I’ve been playing Eve Online for a while, but I got in to it far after it was originally released to the public.
I want to get in on an MMORPG as it is released for a few reasons (being that guy who people know, seeing how it evolves, the thrill of being in the know since the beginning), and am wondering how this game will stack up as it is publicly released. I’ve just today discovered it and the release date I found was in Oct., anybody on the dope familiar with the game or release dates (other than what I know)? playing the beta? know about the release other than what’s on the public website? looks like a soon-to-be-released game I could get in to on the ground floor. dope comments?
I only have a very periferal knowledge of it’s dev history through following GU Comics and their forum (it’s a web comic, look it up, especially if you like MMO’s).
I remember that it started out very ambitious, with big plans for a fairly radically different gameplay experience (not sure how, but I believe primarily in the sense of a less arbitrary, “Gamelike” world than most MMO’s), and of course the hook of being sci-fi, rather than yet another medieval-fantasy.
Somewhere along the lines it got stuck in development hell for a while and came damn close to not being made at all due to lack of financial support.
While the original concept has been largely discarded, as I understand it, many of the original supporters are still onboard because the newer iteration is still true to the creative vision.
I realize that’s incredibly vague, but that’s about all I can drum up off the top of my head. I’ll go see if I can find some good threads talking about it on GU. I’ll be back with links if/when I do.
sweet.
I just seemed to have run through all the “official” info on it and am delving (I love being able to use relatively obscure words on the dope) in to the fan-base/beta-base information on the game. It seems like something I’d be interested in (I’d pursue the ranger->spy/assassin career for those familiar), so any “unofficial” word on the game would be great
Oogh, I just noticed how I spelled “periferal” up above. :smack:
Wikipedia on Richard Garriot the man behind the project. Formerly known as Lord British of Ultima Online, he is basically the guy behind MMO’s.
Old GU thread about when they pulled the whole TR site down to extensively rebuild the Alpha version of the time. The comic Woody (that started the thread) made at the time jokes that they were going to dumb it down and enlarge the female models breasts to give it more mass market appeal, but that’s just his usual snarky cynical style of humor.
A more current GU thread discussing the upcoming release.
Unfortunately, my searching fortunes are low tonight. If I see anything else good, I’ll come back.
PS. I’ve heard a lot of positive press about this game over the last few years. I haven’t really investigated it myself as I’m pretty tied up with WoW and CoH/V, but I’m kind of interested in hearing more about what sets this game apart.
thanks for the replies and thread links.
Like I’ve said I’m pretty tied down to Eve right now but I’m feeling like at my skill level I’m either A) going to hit the “permanently enter lag-fest fleet combat” phase or B) get bored.
Ergo I’m looking for something new that’ll be for the immediate future actively developing and something I can be a real part of.
While playing City of Heros/Villains, I had a conversation with a fellow Doper who also plays, Culex; Toaster on the SDMB IIRC. She was a Tabula Rasa beta tester, as was Balance. Having been released from the beta testing non-disclosure agreement, they filled my virtual ears with complaints about how awful Tabula Rasa is. Poorly designed, buggy, and unattractive was the verdict. Hopefully one or the other will show up here and give details.
Been playing it for six months. More later. I did buy it.
Tried it out during Beta. Wasn’t interested. I only made it as far as finishing the newbie tutorial, but didn’t see anything there to keep my interest.
Tabula Rasa feels a lot more like a FPS than a traditional MMORPG. It almost feels like they were trying to make Halo into a MMORPG. Combat requires you to aim, and movement and cover are counted into the combat system (crouching behind rocks makes you harder to hurt). Your attacks are primarily determined by what weapons you’re carrying. There’s damn little character customization. At the start you have a few selections to change your appearance, but that’s it. Apparently you can pick classes and skills later on, but in the tutorial you’re just a generic guy with a gun. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the power and costume choices available from City of Heroes, but I’d like there to have been some way to differentiate my character from the thousands of other generic individuals out there.
The controls are confusing and counterintuitive for someone used to a conventional MMORPG. Might make more sense if you’re used to a FPS interface. Despite the FPS-like combat controls, I found combat to be remarkably boring. Seemed to consist mainly of aiming the target at the enemy and holding down the firing button for the few dozen hits it would take to kill them. Oh, your gun needs reloading every now and then and has a chance to occasionally jam, and later on you can get some funky powers that let you throw lighting bolts or other things, but it’s mostly just repetitive firing. When taking down one boss I almost felt like I could just tape the mouse button down and go make a sandwich for all the input that was required of me.
These were just my impressions from the tutorial instance at the start. Maybe it gets more interesting later on. I didn’t see much to interest me in buying the game.
Here’s the thing; it’s not supposed to be like other MMORPGs. Richard Garriott has been openly critical of the EQ/FFXI/WOW graphical MUD style of play that’s been mimicked and copied for dozens of MMOs.
The gameplay is supposed to emphasize tactical prowess; aiming at an enemy is made to be simplistic, but it’s the act of aiming that requires you to seek out the best point on a battlefield where you can both defend yourself and attack your enemy. Movement is more integrated into a fight than in other MMOs as each side negotiates the terrain for better cover. I can see how this wouldn’t be covered to a great extent in the tutorial.
As for the Generic Guy model…well, yeah. You’re part of an army, not a costumed super-individual. You can clone your character at any time and have several copies pursuing different advancement paths without penalty, which is more or less incompatible with the concept of a developed character. Planetside also had limited character customization, but I can assure you it wasn’t at all necessary to enjoy the game.
The game may well suck, but Ultima Online was the last MMO I wholeheartedly enjoyed, so I have hopes for another Garriott game.
Also, this:
is just so funny, considering they were talking about a beta. You know, the stage of game development where they finish hammering out the bugs? I realize it may well have been a release that was close to being a gold candidate that still had a ton of bugs – Star Wars: Galaxies certainly wasn’t in any shape to go gold – but it’s still really funny.
You can get the basics in the Game Intel section of the official site, so I’ll go right to my impressions.
When I first joined the beta, I thought the game had potential. It was extremely buggy (which is to be expected in a beta), but fast-paced. The classes seemed well-balanced against one another–sort of different-but-equal. Specialist-branch characters mostly couldn’t dish out as much damage as Soldier-types (except for the obviously-broken Density Field Gun, which acted like a sniper rocket launcher at the time), but they could stay in the fight longer because of their ability to repair their armor and heal themselves in combat. Lightning, your very first power, could be built up enough to be respectably effective throughout the game. The death penalty was running back to the fight (which could take a while). With Lightning pumped up, a few good guns, and the right attitude, you could very easily get into action-movie hero mode. Healing others was problematic, since you had to target them as if you were going to shoot them (no easy matter when everyone is running around like weasels on crack); it wasn’t often a problem, though, as most people took care of themselves pretty well.
Everyone who tagged a mob got credit for the kill, completely eliminating the kill-stealing grief that plagues many multiplayer games. There was no need for formal teams, for the most part–you could cooperate with other players and/or NPCs on the fly. You might happen across a beleaguered AFS squad and come to the rescue, or hook up with other players to dogpile a big enemy at no cost to yourself or others. The only real slowdown was weapons overheating and jamming, which happened a bit too often, forcing you to switch to other weapons or Logos powers.
Then the Patch of Doom hit.
Only the character who did the most damage got the credit (even if it was an NPC). At the same time, Specialist-branch weapons were nerfed so heavily that they did more damage if you ran up and hit the enemy with the butt of your gun instead of shooting him with it. Also, enemies were beefed up, loot drops were reduced, and a lot of weapons started using more ammo per shot. The power cost of Lightning was increased substantially, cutting off that relief from the now nearly-useless weapons. Weapon decay was added, both from normal use and as a death penalty. The Biotech (Tier 3 medical-type specialist) weapon, the Injector Gun, often decayed to a reduced-performance level before killing a single even-level enemy; it would become completely useless in a single instance.
Welcome to the “healer”-ghetto, Specialist. Say hello to Cleric and Holy Priest; they’re waiting for a tank and a nuker who need healing to come along and help them get experience points. You’ll do the same. Of course, you’ll have to wait longer, since healing is both unreliable and unnecessary for your game’s soldier-types. Sure, you can fight pretty well by bashing things in the face with your gun and healing yourself, but why bother? You’ll get the thing almost halfway down, and a Commando will come by and blow up the whole spawn with his rocket launcher, and you’ll get nothing.
Later patches continued this trend, reducing the effectiveness of Specialist weapons again. The once-mighty Density Field Gun is now the “Leech Gun” which does pathetic damage while giving the shooter a tiny heal-over-time effect. Of course, the healing is mostly worthless, because all damage is now taken out of armor first (changed in the same patch). Once your armor is overcome, a small heal is not going to save you–running and hiding is your best option. Another patch changed ammo, so that you had to buy ammo that matched the level of your gun–of course, the ammo for higher-level guns is vastly more expensive. This addressed the imbalance that was causing high-level characters to roll in credits, while low-level characters went broke. Now everyone can go broke.
Also, cloning (which allowed you to make an alternate version of a character to explore other branches without starting over) got limited by “clone credits”. You earn the clone credits when you get to a tier choice level and possibly through some other mechanisms (although I don’t recall what the other ones are).
As of the last time I played, there was no reason to take the Specialist branch. For that matter, going Soldier–>Ranger was pretty useless. Only Commandos were still riding pretty high…provided they could afford their ammo. If you managed to slog through Soldier–>Ranger–>Spy, you got a bit of a break, because you could use swords, which (somewhat surprisingly) don’t require ammo. The swords could jam, however, last I heard.
They have claimed that they will fix the stupid XP mechanic, but I haven’t seen a fix in the patch notes yet. They haven’t said anything about fixing Specialist/Soldier balance, as far as I can tell. The economy is broken as it stands now, and is further hampered by the overly-complicated ammo system. They have been mum about the fact that the wildlife is vastly more deadly than the cosmos-conquering alien army (except for buffing the critters occasionally). The “dynamic battlefields” promised are currently limited to intermittently-functional games of “capture the flag” against the AI.
If they were aiming for a December launch, I would still hold out hope. That could be enough time to make and test the balance changes the game needs. They managed to make it un-fun in that time span, so I would presume they could re-fun it in a similar period, while keeping the bug fixes and newer content in place. Mid-October, though? I’ll believe it when I see it.
I really want this game to be good. It has a lot of promise, and Garriott’s stated vision for it is entrancing. I’m not buying it as it is, though.
Thank you, Balance. That’s highly unfortunate if true. I’ve seen games shoot themselves in the foot by making ridiculous decisions, so it’s far from implausible that this could happen before it even goes gold.
I still intend to buy the game – I preordered a couple days ago, in fact – so I’ll see how it looks first hand. It’s possible that, not having experienced beta pre-Patch of Doom, it won’t be as bad for me and other non-beta players. It’s also possible they’ll revert their mistakes; Planetside’s devs were decent about owning up to mistakes – at least, the mistakes that were mistakes, not the ones that were merely perceived to be so. From the day I joined Planetside to the day I left, people were complaining that one gun in particular was far too overpowered, yet tests showed it was right in line with what the devs wanted, and the game never did come to a screeching halt because of it.
I hope you enjoy it, Bosstone, I truly do. There are a lot of cool ideas in the game, and if you’re inclined to follow the Soldier route, you may be okay–it’s the Specialist side that got hit the hardest.
Me, I’m going to wait and see. I’m still enjoying City of Heroes and don’t particularly need another game; I was interested in Tabula Rasa chiefly as a change of pace, and because the Logos idea fascinated me.
One bit of advice: If you see anything that looks like a bug or a spider coming your way, be afraid. The spider-things have been known to eat Predator-class Bane ships.
Some thoughts based on my own experiences, just to keep discussion going:
Healing requires that the ‘patient’ be targeted. This does make it difficult to heal in battle, which is commonplace in MMORPGs. The solution? Heal out of battle, or find a secure location to fight from.
Planetside used the same method of repairing armor and healing damage; not only did you have to target the patient, but it was extremely close range so you had to stay close. Rather than medics chasing soldiers everywhere, soldiers would fall back off the front line after an engagement and hold still for repairs while healthier soldiers went on ahead. Medics would also hunker down with soldiers in fortified locations and repair, since the soldier was relatively stationary.
On the other hand, Planetside worked off of huge assault squads, often with 10-15 people storming a base at once and sometimes more, so this worked well; there were front lines. How that will translate to Tabula Rasa, I don’t know; if the focus is on small groups instead of large squads, it may not work as well, but I can see it still happening.
Planetside also had the issue of medics not getting kills, so they had to be squadded to earn XP, which wasn’t always workable; I often liked running around supporting the assault by healing random people. The devs fixed this by introducing Support XP; if you healed someone, you would get a share of XP from whatever kills they made for a certain amount of time afterward.
Really, I see far more similarities between Planetside and Tabula Rasa than I do Tabula Rasa and EQ/WOW-style MMORPGs. People going in expecting the latter may well be disappointed and upset with the playstyle, but Planetside was a lot of fun (I know I said UO was the last MMO I enjoyed. I had a brainfart, and liked Planetside a lot as well), although mismanaged by Sony, and so I’m hoping for a similar playstyle here.
good info. Is there an open beta or some sort of trial period to see what it’s like that I can find?
It won’t be in open play until October 19, 16 if you preorder. I don’t know about the current beta status.
If you buy the preorder right now, it grants you access to the closed beta.
I’ve been playing the Beta now for a couple weeks and I completely agree with Balance’s summary, though I wasn’t around to see most of those changes, just the end result.
At this point I think I’m pretty much done with it since it hasn’t really captured my interest and there are so many other games to play at the moment. I can see a lot of potential there, but there are problems. I keep well in mind that it’s the beta, and I haven’t paid a dime, so I don’t expect much. It’s just not all that much fun so far. I’m a level 6 Soldier.
Here’s a question: Would it be a bad idea for me to give my beta logon/password to one of you to check out the game and play around a little? Would that be a good idea or a bad one?
that might be cool, I assume the game engine itself is downloadable? Obviously for your security I’d change your password and such if you’re willing to let me wander around for a bit in the world
It took me until a couple days ago to realize this, so I loaded up and had a two-hour session last night. My thoughts:
- It looks like the XP mechanic you were upset about got fixed, Balance. I didn’t group, but I participated in several spontaneous firefights alongside other players and got XP every time – sometimes less, sometimes more, for the same class of enemy. I take this to mean I was getting a share according to damage done.
- I chose the Soldier route last night so can’t comment yet on the Specialist.
- The clone credits seem kind of silly, but as long as there’s enough credits available in the game to allow you to clone yourself before each tree split, I think the intent has probably been preserved.
- The early game is indeed mostly pointing and clicking until the enemy dies, but hell, what was the last MMO you played that let you start off with all the cool stuff immediately? Besides, once I got into the first area past the tutorial, I found myself trying to use the terrain, running backward and firing as melee enemies tried to close, and otherwise ran around having a good time. It is a third-person shooter with some RPG elements, so if you’re not into shooters much it may not grab you.
- The use of terrain is very fun. There was one instance where I was climbing a cliffside to speak to an NPC. Before I got to him, I heard gunfire in the canyon below. Friendly NPCs were engaged with hostiles, so I knelt down and blasted them from above. I have not played an MMO other than Planetside where that angle of attack was possible.
- The graphics aren’t wildly jaw-dropping awesome, but they’re clean and more than functional. The landscape gives a strong sense of place, and I spent a few minutes along the bank of a river watching the sun reflect off the water.
- The wildlife being stronger than the Bane is weird, I agree, but only from a thematic standpoint. From a gameplay standpoint, though, it makes a certain amount of sense. Wherever you go on the map, there’s always a chance some Bane will drop in and start attacking, even in ‘safe’ villages. They respawn like crazy and are aggressive in the extreme, so it’s necessary to be able to fight them off relatively easily. The wildlife, however, appears to be mostly non-aggressive, and so when you fight them, you’re choosing to fight them, and so the fight is more difficult. (And the Bane aren’t exactly pushovers; I got into a fight in a Bane camp and was overwhelmed fast.)
There are a few things that are clearly unfinished; I ran into placeholder text and errors in wording in several places. Performance is also an issue. My 1 GB of RAM and 3200+ AMD Athlon 64 chip were straining to keep up; the performance monitor was listing them both as continuously 90-100% in use. I took this as an excuse to upgrade my RAM 
so hopefully that will alleviate the choppiness issue.
The gameplay itself, however, seems very solid to me. I certainly enjoyed playing it.
Thanks for the post, Bosstone, sounds kind of interesting. If they ever offer a free trial I might check it out after all.
In City of Heroes, I always get excited when I’m on one of my blasters (especially my assault rifle one) and the team I’m in gets a warehouse mission, because there’s lots of opportunities (particularly in the big main room that’s always at the end) to find a perch and blast away at the enemy while the tankers and everyone else is down in the thick of it. Not only is it easy to avoid picking up aggro from stragglers, but you’re out of reach of enemy AoE and Cone-area attacks.
Plus there’s just something really fun about running along the top of a bunch of shipping crates firing an assault rifle into an enemy crowd and occasionally lobbing a grenade at them (in an MMO, no less).