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His game persona should be pretty well known to anyone who would care about the games enough to post a story to /.

So then what is your excuse for not knowing that in Tabula Rasa his persona was called General British?

In anticipation of next week's launch of Tabula Rasa, we would like to invite you to join us in our end of beta event. The Tabula Rasa team will be playing and challenging you to take on General British himself on Friday, October 26, 2007 from 10:00 PM to 11:59 PM Central Time.

http://www.playtr.com/news/latest_news/the_tabula_rasa_end_of_beta_event.html

did somebody say "free"??? I like "free". :-) Alright. I'm new to online gaming. What do I need to play this game? Is dialup good enough or do I need broadband? Is the software downloadable?

According to TFA it will be free next year but it isn't yet. Yes, I'm fairly sure you'd need broadband. You can get the client here but the installer is a few versions out-of-date and will need to download patches before you can play - you're looking at about 3.2GB all in.

He seems to be trying to do just that. Whether he's correct it is really 'new' is arguable, but it certainly appears to be distinct from the rhythmic-button-mash that is WOW.

I think this is what they've got planned. If you don't know what Tabula Rasa is, go here: http://www.playtr.com/index.html Sort of FPS, sort of MMORPG... The battlegrounds inside WOW have proved hugely popular, and with the new release have hinted at some possibilities of actually having seige weapons and tanks and such in future expansion battlegrounds. If they can beta test that system in stages now, then they can pop off an announcement next year about a Starcraft MMO for xmas 2008, soon to be delayed to early 2009 (This is blizzard we are talking about)

They probably mentioned CoH since NCSoft has published (or planned to publish) a fair amount of different MMOs in recent years, with CoH (arguably) being the most recognizable/successful.

I never played EQ(didn't have the money) but I am playing WoW and I just would not time for this(I split WoW time with my wife as it is). If I am going to play a new MMO I think this would be interesting, going away from the medieval genre Tabula RasaI checked out Eve Online but it was too involved. But maybe by the time Tabula Rasa comes out I will be WoW to Death.

Well... they can be. I hear that the redesigned Tabula Rasa may be a shoot 'em up as well.

You'll find the talent involved in UO2 has largely moved on to form the Tabula Rasa team under Richard Garriott (now part of NCSoft). I assume any of the feasible ideas from UO2 got carried along with them.

http://www.playtr.com/

Richard Garriot is working on Tabula Rasa.

http://www.playtr.com/

SOE currently offers their All Access Pass :

"If you play more than one SOE game, or you want to try the other great SOE games available, SOE All Access opens the SOE game catalog to you.

SOE All Access grants access to all current games published by SOE*, which includes: EverQuest® EverQuest® Macintosh Edition PlanetSide EverQuest® Online Adventures Station Pass access, which includes the popular games Infantry Online, Cosmic Rift and Tanarus

Full access to these games for the low monthly subscription price of $21.99 is a potential savings of more than $18.00 every month over the total cost of the individual subscriptions!"


PlayNC (NCSoft) does not offer such a deal but is a central site for managing your online game subscriptions and I imagine once Guild Wars, Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault and others are released, we may start to see some special offers from them as well.


Skotos has been offering this type of service for a long time. For one monthly fee you can access and play all 11 of the games that they offer. Only 2 are graphical MMOGs (Meridian 59 and Underlight), but the other games are very good as well.


The largest factor in offering multiple "A list" titles for one monthly fee is offsetting development (and in the case of MMOGs, maintenance) costs and bringing in enough revenue to show a good profit. The bottom line is always a driving factor in any business. However, there is hope. As technology moves forward, we will start to see more and more rapid development of MMOGs of higher quality and consequently we should start to see a wider array of offerings and price points.


I also agree that some sports games should start to appear on the scene. XBox Live will probably be a driving factor to this more than anything. Playing football online against other players is quite fun and should prove to be very popular considering the amount of sports console games sold. Now, as to whether that genre will move to PC is yet to be seen, but as I mentioned before, in SOE's All Access Pass, they combine online console and PC subscriptions into one package. A diverse product line benefits them in this case. More comapnies need to grow in the genre and diversify at the same time, but that takes time and money. Soon though... very soon.

NCSoft is acting as a publisher here. The only titles developed by NCSoft is Lineage and Lineage II. Of NCSoft's other titles,

Guild Wars is being developed by ArenaNet , a group composed primarily of former Blizzard employees who worked on Diablo that left in the Vivendi Universal bankruptcy debacle over the possible sale of the games division (including Blizzard). They could have picked a name further from BattleNet, though.

Tabula Rasa is developed by Destination Games, the Austin, Texas group headed by Richard Gariott composed primarily of people that got fired from or left Origin after EA scrapped the Ultima Online 2 project. They were actually far into Tabula Rasa before being signed on with NCSoft.

City of Heroes is developed by Cryptic Studios based in San Jose, CA.

Finally, Auto Assault is developed by NetDevil .

All of these developers are completely autonomous as far as design goes. NCSoft is only the publisher and the billing gateway. For the sake of the independent developers that just happened to have signed up with NCSoft, please don't confuse their works with that of other developers.