MMORPG.com's Carolyn Koh recently visited Flying Lab Studios' new offices in Seattle to talk to the team about the upcoming Avatar Combat Revamp for their nautical MMORPG, Pirates of the Burning Sea.

The imminent launch of Pirates of the Burning Sea’s Avatar Combat Revamp seemed to me to be a good excuse to visit Flying Lab Software in their new digs in downtown Seattle. After a quick tour of the new offices with Community Manager Troy Hewitt and exchanging greetings with many familiar faces, I was seated in CEO Russell “Rusty” Williams’ corner office.

“You must be meeting goals,” I said to Rusty and Producer Misha Williams as I looked around the office. Rusty smiled and spread his hands. “What can I say? New digs, larger staff, new projects…” indeed, it speaks for itself.

“We’ve had wonderful retention numbers with the free trial,” he said. Pirates of the Burning Sea is Russell Williams’ first MMO and as such, some of the performance metrics expected of an MMOs of this scale are not familiar territory for him. “We asked SoE if we were doing alright and although I can’t mention numbers, it’s far better than SoE had expected.” The number of returning players was also far greater than expected.

Read the Avatar Combat Revamp Interview