TR guilds say game over to the endgame

One of the biggest criticisms levied at NCsoft's sci-fi MMO Tabula Rasa is that it is, in many respects, an incomplete game. The Specialist tree has undergone months of retooling and tweaking to be made truly viable, the disparate amount of content in the mid to late levels has been the cause for considerable concern, and it's fairly well known that the game lacks a significant endgame.

It's this latter point that has caused a crisis of sorts on the Pegasus server. Both Defiance and Tranquility, two of the larger endgame guilds on the server (or so we're told), have decided to call it quits because of the barren state of the end-game. All there is to do once you've hit the level gap is PvP. Problem is, the PvP in Tabula Rasa is pretty broken, and the development team hasn't shown much interest in fixing it in the near future. Or if they have, they haven't done a terribly good job of communicating that.

Tabula Rasa is a terrific game, to a certain point. The combat, even with the changes made in patch 1.4, is extremely fun and a lot more intuitive than a lot of the more passive systems we've played in the past. Most of the early areas extremely polished, and when the community was still young right around the time of launch, it was a good deal of fun just running around the zones doing missions. But it's clear as you play further that this game is still in development. And while it might be OK for a game like World of Warcraft to ship without much of an endgame, for a small market title like Tabula Rasa, that's like signing your life away.

So we look at the flight of these guilds with some mixed feelings. On the one hand, we completely agree with their assessment of the state of the game. When you start looking at the next billing cycle with unease or dread, it's time to cancel your subscription. But in the same breath, the last thing we'd want to see is an exodus away from the game before it's had time to develop into something special. It's a fine line.