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Tabula Rasa Goes Live
After a lengthy wait and a substantial retooling, Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa has gone live. The New York Times is running a piece looking into the history of Garriott's interaction with MMOGs, while Wired had a chance to speak with the 'General' getting a better sense of what the game is about. "'It takes 30 minutes to an hour just to meet up with your friends to start playing' in most MMOs, says Richard Garriott, the new game's executive producer. In contrast, Tabula Rasa, a PC game that will be released Nov. 2, was designed to appeal to the average Joe who's probably not interested in learning what "gold farming" or "damage over time" means and just wants to amuse himself by saving the universe. It's a calculated shift designed to move beyond the hard-core gaming crowd and court the mainstream audience that has made Nintendo's Wii such a surprise success. And it isn't particularly remarkable, except that Garriott is the man largely responsible for inventing the MMO model in the first place. "
Played the beta, played the 3 day head start, and got to say, I'm enjoying it so far. /really/ quick to get into. /does/ feel like it's a single player game sometimes that other people just happen to also be in running around, but that's probably why it's quick to get into, there's alot you can do without a group.
Compared to existing MMO's, this is
My main game is EQ, and it's true, can spend hours getting things sorted, farming to prepare for playing 'for real'. This is 'log in, select character, go'. Never stop killing stuff, the grind for xp is very well hidden away.
Graphics look great, sound is good enough to make me want to keep it on and not turn it off instantly like most mmo's.
Now, it
I tried City of Heroes for a bit, that knocked me out for presentation, ease of use, but had little to keep me interested after early teens. I was worried at first in TR as I had that same feeling of 'this is fun, quick to play, great!' and worried that I'd hit the wall of grind/repetitiveness any second, but so far, so good. Plenty of missions/scenery to look at, and the lore of the portals between worlds offers them the chance to spice it up a bit. Seeing big Bots walking around with Chain guns for arms is also giving me incentive to hope that I'll get to drive one soon.
So, yeah, give it a bash, we'll see how it lasts at the mid-high game, but so far, it's had a pretty good start.
Just the memory leaks/crashes after a few hours of play that's the downer atm, sure to be patched soon, but considering some MMO releases (even after 8years), it seems a highly tuned and working game.
Most of all,
Fun!
Waiting for an amusing sig.
While I'm sure we all share the utmost respect for your memories of imaginary deeds, I personally disagree with the notion that the level of inconvenience is the ultimate level of difficulty. I'd rather enjoy a brief, challenging scenario/quest/mission/run/raid/whatever than a lengthy, tedious, repetitive one.
While the atmospheric value of lengthy and demanding preparations is clearly illustrated by your post... does that actually make it fun (with fun being the traditional reason for playing games)? For some, sure. For others, not so much.
It's the simplest and most overused method of scaling difficulty. It doesn't matter whether you're walking for hours to get to the right zone (or back for supplies), collecting hundreds of drops for a recipe or just killing ten rats repeatedly until you can get to the level where you're magically allowed to kill ten dire rats. I am truly saddened by the fact that difficulty is most typically made "hardcore" through excessive annoyance.
It's still purely artificial inflation - exactly the type that you claim to despise. I don't care whether you consider it "hardcore" or not, there's plenty of room to accommodate multiple levels of commitment to imaginary universes.