Power & Prestige, the first free expansion to Pirates of the Burning Sea was announced at last year's Penny Arcade Expo, but the developers over at Flying Lab have been keeping quiet about what features the free expansion would be offering. One might imagine being a pirate-based game that it would have something to do with buried treasure, a talking parrot, and a bottle of rum, but the team decided to be a bit more extravagant than that. A broad overview of the expansion's list of features was recently posted to the game's website and some of the new content will have some players giggling with glee.

One of the big features that will be coming with Power & Prestige is Port Governance. What is Port Governance you ask? This feature will allow players to spend influence to elect Governors in ports throughout the game. This will grant a lot of useful options for the player that gets to act as governor as they will be able to take military and economical actions for the port, adjust the tax rate, and even draw a salary. Governors will also gain a special title and have access to special shop with governor-only items. There are also other small features players will have the chance to use such as setting the welcome message other players will see when entering the port. Grant it, with the sick sense of humor some of us players have this could get a little creepy at times.

Power & Prestige will also bring additional conttent by way of a new "Pirate Hunter" faction, over 60 new missions, avatar skill revisions, ship combat, tuning, and more. The beta testing for Power & Prestige required the launch of an additional test server, Sandbox, to keep the game's normal test free for regular update testing while the expansion gets tested. In order to access the Sandbox test server you will need to have an active Pirates of the Burning Sea account and apply for a beta key.