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Tabula Rasa announcement contest winners announced
The Tabula Rasa community website has revealed the four winners of the Foreas Base announcement contest for the US version, English Europe version, French version, and German version. They've also kindly translated the French and German announcements into English, so those of us across the pond can laugh about them too.Below the main post are also the runners up for all of the different versions, and we have to say, it was quite a hard call. Congratulations to the winners, and congratulations to everyone who participated!The winners will have their announcements voiced-over and added to the standard Foreas Base announcements, which, even if you're not a TR player, you should listen to. They're sure to brighten up even a non-TR player's sour day.
NEWS FLASH: AFS pushes against Bane at Valverde Plateau
Dateline: the planet Foreas. Those psychotic raiders from beyond the stars, the Bane, are giving our boys in the field what-for. In response, high command of the AFS has authorized a big push against those conniving crusties at the Valverde Plateau. Now known as the "Battle for Trinity Bridge", the boys of the AFS are pushing back against those no-goodnicks in a big way.If you're going into battle, TenTonHammer has what you need, soldier. Their guide to the Plateau and the surrounding regions will let you take the fight to the front lines, and beyond! From Fort Defiance to Maligo Base, all the boys in the field are swearing by it; make sure to read up and then hit them where it hurts! For the video news about these offensives, with high-quality footage from the AFS Network, check below the cut. Good hunting, soldier!
How not to review Tabula Rasa
PC Advisor UK recently ran a "expert review" of Tabula Rasa, giving you a wonderful look at the game... up until level 10. Then apparently the reviewer didn't want to play anymore and started to make things up.Tabula Rasa Vault picked this gem of a review up and actually reviewed the review, and I'm quite inclined to agree with them. Last I checked, Foreas isn't an island, Twin Pillars and Foreas Base are nice places to hang out, you don't waste so much ammo when you crouch and have a higher accuracy, and it's really easy to avoid enemy controlled bases by just switching battlefield instances. Reviewing an MMO is tough - especially when you may not have alot of time to put into it. This review is, sadly, proof of what happens when you don't spend some time with the game beyond an early level. This reviewer never got to see the interesting facets of Tabula Rasa, like the community sponsored fist fights, the in-game events, and the other cities and planets. If the reviewer had played past level 10, he might have started to like Tabula Rasa. This is a great reason to make sure your reviewer checked his facts before posting his review. Otherwise, you might just be believing an illusion.
One Shots: Unicorns! Everywhere!
So it isn't quite as unicorn-laden as the original Tabula Rasa was, but you have to admit, seeing uniformed unicorns is definitely a strange sight. While Razorwire may not have cared for this three-month veteran reward gadget, it certainly seems to have become somewhat popular amongst players like Mark "Jukovic" Benson (the one who sent this great One Shots) that understand the joke about Tabula Rasa's previous development period. That, and it's just downright silly, which gives it a 10 in our book. We love it when devs do something that shows their sense of humor to the players. Do you have some screenshots of silly things from your MMO? If not, go get some! Then send those screenshots to us here at oneshots AT massively DOT com. We can always use a good laugh. %Gallery-9798%
Tabula Rasa patch notes for 1.6 are up!
Some folks are happy, some guarded, and others aren't so thrilled, but the details for Tabula Rasa's upcoming Patch 1.6 have been released. Along with the experience buffs that were mentioned on Feedback Friday, there's also a boatload of fixes to missions, mobs, terrain problems, modifiers, and more. For those curious about how the new experience modifiers play out, here's the details:- The kill streak multiplier has been updated to make leveling easier at higher levels. Before the same multiplier was available to everyone regardless of their level and players could only reach a maximum of plus 250%.More patch notes experience news behind the cut!
The Daily Grind: What would bring you back to a game?
One of the bits of news yesterday was that of a stupendous deal on NCsoft's Tabula Rasa Collector's Edition version for the cost of $14.90. Now, as I tend to collect MMOs like many people collect books, this definitely got me to put down the $15 to give Tabula Rasa another go. I know a few other MMO fiends who were similarly interested, considering the extra goodies for the low price point and who have joined me on the "try again" bandwagon. This got me to thinking, though -- what would a company need to do to get your attention, and perhaps entice you into purchasing their game after a first try that didn't (for whatever reason) work for you? Is the promise of something shiny and extra -- on top of changes to the game structure from when you tried it -- more likely to get you to give a game a second go? Is there ever a time when you're willing to try an MMO again? Would a free trial or change to a free-to-play/microtransaction structure help? Or is it pretty much one try and move on for you?
WoW: The Burning Crusade wins MMO of the year from the AIAS
The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences has placed another feather in the positively avian cap of Blizzard's World of Warcraft. A final list of the nominees and winners from AIAS' 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards has been released, and of the five shortlisted games in the Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year category, it is the WoW expansion in particular, The Burning Crusade, that took the top honor (as Mike Schramm predicted when the nominations were first announced). Blizzard executives also gave speeches on the strategies behind their success -- unrelated to the award -- at the D.I.C.E. Summit, where the awards took place.There were four other MMOs that deserve a mention for being nominated, and these are a mix of new titles and expansions. In no particular order, they are: EVE Online: Trinity, Guild Wars: Eye of the North, The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, and Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa. The Overall Game of the Year went to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and you can check out a discussion of this, and some of the other AIAS' gaming awards outside of the MMO focus, at Joystiq.
Logos Atlas sends a call for casual cryptologists
One of the interesting, if often ignored, parts of Tabula Rasa's lore are the Logos symbols. Not to be confused with Logos itself - which is said to be the power which controls the very fabric of the cosmos, or Logos abilities - which are TR's version of magic spells, Logos symbols are those little figures that appear on shrines and holy places, and make up the language that is used to tell the stories of the Eloh. Truthfully, their function in the lore is something that I haven't seen players show a terribly large amount of interest in to this point, but from hearing General British himself speak about them, it's easy to tell that they're something he put a good deal of thought into and is quite proud of -- even suggesting that they would make a good universal language for the deaf.Among the Tabula Rasa resources on the 'net, Logos Atlas is easily the most reliable as it concerns the location of Logos shrines and their meaning. It should already occupy a spot in the bookmarks of any self-respecting member of the AFS. To drum up a bit of interest in their site, Logos Atlas is holding a contest through the end of the year, offering an Ideazon Zboard with a Tabula Rasa keyset and a Tabula Rasa FragMat mousepad for one lucky winner who can successfully decipher three puzzles written using Logos symbols. It sounds a lot easier than it actually is, and we're told nobody has successfully completed them yet. So if you fancy yourself an amateur cryptologist, give the contest a look -- it's free loot after all.
Tabula Rasa servers down for hotfix [Updated]
Tabula Rasa players hoping to enjoy some shooty MMORPG action after work will be a disappointed, as all four of the game servers are down for maintenance as of 5 p.m. EST this evening. According to a note on the official site, the servers are being brought down to apply a hotfix that will fix an error that was causing syncing problems between backpacks and footlockers, and another that was preventing players from accessing the new Faultlever instance.You'll have to forgive us for being skeptical, but we suspect that there's problem more to this. If they're really dead set on fixing these problems (and the syncing issue has been around since launch, which is why we're curious about the apparent urgency), why would you bring the servers down during prime time, instead of in the early morning when nobody is playing?[Update: No sooner do we put this story live than the servers come back live. Huzzah!]
Calling all TR experts - wanna be a wolf?
The good people over at Tabula Rasa Vault are putting out a call vise vie the official Tabula Rasa website for experienced players to be "alpha wolves" in their new clan -- The Wolf Pack. What ostensibly sets this clan apart from every clan out there is the information-gathering role it will play for the TR Vault community. They're looking for players who are experts in their given class to find all there is to know, gather the concerns of other players in their class du jour, and suggest solutions to perceived class imbalances. Apparently, this role is more than just a self-appointed one -- as they're promising that these Alpha Dogs will get the chance to discuss their concerns with the TR designers themselves.It's not uncommon in other titles for developers to pay attention to the class concerns of a game's elite guilds, but it's rare that a clan can promise that sort of interaction before most people have even settled in the end game. They're still recruiting for all Tier IV classes, so if being an Alpha Dog sounds like your cup of tea, check out the information on the TR website.
Holideals: Tabula Rasa stocking stuffers
When it comes to established games like World of Warcraft or City of Heroes, finding holiday goodies for dedicated gamers is a simple matter of hitting Google and seeing what manner of strange and extravagant goods rise to the surface. For a game like Tabula Rasa, which has only just now starting to sink into the hearts and minds of MMO nuts, simply getting people to consider playing the game is a difficult prospect in and of itself. With this in mind, we scoured the internet to find the best deals on Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa and came away pleasantly surprised.The pickings are a little sparse, but definitely worthy of your holiday dollar: Gamestop is running a promotion where you can get a free Tabula Rasa keyset with the purchase of a Zboard, a $20 value. The Zboard is a keyboard specifically designed to give you easy and quick keyboard access to chat features, emotes, and menu commands. The deal runs through the end of the year, so now is the time to jump on it if you were planning on springing for a Zboard anyway. Amazon has both the regular and collector's editions of Tabula Rasa on sale for $25 and $30, respectively. This puts them well under the impulse purchase threshold. Heck, at that price, you could afford to buy the CE for yourself and a good buddy and set aside some holiday time to blast some Bane over a glass of eggnog. Being a Tabula Rasa player myself, I can tell you that this it is the perfect "gateway game" for getting traditionally casual or console gamers into the MMO genre. There's something about shooting aliens with a rocket launcher that seems to transcend the normal social boundaries. For the new, reduced price of entry, you cant argue.
Theorycrafting: putting Rage to the test
There are times, and it happens with almost every game released, when the description of a certain game mechanic or ability is ambiguous enough that players are left unsure of exactly what it does in certain specific game situations. When the devs aren't handy to provide direct clarification, there is a certain subsect of the gaming population that likes to engage in theorycrafting, grabbing large chunks of data to see how closely abilities work in practice to the numbers set forth on their tooltips or in the patch notes. Among the only solid theorycrafting I've seen so far for Tabula Rasa is from the folks over on the Tabula Spot forums, where among the many things they're working, is on figuring out which Logos abilities stack with Rage.So far, the results don't look terribly promising. Neither Lightning Discharge nor Shrapnel show a statistically significant difference in damage when Rage is activated (and here we seem to be talking about the nerfed Rage on the PTR). This seems to conflict with the Rage tooltip, which says in part, "Utilize the power of Logos to increase the damage done by your attacks." Interestingly, while Rage doesn't appear to work with Logos abilities, it does work with hand-to-hand. Methinks they should consider amending the tooltip to reflect the way it actually works.
Paul Sage promises changes for Specialist classes
Hey all you Specialists out there! Feeling a bit down? Tired of your Soldier friends flaunting those fancy chainguns and graviton armor while you run through the Plains in motor assist? Sick of throwing heals at pick up groups who forget you're even there? Well hang in there friends, because Paul Sage has the answer for you! According to the erstwhile Tabula Rasa designer, many of the changes in patch 1.3 are aimed at shoring up some of the weaknesses in the Biotech and Medic trees, including an AE damage/heal for the Biotech and a big debuff ability in Disease for Medics.Perhaps more importantly, Sage revealed that they're going to be tweaking the significance of attributes to try and make Health a more meaningful statistic, instead of its utility now, which is basically just a rough estimation of how long it will be until you die once your armor is worn down. These changes won't be coming until 1.4, so they may be over a month away, but it's reason enough to go back to level 5 and retry that Specialist clone again, if you haven't already.
TR 1.3 patch heralds in big changes on PTR
It seems like it's been a long time coming, but many hotly-anticipated changes to Tabula Rasa are finally making their way onto the build currently running on the PTRs. Exactly which changes, you ask? Well, honestly, just about all of them. According to the patch notes they released today, Rage is getting its big nerf, Military Surpluses will be implemented to give the game's economy a serious kick in the butt, itemization has been changed to make item rarity factor into damage, players all get a free respec, and of course, there are tons of bug fixes, skill tweaks, and even a few new missions.There's no ETA on this patch going live, but the preface to the patch fixes seems to indicate that it might be another few weeks. According to the notes, "We are giving players patches earlier in the development process now - so this patch will NOT be going to the live servers. We will have another patch going on the test server in the near future that will be closer to a 'live' version." Giving it a bigger lead time seems like a good idea, but the sooner they can get these fixes live, the sooner general chat will stop being a non-stop Rageathon.
Top 5 combat tips for Tabula Rasa recruits
So you bought Tabula Rasa, created your character, and conquered basic training with ease, and maybe even found your first Logos. Good for you! As with any new MMO though, the learning period has only just begun. There are a myriad of subtleties, strategies, and nuances that dictate your success in Tabula Rasa, and most of them are only discovered via trial and error. That or prodigious use of alt+tab and Google. After spending some time on TR's dedicated new players channel, we've boiled down the most common sources of complaint and confusion, and compiled them into our top 5 list of combat tips for Tabula Rasa recruits. It's by no means a comprehensive guide, but for players still getting their bearings, and perhaps even for some veterans, this should serve as a basic guide to surviving in Destination Games' Tabula Rasa.
Tabula Rasa devs foster Friday Night Fights
Destination Games posted another Tabula Rasa Weekend Wrap-up this morning, revealing the results of the latest Friday Night Fight. As part of their burgeoning community-centric approach to their game, they've been heavily involved in supporting the event that, not unlike the group in a particular movie starring Brad Pitt, seems to have started organically and has gradually grown with the support and interest of the player base. In Friday Night Fights, players roll new characters, strip them of all their high-tech weaponry and armor, and duke it out in hand-to-hand in a tiered series of battles.What separates FNF from a nude gnome raid on Iron Forge is that the developers have actually helped facilitate transforming it into a legitimate community event, building a boxing ring for the event to take place in, and making sure that Tabula Rasa dignitaries like Sarah Morrison and General British are on-hand to cheer the fighters to victory. They're so involved, in fact, that after this past weekend's tournament, the winner was granted one of General British's berets, the only one like it in the game. When is the last time Thrall paid players the same mind?
Forum fun: an open letter to Tabula Rasa's minimap
One of the joys of the weekend is that we actually have time (sometimes) to bounce around the internet, hitting up all our favorite forum spots to see what the buzz is on various game community forums. Given that I myself have become something of a Tabula Rasa addict, I've taken to patrolling the loose confederation of forums that make up the community in lieu of official forums. Among the posts that caught my attention most was a rant on PlanetTR's Rants and Flames forum by poster BenBot. He begins his post:Dear Minimap, I hate you. Don't we all. Benbot brings up a number of good points in his post, not least of which is that there are often no discernible visual cues that differentiate between terrain that can be traversed and terrain that can't, and the minimap often confuses this issue by making it appear as though you're right on top of a mission objective, when it's actually on the other side of hill that it's going to take 20 minutes to get around. Anybody whose ever been to Benefactor Valley in the The Divide will feel my pain. And unfortunately, it is something that's unlikely to be addressed with the current content, because of the work involved with going back to re-texture old terrain. That won't stop people from complaining about it though, or us from reporting on it!
Weapon swap glitch in TR to get hotfix soon
Destination Games threw a quick notice on their website last night saying that they had been made aware of, and were currently working on a fix for, what has become a very troublesome bug in their seminal MMO release, Tabula Rasa. The bug, in the wording of the release, made it such that, "If you try to switch weapons immediately after firing, your weapon will remain the same. Instead you have to wait a sec or two, then try to switch again." That's putting a bit of a sugar-coating on the bug, which has actually been much more of a nuisance than their release lets on.One of Tabula Rasa's most endearing gameplay features is that it's combat requires quick, almost shooter-like speed and precision in order to dispatch with enemies as efficiently as possible. Soldier classes need to be able to move between their equipped weapons smoothly, as different weapon types serve very specific purposes in combat, and moving between them mid-battle is absolutely key to taking on large, mixed groups of enemies. Specialists too need to be able to move between their repair and healing tools at will, in order to maximize their utility at keeping parties alive. According to the release, it should be fixed as of this morning's maintenance. This bug has thrown a wrench in the way the game has played the last two days since the patch, so we're happy to see them getting on top of it ASAP.
TR Feedback Friday addresses Military Surplus, emotes, bugs
Well we have to say, the folks doing the community management for Tabula Rasa have done a tip-top job keeping up with community feedback and maintaining an on-going dialog with the player base, even despite their lack of official message boards. For this week's Feedback Friday, they've addressed a number of concerns that have been plaguing the Tabula Rasa community recently. Most notably, they said that the Military Surplus stores aren't quite ready to go live yet, but are available on the public test realms for those interested. They also announced that some new emotes will be hitting servers soon as veteran rewards and there'll also be a special /cutthroat emote for those who were part of the end of beta event. Very cool.Considering the game has only been out a month, we haven't really gotten a good feel for the patch release schedule yet. But just based on the way they're talking about it and the speed that things seem to be moving from PTR to the live servers, we'd be willing to bet that Military Surpluses will make their way live in another two weeks or so, and at the very latest before the end of the calendar year. We'll keep you posted.
Tabula Rasa patch lands, underwhelms
I suppose it was a bit naive to assume that any of the proposed changes to Tabula Rasa that hadn't appeared on the public test realm would actually make their way into the 48.9mb patch that was officially put live this morning. You can probably attribute the community-wide high hopes to the fact that Destination Games hasn't even given an ETA on the Rage nerf, let alone when they're actually planning to implement the Military Surplus (TR's version of an AH) or the huge change to weapon itemization. I think the hope was that, not unlike Santa Claus, the devs were going to slip down our intertubes at night and leave us a whole bunch of in-game goodies while we stay asleep, none the wiser. Alas, that was not to be.Most of the changes in the patch are fairly routine, including the new integrated screenshot utility and UI toggle we mentioned not long ago (used to snap the shot of my character's sweet porno 'stach above). Hopping into the game for the first time post-patch, the first thing I noticed was that (unless I'm mistaken) the number of tokens required for the CP defense quests in Divide had been nerfed big time from 100 to 25. Considering I was at 97 at Hydro Plant last night, I can say that this is definitely personally disappointing, but I think it's also a shame because it gives less incentive for people to engage in the free-form base attack and defense that is so unique to Tabula Rasa. They also seemed to have created a glitch where you can't switch weapons during combat. Oh well, such is life with patches... Since for some reason they don't like to post patch notes on their site, I've gone ahead and copied them for your perusal after the jump. You're welcome.
