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Richard Garriott and special guest join TR's Friday Night Fights
In the past, we've reported on some excited bouts in Tabula Rasa's Friday Night Fights, but nothing compares to what they have in store for you now. Next Friday, July 25th, Richard Garriott will be facing up against two time featherweight boxing champ Jesus Chavez in the C.E.L.L.A.R. Arena. This will be held on the TR Test Server starting at 6pm Central time. They will be in C.E.L.L.A.R. 3, which can be accessed via teleporter from the barracks in Alia Das.If you're new to Friday Night Fights and aren't sure how it all works, TR's Community Coordinator Amy "Critters" Crider has assembled a handy Q&A which you can see right after the cut, as well as a hilarious promotional video created especially for this event. We hope to see you there!
Developer diary: Preview of the new Velon Hollow instance
The folks at Destination Games sent over another one of those Tabula Rasa developer diaries, giving us some insight into the content coming in the game's next big content drop: Deployment 9. We already knew generally what was coming thanks to the official site preview: a squad merge feature, a PTS-only tag, and a new questline leading to the subject of today's diary. Designer Brian Hudson is onhand today to walk us through the process of putting together the Velon Hollow instance for TR players around level 30. Hudson walks us through the different elements that lead to the area's development, and even goes so far as to recognize something we've seen as a standard in Tabula Rasa play now: post-level soloability. While the area is designed for 2+ players of a given level range, they're now tuning with the knowledge in mind that players will likely come back several levels later to take on the content in a solo fashion. Interesting stuff. All that and more are after the break. %Gallery-9822%
Ask not what your MMO can do for you...
MMO players are a devoted lot. When we're not actually in our game of choice, we're often on forums arguing about the latest patches, researching new talent builds to make better use of our given class' abilities, or blogging about recent experiences. A tremendous amount of energy goes into making an MMO community what it is, both in and out of the game. But as wonderful as player enthusiasm can be in its many forms, it is frequently ignored or utterly under-utilized by game developers. And as blogger Aspendawn reflects in a recent post, when they do throw their weight behind community events, their support tends can be quite hollow -- as was the case with the EQ2 "Guild Recruitment Fair" pictured above. Her call for more developer-sanctioned mentoring systems is also spot-on, particularly for games that have been around for a while. Even if a community is friendly and welcoming, it can be intimidating jumping into a PUG when you don't quite have a grasp on your class' role just yet. We'd also love to see more events like Tabula Rasa's Friday Night Fights--events blossoming from the minds of creative gamers and taking official form with the addition of actual in-game assets to support them. It's not all fancy graphics and epic lootz, we want community too!
TR's Tom Potter reveals some exclusives for TabulaCast
As we announced a few weeks ago, the folks at TabulaCast landed an exclusive interview with Tabula Rasa's lead designer, Tom Potter. They reached out to the community during these last few weeks, asking players to submit their own questions for Tom to answer on the show. Now, that episode has been recorded and is ready to download. In this audio interview, we hear more than just the usual about how new features are coming "soon", Tom actually gives us some specific deployments where certain changes may be made. For instance, when asked about concept art for the much-anticipated Personal Armor Units that Destination Games has been promising for around 8 months now, Tom says that we can expect a finalized design within the next one or two deployments, and then after that, concept art will soon follow. He also discusses some exciting features coming down the pipe such as completely new enemies, more PvP maps with the possibility of class vs. class battles and a working prototype for the new crafting system they're developing, which will work on a more streamlined infrastructure.Take a listen to this episode to hear more about what Potter reveals on the future of Tabula Rasa.
Staffing shake-up on Tabula Rasa
Feelings must be mixed over at NCsoft Austin today, as the Tabula Rasa team is experiencing a bit of a staffing shake-up. April "CuppaJo" Burba, who only a few months ago was promoted from Community Manager to Associate Producer, will be leaving the team to take on the same Associate Producer role with the Dungeon Runners team, who just recently released their first retail box. Dane Caruthers, long-time Tabula Rasa team member, is being promoted from QA Lead to fill CuppaJo's combat boots at Associate Producer. and Neal Johnson will be getting the nod to take Dane's former position.Just two months ago, Tabula Rasa designer Paul Sage left the team to work on another unspecified project within NCsoft. The flight of their lead designer and associate producer within such a short timespan is worrying, to say the least. We don't think the game is going anywhere or anything dramatic like that, but as gamers it makes us a little uncomfortable to have people we don't know shepherding the team forward. We will, however, be looking forward to Dane's first communiques as Associate Producer.
Tabula Rasa to get emote-tional at Comic-Con
With all the flaws we've seen in Tabula Rasa over the last eight months, one thing we'd never criticize the game for is a lack of creativity from the community team. They've consistently done their best to keep their community engaged, despite the fact that said community is disbursed around the internet due to the lack of an official forum. Their support team has pulled in similar praise in the past as well.Continuing their reign of awesomeness, the Tabula Rasa community team is going to be spear-heading a new event at this year's Comic-Con. Critters and co. will be setting up a booth giving away free Tabula Rasa goodies, an exclusive Lumin pet, and filming fans performing their best real-world emotes. They'll take the footage back to their Austin offices and vote on which one is the best, and actually recreate it in-game. It's a pretty neat contest, and we recommend you check it out (booth #5209) if you're headed to Comic-Con this year.
Feedback Friday highlights beefier shotguns, other changes
For all the complaints one could levy against Tabula Rasa, the one you almost never heard was that the game was lacking in varieties of awesome firepower. Even if you counted yourself as a heavier Logos ability user (as this blogger did with his lightning-happy Demolitionist), you could still bust some skulls with good old-fashioned lead to the head. This week's Feedback Friday revealed that they're looking to expand on this awesome firepower with the inclusion of new kinds of Incendiary shotguns, adding double and even triple barrel version for maximum Bane-blasting goodness. And that's just the first stop in a whole new line of weapon upgrades.They're also looking to expand expand character customization to address player concerns that avatars aren't unique enough. They plan to do this by making character profiles distinct from NPCs, and adding the ability to dye armor multiple colors, to give them a more snazzy look. Good to see the team under Tom Potter finally getting around to some long-time player complaints.
Cascading population drops the true MMO killer
One of the most depressing situations in any MMO is coming to terms with the fact that you feel isolated and alone, even in the midst of your massively multiplayer world. According to Eric Heimburg of Elder Game, this phenomena happens not because of any specific reason like a bad patch or lack of new instanced content, but because a server population has dipped below the critical mass it takes to keep a game functioning as intended, and players start fleeing in droves. Everquest II, he suggests, is in need of some server mergers if they hope to keep their population numbers above that important number.One wonders what is supposed to be done with a game like Tabula Rasa when servers drift into dangerously low territory. With only four servers to its name, it might actually be more harmful to the size of the player base to simply concede that a merger is necessary. Players have never been terribly resistant to bad news, at least if forums are any indication, so might a server merger act as another negative point in a cascading failure? At what point do you leave an MMO?
The week in Massively features
Massively Exclusive: Tabula Rasa's AFS War CollegeLast week we got a chance to visit NCsoft's Austin offices to attend the first ever AFS War College, where some of Tabula Rasa's finest soldiers were invited to join NCsoft's developers for a day of discussions, questions, and demos. Gearing up for Guild Wars 2It's been a long time since we've heard any news about Guild Wars 2, so we thought it was about time to sit down and have a refresher course on what we can expect with the sequel to one of the most successful MMOs of all time. Anti-Aliased: Fourth Edition and the Kamehameha FallacyI've wanted to do a post on Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition for a while now, but I just couldn't put my finger on what I wanted to talk about with it. The rules are very much made in the vein of World of Warcraft -- you can tell that by just opening up the book. Player vs. Everything: The quirks of D&D OnlineFrom the first time I stepped into Turbine's Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach, I was amazed by how well it managed to capture the dungeon crawling feel of the franchise that I knew, loved, and grew up with. Player Consequences: Pervasive Map FeaturesThere are a lot of reasons for the increasing popularity of MMOs and the amount of game developers who are entering into the market. I personally think that MMOs with their rich and complex fantasy worlds have a huge advantage over most single player games.
TR's Tom Potter knows what it will take
There's been a fairly substantial amount of buzz surrounding Tabula Rasa over the past couple weeks. Ever since long-time designer Paul Sage was announced to be leaving the game to be replaced by designer Tom Potter, fans and observers alike have been left to speculation about the state of flux surrounding Destination Game's sci-fi MMO. To their credit, they've really stepped up to the bat, both with the recent War College meetings at their Austin studio, and with other interviews around and about the gaming media.Adding to this steady trend is this week's Feedback Friday, penned by none other than Tom Potter himself. Potter really goes all out and addresses many of our complaints, including the hyper-active enemy aggro, buffs to Logos users, a link loot system, and a true, blue repeatable end-game. Perhaps best of all, at least in this bloggers' opinion, is his acknowledgment that the crafting system needs a near-complete overhaul. Now, we have to emphasize that there is a serious difference between knowing what needs to be done with a game and actually accomplishing these changes in a reasonable amount of time. Now that we know Potter is wise to what's wrong with the game, we're expecting him to push the changes through, and soon!
The third NCsoft Europe podcast focuses on Tabula Rasa
The third episode of the Official NCsoft Europe Podcast has just been released, and in it, we get treated to a bit of a pace change. Avatea, NCsoft Europe's Community Team Lead for Tabula Rasa hosts this show while interviewing three of the main developers for the game: Producer Starr Long, Lead Designer Tom Potter and Art Director Victor Meinert. Luckily for those of us Rockjaw fans out there, he is not completely left out of this one!This 40-minute show gets into the minds of these developers, and lets us know a bit more about what it's like to work at Destination Games, their visions for the future of Tabula Rasa, the importance of player feedback and much more. We even get a glimpse into the crazy practical jokes the team has played on each other! So give it a listen and don't forget to follow along with the complete episode transcription.
Massively Exclusive: Tabula Rasa's AFS War College
Last week we got a chance to visit NCsoft's Austin offices to attend the first ever AFS War College, where some of Tabula Rasa's finest soldiers were invited to join NCsoft's developers for a day of discussions, questions, and demos. We took a tour of the facilities guided by Richard Garriott himself, and we invite you to join us as we learn all about the design of Logos, hear all the details on how Tabula Rasa is developed, and see the TR developers' top priorities. Have we piqued your interest yet? Click along with us and see what came of this year's War College!Let's get started in the audio department >>%Gallery-25259%
TR Feedback Friday: Why all the PvP?
This most recent Feedback Friday is chock full of the usual bug fixes and the announcement of Deployment 9's arrival on the live server within days, but we thought we'd address one particularly interesting response given to a question the developers received regarding the direction of the game recently.When asked why they're making Tabula Rasa a PvP MMO, their response was, "PvP has never been and is not going to be the only direction we want TR to take. It is true that a lot of changes and additions have been made with PvP in mind and the Wargame is a good example, but in this case for instance, it is mainly because we had the systems mostly in place already and could reuse part of it in that map."
Improvements to Tabula Rasa's performance on the way
The most recent iteration of Tabula Rasa's Feedback Friday brought the announcement of a change to how the client will work in future deployments of the game. "The Bubble," as they call it, is an optimization that the developers hope to roll out in a future build of Tabula Rasa's Deployment 9. Until now, all static map objects such as rocks and trees loaded up front, but at the cost of decreased system performance. The Bubble will limit the client to loading only those static objects within a certain distance from the camera. The end result promises to be a client that uses less memory and delivers increased performance. They would, however, like help from the players with testing the bubble feature once it's viable. As always, Feedback Friday also addressed player questions and concerns, namely that logout countdowns in PvP will stop being exploitable in Deployment 10. As it stands, players can evade combat during clan-wars by simply logging off. Another issue in the game that's being resolved is the common complaint about how difficult it is to keep track of friends. Presently each time a player creates a new character, they must reinvite all of their friends, ad nauseam. So beginning with Deployment 9, both the friends and ignore list are now user-based instead of character-based. This change alone will eliminate a number of headaches for TR players, but check out the Feedback Friday page for more details on how the game is evolving.
Tabula Rasa goes AWOL from Q1 NCSoft financial reports
When the financial reports for the Q1 performance of NCSoft hit the Massively offices, fingers were quickly pressed to pages with one intent -- finding out what was going on with Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa. Already this year, we've heard dour reports on the status of the game, which were then rebuked by NCSoft, but those reports still planted seeds of doubt. Our hope was that the financial numbers could shed some light on what was happening with the game and perhaps reveal the game's direction. Was the game going uphill, or was it careening toward Auto Assault's junkyard?But finding financial information about Tabula Rasa was like trying to track down Deep Throat. In the whole of the Q1 financial reports, TR appears twice. Even when most of NCSoft's major properties are listed and statistics are given, TR does not get mentioned.But where Tabula Rasa does briefly appear, things do not look good at all.
Healthy dose of Tabula Rasa community in this Weekend Wrapup
In this week's installment of Weekend Wrapup for Tabula Rasa, the hardcore community shines through yet again. First off, there's mention of the PlanetTR Tavern Roleplayers group who usually gets together to crash the tavern in Foreas Base, but this time they've moved on to the C.E.L.L.A.R. arena. Included in this community update are some screenshots of their good times. We also get word of the very latest episode of TabulaCast, where the hosts John and Matt discuss all the latest TR news on and off the Public Test Server. Their discussion continues as they report on their experiences with Project Immersion and read some listener email.Finally, there's the results of this weekend's Friday Night Fights, where the largest purse in TR history was awarded: One million credits! Congratulations goes out to Glass for winning it all!
Make NCsoft machinima and win some swag
A really good machinima is a thing of beauty. It's fun to watch and a great way to show off not only games, but player creativity. Apparently NCsoft Europe and Onlinewelten's new portal, MyGamersVideo feel the same way about MMOG machinima. Why do we say that? Because they've banded together to run a machinima contest to introduce the new video portal to gamers.All of the entries into the contest have the chance to win some awesome prizes -- from NCsoft games to t-shirts, posters, pins and even the highly coveted artbooks for games like Tabula Rasa, City of Heroes/City of Villains, Guild Wars and Lineage II. From newcomer to veteran machinimists, all are welcome to enter, so what are you waiting for? Grab your favorite NCsoft game and get to making a video! [Via IGN]
Tabula Rasa's new PvP Control Point Wargame
We've been hearing word of more exciting variations on PvP coming to Tabula Rasa soon, and in this week's Feedback Friday, we get some more details and screenshots for the new Control Point Wargame. Apparently, in this PvP zone, each team will own a fortress containing a control point. If one team conquers the other's control point, the losing team is imprisoned and subject to humiliation and ridicule, courtesy of the winning team. This battleground will be introduced to the Public Test Server with Deployment 9 and probably stay to iron out bugs at least until Deployment 10.Also in this report, we get word of Clan Lockboxes which will be introduced as part of the Clan-Owned Control Points feature. At first impression, they seem to operate almost identically to the WoW guild banks, complete with restricted access and clan log tabs. These will be in Deployment 9 on PTS only, but will most-likely be introduced to the live servers with Deployment 10.
NCsoft announces the 2008 AFS War College
Attention, AFS recruits! On the 13th of June (only a couple of weeks away!), NCsoft will be hosting the 2008 AFS War College at their offices in Austin, Texas. What's the War College you ask? We're told it's one of the AFS's time-honored traditions, which brings together strategic thinkers to identify, develop, and address future issues critical to the military organizations' success. Members of military leadership hand-pick each year's class to participate in the college and these select few bring with them battle-tested feedback and strategies vital to success in the ongoing war effort. (Read: a small number of players -- selected based on the quality of their field reports, level of experience, commitment to the cause, and game knowledge -- will get to spend some quality time with the Tabula Rasa development team and get a first look at Deployment 10.)General Darkstarr and General British have announced the call-signs of this year's War College attendees: MrGlass, Woebringer, Line, Lanster, TankHardrive, PegasusMD, Youngblood, and Rothnang. If you know these soldiers, offer them your congratulations! (And don't forget to give them any questions you might have for the development team!)Your faithful war correspondents at Massively will also be attending the War College and reporting the events back to all of you on the front lines.
Another interview with TR's new lead designer
When it was announced that designer Paul Sage was stepping away from Tabula Rasa to pursue other projects within NCsoft, many players in the community were understandably concerned. So much so, this blogger observed, that many didn't even pause to reflect on the ideas of the new guy in the lead designer hot seat - Tom Potter. Perhaps mindful of this, their PR squad appears to be shopping him around to various sites so players can get comfortable with the man and his ideas.In his latest interview, Potter doesn't step out of the box terribly much. After describing his history in the game industry, he pretty much toes the existing line of restrained enthusiasm for features already announced (like the clan-controlled CPs we've heard about for months), without really giving any concrete facts or ideas for us to chew on. Potter said that with unlimited time and budget, he'd love to implement things like space stations and Bane motherships. While this is a neat idea, it's something we were sort of expecting from future expansions anyway, and not something that would be liable to bring TR off of life-support. Perhaps we're asking too much, but we just want to be excited about the game again.
