Originally posted by Hauken

 The game is NOT 2-3 years away from launch. Its ready to enter the alpha stage. 

.....

Hauken, please don't take this as an insult, but I get the impression that you either haven't followed many MMOs before they were released or you are simply way too trusting. In either case I feel like I should tell you that the "alpha" stage for most MMOs is the point where the game is still ATLEAST 2 years away from release. Yes, I know you think that you have spoken to the developers of this game and that they have made promises to you that the game isn't that far away. These were lies. The developers of Shadowbane made the same promises to me seven years ago when they claimed that Shadowbane was in "alpha testing" stages but would start beta "any day" and would be released within six months. Shadowbane was delayed multiple times after that and took another two years to release. Even once it was released it was still quite far away from actually being "finished" by any definition of the term.

For a more recent example of what I'm talking about look at Darkfall. The developers of that game have been talking about beta testing for something along the lies of three years now. The game is still nowhere near release. All they have to show to even prove the existence of their game is a bunch of outdated screenshots and a few blurry gameplay videos. There is more evidence to support the existence of big foot than Darkfall. And right now this "Crusades" game seems to be in the same boat.

I'm not a "nay-sayer" nor am I trying to bash your game. I'm just trying to do you a favor here and stop you before you get too wrapped up in this game which I promise you is still MANY YEARS away from release, if it ever sees the light of day at all. Alpha testing means the game is still 2+ years away from release, at a bare minimum. If the developers of this game have told you otherwise then they are liars, plain and simple. MMO developers are some of the most notorious liars in the known universe, no matter which company they happen to work for. Don't trust them. And don't help them hype their vaoprware.

And if you still don't believe me then ask the developers of your game this question: If its ready to enter Alpha Testing, why does their website have only concept art and no screenshots? If the game is ready for alpha testing then it means their graphics engine is working and there shouldn't be any reason why they can't post screenshots to prove that. Right?

Maybe you guys are thinking of a different kind of  "turn based" than I am.

If its Final Fantasy style turn based then yeah, that would be a total joke.

But I was of the impression that since it says you would control up to nine characters that it would be more of a strategic turn based type of game, such as Vandal Hearts for the playsation (I really hope I'm not the only person who still remembers that game) or like the Tactics Ogre games. I'm sure you guys know the type of game I'm talking about. I know that sort of combat may be a little to slow paced for some people but I have always preferred strategy over button mashing and if this game can deliver that then I say more power to it.

To avoid grinding, I would do something along the lines of what Guild Wars did where you gained levels very quickly and the level cap was set rather low, so you could only become so powerful through grinding and after that you had to attain more skills and develop new tactics in order to become any better at the game. They already said that for this game you would have one main character and the other characters you control during a battle will be people you "hired" to fight for you. Perhaps it would only be your main character who levels and the "hired goons" could be just red shirts who have set skills and when they die you replace them. That would make sense to me.

But yeah, its an asain MMO. I'm probably asking for way too much here...

I think that its very bizzare that a game which was just announched is claiming to be released THIS MONTH (July 2008, posted right on the front of their website). Perhaps they did it to avoid the fanboy hype that gets so absurd with other MMOs. But maybe they just spent very little time in development.

Asian developed MMOs (Korean ones in perticular) are famous for massive amounts of grinding. Although the idea of a turn-based combat system in an MMO sounds amazing to me, I'm worried that if this turns out to be a grinding game then the grinding would only be made that much more painful by the slower than normal combat. (Imagine it, instead of killing 100 rats to get to level 2, you have to plan a massive three hour long battle aginst the rat king and his 3000 soldiers to get to level 2!)

And do we have any information on the payment scheme yet? Will it be subscription based or will it be "FREE" with some kind of sinister catch? Will players be able to purcahse in-game advantages over other players using RL money? This sort of setup has become all too common these days, even more so with quickly developed asian MMOs like this one.

Assuming that they avoid grinding, have a fair payment scheme and deliver on their promise of unique turn based combat, this could be a great game. Fail on any one of those counts... and we have another awful MMO in a sea of awful MMOs.

I have to say.... I'm not that impressed with this game after seeing their website.

The FAQ is very vague at best.

You can't even see the "Character Classes" without logging into their site. (Perhaps someone who has an account on that website could tell us if there is even anything worth registering for to see on that page?)

The fact that there even ARE classes seems to conflict with their claim of  "Versatile 'Be What You Want To Be' Role Playing with an open ended Storyline"

And most suspicious of all, there are no screenshots or videos of the game in action anywhere on the site. I find it pretty hard to believe the game is in alpha testing if they have nothing but concept art to show for it.

I have to agree with the guy who said the game was atleast 5 years away. I call this vapourware. (Even Darkfall has some screenshots to prove it exists and most people still call it vaopurware.)

Originally posted by Recant

 If I were Conan I'd order this game destroyed.   5 years they took to build this... it's Vanguard 2.0... only instead of anything resembling progress, gone is the seamless world, replaced with arbitrary instances and piss-poor game design.

Failed.

I played in the closed beta and saw even then that the basic premise behind this game was flawed. The highly vaunted combat system seemed boring to me, leveling was tedious and the supposedly great storyline and NPC interaction didn't impress me either.

I tried to warn people about the game but everyone just accused me of being an AoC hater and quoted stuff off the AoC website about how awsome the game was going to be. Pffft. Morons. I hope they enjoy their crappy Vanguard clone.

Originally posted by TeflonEddie

...longevity is TR's main failing.

I won't list all of the problems again; the same points have been raised ad nauseum on this forum already, but I would counsel any TR player who is currently still in the "honeymoon" period not to set their hopes too high for the game.

I like the way you called it a "Honeymoon period" in your analogy. Thats exactly the way that TR sucks you in at first. You walk into the game and its loud, fun, flashy and fast paced at first. All seems to be well with the universe.

But as you approach on level 30 and beyond the process of gaining levels slows down considerably and you start to wonder when you will see the endgame content. But then you are told that there is no endgame content, no light at the end of the tunnel so to speak.

Plus, with the next few patches planned (1.6 and 1.7) the developers are talking about more changes to the classes but no new content. For the last five months thats all they have done: tweak stats, nerf skills and hybrids, ect. But they haven't added barely any content when thats the only thing the players actually want. So why is the dev team wasting time tweaking the gameplay when there isn't anything wrong with the game play?

Then add in the rumors flying around that NCsoft is losing money on this game and cutting back the staff...

Yes, this game does have a lot of potental. And yes, it may one day tap into that potental to produce a great game. That day is not today however. All signs indicate that day will not be within the next six months. How long do they want us to wait? Years?

I cancelled my subscription two days ago. Due to the fact that I convinced several of my guild members to play the game through the recruit a rookie program, I still have several free months of paid time remaining. During those months I'll keep an eye on the game to see if the situation improves... But suffice to say that later this year we have Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Spellborn and who knows how many other MMOs on the way. If even one of those turns out to be better than Tabula Rasa, I doubt I'll ever return...

Wow, on the one hand this thread is a serious flame fest and on the other hand there are actually a lot of really good points being made, both about TR and MMORPGs in general. I barely know where to start and I'm going to have to resist the urge to quote every single person.

First off, let me just say that I played this game with several members of my guild and while we will probably leave this game in the next few days we won't be bad mouthing it like many other MMORPGs that have dissapointed us down through the years. Its true the game didn't deliver exactly what we were expecting but it was atleast fun for a few weeks, it was mostly free of bugs and it actually WORKED without massive lag, crashing frequently or installing spyware on my computer. Thats a hell of a lot more than I can say for most of the MMOs I've played over the last 10 years.

Maybe like "Thunderous" said, my expectations of MMO developers these days are simply very low. But that could very well be a result of the fact that I was present for the launch of Shadowbane, Dark and Light and Anarchy Online.

Anarchy Online was a good game, but at launch it was so bogged down by lag and crashes that it was almost totally unplayable. I quit that game within one week.

Then came Shadowbane, which was 10 times worse. Lag to high holy hell and back, but even worse was that it was the most unstable piece of software I've ever seen. It crashed every two minutes no matter what you did. Looking at your monitor caused it to crash. Touching your keyboard caused it to crash. Everything caused it to crash. It was a completely unfinished game in every sense of the term. The developers knew it too, but they lied to us about the game for years then released it anyway when they knew it wasn't finished and was in a completely unplayable state.

For years I thought Shadowbane was the worst game of all time. Then I played Dark and Light. Long story short, I was lucky it was just the open beta I was playing in (A.K.A. "Settlers of Garenth") and not the full version of the game. I was able to get a refund on my pre-order and cange my credit card info before the publisher started charging montly fees from people who never even signed up to play.

So yeah, I guess after going though all of that I'm probably pretty forgiving when it comes to Tabula Rasa because it atleast runs on my computer without crashing constantly, has minimal lag and was actually halfway fun to play for the first few weeks. Endgame content aside, its a pretty solid bit of software.

Originally posted by TeflonEddie

 

 

 

 

As for who has screwed up the MMO market, that's easy to define: the hardcore 60 hour a week gamers who complete all the quests/grinds then whine and bitch that there isn't enough content. Casuals/soloers who take months to get to the max level are probably the MOST benign type of gamers.

 

Agreed.

WAY back in the day when I played Asheron's Call I was a casual/solo player as well. I mostly enjoyed the game because of its large world, unique dungeon designs and potental for exploration. I did sometimes travel with my fellow guild members and I enjoyed it a lot when we did that, but most of the time I was a solo player when it came to leveling my character and earning money for equipment.

I never made it past level 45 because I was a very casual player and mostly just enjoyed playing to explore the world and communicate with my friends. But after a few years a small but VERY vocal monority of level 100+ players started complaining that the game wasn't "challenging" enough for them anymore. This was due to the fact that they were exploiting the magic system to buff themselves to outrageous levels before every fight to become more or less invincible. I would have been fine with it if the developers had simply added new ultra hard content for these players to "challenge" them. Instead though they changed much of the existing content in the game to counter the buffs those high level players were using. Many low level creatures in the game vanished and were replaced with much higher level creatures with powerful debuff spells. It got so bad that I couldn't even leave town anymore without being killed by some monster I didn't even know existed. When I finally had to start using portal magic to travel directly to and from any dungeon I wanted to visit, I knew I wasn't going to enjoy the game anymore.

In my opinion, power levelers and obsessive gamers ruined Asheron's Call by making it too hostile for anyone under level 60.

That was a long time ago and now I'm a member of a guild with members who I have a lot of fun with. I enjoy grouping and I take the games I play seriously. But I still feel that soloing is critical and that forced grouping is a bad thing. Low level players and solo players should be able to enjoy the game just as much as those players who can dedicate their whole life to the game. Nobody should get special treatment just because they can make more noise on a forum or happen to be closer to the developers than the average gamer.

Originally posted by supraliminal

Note the 8.2 user rating (I can't imagine the flaming if anyone ever made a 2.8 rated game!).  So you have to take what you read on this site with that grain of salt.  The fairly nice user rating is actually quite an accurate score I think.

Actually, I think 8.2 rating is probably NOT completely accurate. That rating is probably mostly made up of people who rated the game during their first few weeks of play before they discovered the lack of endgame content. Most of said players have probably not returned to downgrade their reviews accordingly, as such the high rating still stands. Over time I believe it may drop quite a bit as more players review the game and those who previously reviewed it revise their scores.

In fact, part of the reason I'm making this post is to get my own "rating" on this site up enough so that I can edit my previous review of Tabula Rasa. I think its kind of silly that this site is so paranoid that they take away my ability to edit a review I already made just because I went a week or so without logging into their site... But I guess thats a post for a different forum.

I've never posted here on the MMORPG.com forums before but this thread is such a good question I didn't really think I had a choice.

First off I would like to say I was kind of suprised to see this "game" even ranked here on this site. A lot of SL fanboys will yell at you if you dare to call SL a game and this is exactly the way Linden Labs wants it. They sell SL as being an actual "life" and will try to crush the idea that its a game of any kind. I can't believe they didn't try to sue someone over their product being posted here with all these other games.

Secondly, to anwser your question, YES. The game is full of weirdos and perverts. Some of the most perverted things I've ever seen were seen in this game. Pretty much any weird sub-culture you can name will have their own island (or even an entire continent) located somewhere in this game where you will see images of whatever bizzare fetish they enjoy plastered all over every billboard, wall and person in the area. For the most part you won't have to see too much of this unless you make the mistake of going looking for it. But even in the newbie welcome areas there is the occasional troll who will take off whatever skimpy outfit they were wearing to ask you how much you like their virtual penis.

To be honest though, I think how much enjoyment you can derive from this "game" is all about attitude. If you go into the game looking for some kind of meaningful experience you will come away from it dissapointed. On the other hand, if you go into the game to laugh at all the bizzare things the weirdos are doing then I think you will be pleased with the outcome.

Just try not to spend any real world money on this thing. Or atleast set a reasonable limit for yourself, like $20 once and then never again.