PotBS - Grumpy Old Gamer vs Flying Labs #2 @ GCC

The second part of GameClubCentral's Pirates of the Burning Sea / Flying Labs visit report is online:

When you start up POTBS you are of course, as expected, creating an avatar of yourself. This is who you will be in the world as with all MMO type games. There were many questions relating to how much detail and difference you could put into this creation and I saw first hand that it is quite a lot. If I were to compare it to any game on the market today I think that City Of Heroes comes to mind as to the variety of control you have at this creation, only more so. COH raised the bar in avatar creation and POTBS takes it upon itself to raise it again, pretty much guaranteeing that you WON’T run into a twin in the game looking like you.

I asked Rusty about the real pirate items like hooks, peg legs, and shoulder mounted parrots with no toiletry manners. “We’ve decided to make those rewards for some difficult missions rather than just give them away in the beginning. The idea was to make them more like badges of respect – if you see a pirate with a peg leg you will know that he’s one bad ass that has completed a particularly difficult mission and is no one to mess with.” Indeed, that seems to be a sense of realism to me! While Troy whisked through the different possibilities and worked the colored pallets for each item down to the earrings and such, it was clear that there were perhaps a million or so combinations that would be hard to replicate, thus staring face to face with a replica twin of yourself within the game seems highly improbable – if not impossible. Enough with the Avatar, it’s time to set sail!