While the average MMO has a tutorial that will teach MMO savvy people how to play, many of the currently released games don't take new players into account, new players who have never played an MMO before and who might find our worlds confusing.
Well, it's Saturday, which means that I'm supposed to sit down and spout off about some of the things that have happened this week. The problem is, this week, with the Thanksgiving Holiday in the United States, has been a little bit slow. Fortunately for me, I've been able to put some of that time to good use and I installed my copy of Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa.
There's a full review coming soon from Laura Genender, so I'm not even going to pretend that this is anything close to a review, as I've only played the game for a few hours. Still though, there are a couple of points that I'd like to make:
This first point isn't really Tabula Rasa specific and I often feel this way whenever I start a new MMO. WTF is up with tutorials these days? I mean, granted, they're perfectly adequate introductions to the games. In fact, in Tabula Rasa, I thought that the opening quests did a fantastic job of teaching you how to do all of the things in TR that are different from most MMOs. Heck, I was even entertained as I learned more about the post-apocalyptic universe that Sarah Morrison introduced us to in the opening cinematic (golden, by the way). The beef that I have with opening tutorials is that there's an assumed knowledge there of previous MMOs.
Read it all here.
