Comments on: Tabula Rasa: Not Slated

By: Going Blank Again | Rock, Paper, Shotgun: Pagans repent! The Endless Bear is your true God

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:34:11 +0000

[...] in time for Space Week Jason Ford, Mission Designer for Tabula Rasa talks about a Mission in Tabula Rasa. Who’d have thunk [...]

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 12:30:09 +0000

I played in the Beta and for me it didn’t offer anything new in terms of mmos. Also I didn’t feel like part of an army just one of many people running about trying to get guns and loot. I had no sense of being a displaced and desperate people, threatened by a brutal alien force. The game just lacked character or innovation. (Despite claiming innovation was the forefront of its design.)

I just got annoyed by Garriot’s interviews, and the game previews, they really misrepresented the game to my mind. I would play the game then read some preview that suggested all kinds of things that the game didn’t do. And personally I can’t help but feel because they have already been untruthful regarding the games features, this whole “beta players didn’t see the finished game” thing is another publicity exercise to try and reduce the damage that was caused by word of mouth. I find myself thinking the gap between the end of beta and the release of the game was a matter of days how different could it be?

I think a free trial, is something they should definitely go with. If they are confident in the finished game, they should put their money where their mouth is and let people find out for themselves. Offering a short trial would send out a message that they are confident in their product. I would try it again if they did, just to see if they were lying to me again.

By: Rock, Paper, Shotgun: The Constitutional Monarchy of Aruba’s favourite PC Gaming blog (Probably). » Blog Archive » Tabula Rasa Recruitment Drive

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 11:16:08 +0000

[...] We’ve ranted that you should give Tabula Rasa a shot when a free trial arrived before. And lo! one has. And we thought we’d mention it as i) we’re a pc gaming blog. That’s what we do, man. ii) it gives another chance to publish this screenshot of a handsome in-game moustache. [...]

By: Rock, Paper, Shotgun: PC Gaming’s Beadiest Eyes » Blog Archive » Seven Levels of Tabula Rasa

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 19:15:37 +0000

[...] lameness, the more general sense is quite-good-actually. This latter camp includes RPS’ own Kieran Gillian – but he’s a big fan of Guild Wars, a game which I always come away from with the odd sense that [...]

By: drunkymonkey

drunkymonkey — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:04:45 +0000

“I don’t really see the probablem with just playing an MMO for a few months and then trying something else”

I think it’s because of the whole subscription fee thing. Personally, if I stopped playing WoW after only a couple of month, I’d feel I’d wasted 18 quid.

By: kiit

kiit — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:39:59 +0000

Tabula Rasa near the end of beta was nice.. Then they nerfed all higher level weapons leaving starter weapons as the best overall choice for all classes excepting the spy, whose blade was the only unnerfed weapon left.

After release they nerfed the drops severely (so your point about late beta drops being nice to have so much loot to choose from is no longer true).

The low level game does play the way you noticed, taking on large groups without having to carefully manage your agro and targets is spot on. Once you pass levels 25-30 this begins to change, going past 35th everyone is pretty much forced to group. Seeing the new nerfs coming from the current version on the Test server indicates forced grouping for all classes from 30th on.

Given the massive number of bugged quests and game mechanics (simply listen to general chat for an hour and note how many people ask questions about quests or skills and see people still saying ‘its bugged’ to see just how invasive these problems are)… I am getting very tired of the interface not registering key presses and mouse clicks in high threat situations leaving me to die and having to recover for 20 minutes or more on long runs.

I will be dropping this game when my current time is up and not re-newing. I might come back if they every actually fix stuff. As for now, City of Heroes, Second Life and the lovely Lord of the Rings Online with its wonderful story-quests keep me quite happy and occupied.

By: Thelps

Thelps — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:43:53 +0000

While I agree with you, Kieron, my fear with MMOs as played more casually, like you suggest, is the danger of falling behind the curve of my guild/friends/regular playgroup. I don’t know a great deal about TR as I haven’t played it, but before I’m willing to pick up an MMO just to play through to the level cap and then drop, I need to be assured that failing the game doesn’t support large level disparity in groups that there’ll be a healthy number of people online for instances and going LFG. The one thing I can’t stand is huge waits for groups in an MMO, as it’s a ridiculously large waste of time I could spend doing better things.

As such, like I did in my past WoW ‘career’ (huhuhuh) I either go full on hardcore into an MMO, or I just don’t play it. That’s what’s putting me off the entire genre at the moment.

By: Kieron Gillen

Kieron Gillen — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:03:30 +0000

Yeah – you worry about the endgame, but – at the moment – it’s just fun. I don’t really see the probablem with just playing an MMO for a few months and then trying something else and TR, for me, is definitely worth that time together.

By: Greg

Greg — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:51:30 +0000

I did the same as the poster, I played half-way through the beta and then quit because it just wasn’t up to scratch. But this wasn’t before I had put in a pre-order at Amazon.

So when the game turned up, obviously I played it, hell I payed for 30 days so I was going to play 30 days! I was pleasantly surprised, whatever it was that made the beta feel wrong and dissapointing had changed. The game is good fun, really good fun, what-da-ya know!

There is room for improvement and there is room for new additions and content. To put it in my wife’s words (who is used to wow), is that all you do, just shoot things all the time? zzzzz…. boring. But it’s not just shooting things, it’s a war zone, it’s strategy, it’s tactics, hell, it’s damned fun!

Going back to wow after playing TR I just think, jeez, how much down time is there? Travelling la la la, find a trainer la la la, etc.. In wow it feels as though the mobs are presented to you piece meal, and you can fight them at your own pace, or not at all if you choose. In TR, omg! You fight or you’re dead, there are onnly a few safe places that a squad of Bane couldn’t just beam down into. The rest of the time keep your weapons loaded and handy and brush up on your FPS skills, it’s not an FPS but those skills will still come in handy!

The only question mark I have about this game is will it keep my interest in the long term? Will there be an end game?

I am encouraged to see that they have a very active development cycle at the moment, auctions houses (miltary surplus) are coming in the next patch. PAUs (mounts, of sorts) are due soon. There’s so much cool stuff that can be done in this world and I really hope they keep it up!

By: Kieron Gillen

Kieron Gillen — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 13:39:27 +0000

Darkripper: Agree entirely that the game is far from perfect and that the Beta situation is completely NCSoft’s fault.

By: drunkymonkey

drunkymonkey — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 23:29:45 +0000

I’ve been signed up for the beta for WH:O for I don’t know how long, and never gotten through to playing the damn game. I do agree that betas shouldn’t be glamorous affairs (I think the likes of Halo 3 and COD4 have really brought forward this idea of public betas that I’m not ultimately sure are at all healthy), and certainly for Hellgate: London the vast majority of the posts on the beta forums were nonsensical and devoid of coherent feedback, which was a shame. It has to be said though that there were a few threads of excellent insight into the workings of the game and how they could be improved upon, and although I came from Eurogamer I tried to be as helpful as I could. I couldn’t say how useful the beta was to Flagship, but I’m willing to bet that it took a lot of cutting to get to the real stuff of worth.

If it was an invite-only basis, or through sites that specialize in this sort of thing, then I can see betas as being extremely helpful to the developers. Having actual applications would doubtless take a lot of time, but evaluating the strengths of testers based on their prior experience, politeness and sensibility sounds like it could really help developers make the last-ditch changes to the games before they’re sent out to be picked apart by reviewers and the gaming public as a whole.

By: darkripper

darkripper — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 23:03:35 +0000

Well, I don’t think we’ll see a Warhammer Online public beta anytime soon. Mythic is picking their beta players from big clans and the fanbase. That makes sense to me. A beta shouldn’t win the hearts of gamers, should be actually used to fix problems and give feedback to the developers. And then, when the game is almost finished you can open it to everyone (or anyone fast enough to grab the code). At the time of the launch of the beta, TR felt a lot like a work in progress. For example the bane didn’t attacked the control points…

So I guess it’s a critical decision when to open a game to everyone. Funny thing, they already knew it, because of the AutoAssault trainwreck. I guess some people never learn.