. The scale of the project has grown as well. When we started, there weren’t even going to be human avatars! Ports were just a menu where you clicked options. The whole game was much, much smaller and a lot less interesting.

At this point, we have a big fat slab of game: a giant, player-driven economy; incredible ship combat; swashbuckling swordfighting; a thousand missions; eighty towns; a conquerable world; and more adventure than we ever expected. Behind the scenes, we are working really hard to fix bugs, adjust gameplay, balance and tune the numbers, and generally get the game ready for launch. There’s still a ton of work to do and we’re hard at it.

You be sailin’ into dangerous waters there me hearties… A release date of January 22, 2008 places this so incredibly close to Warhammer Online that it could be like a deadly blast from a Ship of the Line to the broadsides of everything PotBS is working towards. However, I’ll keep an open mind and hopeful spirit about this one and say that I am glad they are not rushing the release. It’s great to see that they will continue development to turn their fat slab of a game into a juicy and delicious medium-rare masterpiece.