I had an Electron too. Even had a joystick for it, which required a large interface board with a joystick port on it to be plugged into the back of the Electron.
One day my brother was playing some game (I think it was called Mr Wiz) and the joystick interface suddenly caught fire. Fortunately the Electron survived the ordeal.
Did you ever play a game called The Golden Figurine? I hurled my Electron across the room many times thanks to that game. That game should have come with a health warning.
Most of the interviews with game devs I've read recently say the same thing: it's about content now.
You can create the best real-time 3D renderer in the world, with the most advanced game engine, but it's all for nothing without the myriad assets that comprise the game.
Game studios producing AAA+ titles these days require a small army of artists, sound engineers, programmers, producers, testers and various other roles to produce the content for their games. This burden is increasing as gamers demand more and more from their "next-gen" experiences.
Now, try to imagine the content required for your 10,000 completely unique characters and landscape with infinite draw depth. Sure, you can hypothesize about procedural generation of some game elements, but when it comes down to it you're probably going to need actual people churning this stuff out.
That's where the challenge is going to be now. The technology is going to outstrip game studios ability to create sufficient content within any kind of sane budget/time frame.
Coming soon on Slashdot: EA outsourcing texture art projects to China.;)
Why is this modded up? To me, this reads like an advert for AMD written by a frothing-at-the-mouth fanboi, and the OP doesn't look particularly FUD. Why the modding bias?
There are those of us, myself included, who have used BOTH nVidia and ATI hardware, and know that BOTH have their quirks and issues. Different combinations of hardware produce wildly different results. Such is the PC market.
So, instead of spouting the usual fanboi shit, why not break the cycle of dick-waving and try to diagnose the problem? Why not try proving that your pet vendor is as good as you believe it to be, instead of a diatribe about driver quality and comparative price?
Check all your components when faced with a gfx BSOD, don't automatically assume it's the card. In most cases I've found it's either motherboard or RAM at fault. Bear in mind that Windows will frequently blame the gfx driver even if it's another component.
For weeks I got BSODs blaming the nvidia gfx driver, until i discovered my northbridge was waaaay overheated. A fan pointed at the NB heatsink cured all the problems.
NB overheating, as I discovered later, is a fairly common problem with nForce 780i chipsets. Since you're on ATI platform this probably isn't your specific issue, but thought I'd mention it anyway.
Sorry you've been marked Troll by ATI fanbois... It's a shame you can't actually discuss legitimate problems with either platform on Slashdot without stirring up the knee-jerk crazies and sponsored astroturfers on both sides.
For the record, I use both nVidia and ATI hardware, but not in the same machines. I'm happy with both.
The problem there isn't technology. The problem there is SOE and Sigil being stupid.
Create a service that relies upon having a large number of subscribers to be viable.
Next, construct a huge technical/financial barrier to adoption of your service - in this case, an expensive gaming PC.
Now, sit back and wonder why nobody plays your crappy game and you've had to consolidate down to just four servers, which is just a bump on the road to game closure.
Conclusion: anyone who makes an MMO with ridiculous system requirements has no common sense or business sense, and deserves to fail.
You're modded Funny but it should probably be Insightful.
I work in IT in Education. Trust me when I say that trying to teach teachers anything IT-related is utterly futile. Even the younger ones who have used computers through School and University are woefully computer illiterate bordering on technophobia.
I can picture the staff's heads collectively exploding as I attempt to explain the concept of a VM, much less how to actually use one. I think many of them would pass out from general fear and anxiety.
Installing XP on VirtualPC (and I'm sure VMWare and VirtualBox are very similar) is already super easy right now, and takes well under an hour on reasonably modern hardware.
Ditching that second PC would decrease your electricity costs and allow you to reclaim desk space.
Plus, once you get used to working with the VM, you'll probably find it much more convenient.
The cost of that XP Pro license is almost certainly greater than the cost of a new scanner.
I also don't understand this "free with Windows 7" comment. (You're not the only one who has said it in this thread.)
It's part of the feature set, and you're paying for those features. So how exactly is it "free"?
It's a feature they've decided to include in the price. If you don't buy one of the more expensive Win7 licenses, you don't get to use it. Hence, it's not free.
The rabid pro-Microsoft sentiment seen on this site lately looks and feels a lot like astroturfing.
NB. I'm typing this comment on a laptop running Windows 7 beta. Please don't assume I'm just some MS basher. I'm just concerned by the sudden proliferation of MS fanbois and apologists.
I get the feeling that Spector is still butthurt from when Quake 3 Arena (probably the epitome of what Spector is referring to - a plotless multiplayer game) outsold Deus Ex by a considerable margin.
There's room for both types of games, and I don't think there's much laziness involved in developing a fun, balanced, competitive multiplayer game. I mean there are plenty of godawful single-player "experiences" one could point at to refute Spector's claim.
It's not multiplayer free-for all vs. single-player guided experience, it's good game vs bad game.
I love most of the games Spector has had a role in developing, but that particular comment seems misguided. Of course, there's no direct quote in TFA so context is lacking.
Holy crap, yes! Haven't heard canyon.mid for years! And I also discovered the MODPlug Plugin and.IT and.XM tracks soon after.
In fact, my GeoCities page may have had the modplug plugin embedded in it at some point, playing some tiny mods that still took 30-60 secs to download over 28.8kbps.
I was also an AltaVista fan.
On a totally separate nostalgic note, I still remember the very first website I saw incorporating frames. It was the Warner Brothers site (or maybe just Looney Tunes) and it was just a gaudy mess of animated characters, but it was split in TWO. I remember thinking "wow, how did they do that?!" and looking at the HTML source (in Netscape, of course) to determine how these newfangled frames worked (and then overusing them in every site I created for years).
Ahh, those were the days. When [hr size=10] was the very epitome of style and technology.;)
Admittedly, I didn't check the chronology of InstantAction compared to QuakeLive. Thanks for clearing that up, Mr AC!
I tried out Legions this weekend. It's very good for what it is, (a cut-down Tribes) but I'm looking forward to the original Tribes more.
I wasn't comparing Tribes to QuakeLive in terms of gameplay. As I said, Tribes was clearly different to its predecessors in the genre. I was talking about the nascent browser-based FPS phenomenon in general.
Also, I wouldn't say that QuakeLive has no real depth. It's a more traditional arena-style FPS, but that doesn't mean it has no depth, it just means it exposes its depth in different ways.
Given the choice between the two games, rest assured I'd choose Tribes every time.:)
Starsiege: Tribes was one of my favourite online FPS games.
At the time it was a breath of fresh air to the FPS genre. Quake II and Unreal were fighting for the FPS market share, but were ultimately very similar games. Tribes was different; suddenly Unreal and Q2 seemed very slow and static.
Tribes features jetpacks, vehicles with interesting physics, new gametypes and huge maps. It was an instant classic. I have nothing but awesome memories of Tribes matches.
Kamikaze scout runs into enemy flag rooms, disc-launcher jumping with jetpack to get insane height and speed, across the map in seconds rather than the minutes it would take on foot.:)
Suffice to say, if this revitalizes the Tribes community, it might be one of the best things to happen to online gaming this year.
The fact that the new IP owners are also (some of) the original creators of Tribes is just icing on the cake. I really hope they exceed their own expectations.
Have to tip my hat to id for leading the way with browser-based FPS games. If this kind of thing is the result maybe the future of PC gaming isn't as bleak as some have predicted.
I started playing a couple months before its closure was announced. My experiences pretty much mirror yours.
Combat - there's simply nothing else like it in the MMO genre. It's as close to real-time combat as you're going to see. Cover, aiming, crouching to increase accuracy and damage. No other MMO comes close.
The fact that you can solo most of the instances is a big win, imho. Rather than making it a single player game with a chatroom as others said, it removes the need to find someone else to run the instances with, which is sometimes a challenge in a game with such a low player population.
I'm actually surprised they're canning the game entirely. Most MMOs survive longer even with just one or two servers and a skeleton crew of staff and devs.
I'm _guessing_ that TR, thanks to its combat system and constant NPC-vs-NPC-vs-Player battles, probably has a heavy power and bandwidth requirement compared to other MMOs, contributing to high running costs. I could be totally wrong about that.
As others have said, TR only really reached release quality a few months ago. It's sad to see it go at this stage. It's by no means a bad game now. In fact, it's one of the better MMOs out there at the moment, and certainly a unique one. Given more time and money I think the developers could and would have done so much more with it.
Out-of-band is a technical term with different uses in communications and telecommunication. It refers to communications which occur outside of a previously established communications method or channel.
In this case it means remotely changing system (BIOS) settings etc. while workstations/servers are 'powered down'. There's more to it than that, of course. Check the features list on that linked article.
An evaluation by the National Physical Laboratory in the UK found vein patterns to be the least reliable biometric they'd ever encountered, worse even than face recognition which became notorious for its zero-percent hit rate in several public trials (OK, so you can't get worse than zero percent, but in carefully controlled lab trials face recognition did get a non-zero score).
Yet it's been in use with Japanese banks for years. You'd think with such poor performance they'd have abandoned it, which makes me think that what the NPL studied and what Hitachi are selling might not be exactly the same thing.
We actually considered this technology where I work, as part of a cashless canteen/print queue auth/building entry scheme, mostly to avoid the controversy around fingerprint scanning, which is tied in people's minds to law enforcement. We couldn't find any companies actually installing Hitachi's palm-vein scanning tech in the UK, though several we contacted were at least aware of it or evaluating it themselves.
I'm currently playing Tabula Rasa. Started just over a month ago. My main character is now level 41 out of 50.
Having not played in beta or just after launch, I have no idea what the interface was like back then, but now it's absolutely no worse than any other MMO I've played.
As far as grinding goes, I've found there is as much grinding in TR as there is in WoW or EQ2 or anything else. It's certainly not a Korean-style grindfest as a poster above claims. Perhaps it was in the past, but not anymore. I've done 41 levels - mostly solo - and I've never had to sit in one place doing the same thing over and over. I play through the missions in the zone and the move to the next one. I've never been stuck in the same place doing the same thing out of necessity or to progress. The progression is very well laid out, and the level range of each zone is pretty much exactly the levels you'll achieve in it, so no hanging around killing mobs just to level up so you can move on.
If what you mean is there's a lot of combat then YES there is a *lot* of combat, usually against the same enemies, but that's true of almost every MMO. Grind is when you don't enjoy it, and I find TR's combat to be a refreshing change from the "press the same number keys over and over in sequence" style of WoW.
The crafting system was reimplemented just last month. It's now probably the simplest crafting system in any MMO. A frustrating amount of clicking is involved in its current implementation, but it works, it takes about 30 seconds to learn fully and gives players something to aim for (fully upgraded weapons/armor). Hopefully they'll address the amount of mouse-mileage required in a future patch.
Military Surplus (auction house) has been in the game for quite a while, although it was absent at launch. It's buyout only at the moment, no bidding, but that may come later (and it's no great loss if it doesn't). Diablo-style bind-on-equip set items recently made their way in too.
True FPS viewpoint is coming soon, so the 3rd person follow-cam/shoulder-cam is going to be optional. They're also implementing a zoomed in scope view. How/if this will change gameplay I don't know.
Rideable mechs have been "coming soon" since long before I started playing, but it looks like we may actually see them this year or early next year.
Combat is different to any other MMO i've played, it "feels" a lot more real-time, even though it's really a kind of hybrid system. They've been adding more dynamic encounters to the world, so it's apparently less "static" feeling than it was a year ago.
I do agree about the story. It's poorly explained to the player what their role is and what is happening in the same at the start. It's only after playing for several days that the story begins to make itself clear(er). A couple of cutscenes or a little more voiceover work could sort that out. The background story could actually be quite good and inspirational if it wasn't put across so clumsily.
Tabula Rasa really deserves to be more popular than it is. It's by no means the worst MMO I've played, in fact it's one of the better ones. According to players who have been playing since beta it was launched *far* too early, and it's hard to tell who is really to blame for that.
It has a few serious flaws, but it is - at its core - a solid game, and I'm enjoying it. The small community on the European server helps in that regard too, getting to know the people on general chat. A symptom of the small population is that server-wide chat is actually possible without it becoming a spamfest.
It would be nice to see it reviewed again by the major gaming sites, revisiting it after a year of updates. And if you've read this and considered giving TR a go then I urge you to try it out, if only to see the combat system and how it differs from MMOs you've played. 7 day Trial Accounts are free so there's nothing to lose except your spare time:)
So, sure, computers will get much faster, but who really wants to spend $2,500 on a top of the line system when they can run an older OS on a $500 machine?
Exactly. Applications are the key to this.
What applications, except certain DX10 games, run on Vista but not on XP?
I'm pretty sure the answer is "almost none" or at least "absolutely none of the important ones".
If you can run every application on XP, do everything you want to do and have it feel more responsive, why the hell are you "upgrading"?
There is NOTHING built into Vista itself that justifies, in my mind, the move to Vista. It's just not better. Aero Glass doesn't even count; that's just MS playing catch-up to MacOS and Linux, and I don't even use it on my Vista machine. Don't think I'm the only one.
The bullet point list of features that Vista contains compared to XP... well, if you strip out the marketing gibberish, there is nothing there. Nothing for end-users anyway. I think Microsoft know very well that if Vista wasn't bundled with everything right now its market penetration would be utterly pathetic. XP works, it works exceptionally well on modern (and cheap) hardware and it runs everything that Vista does (except a few games).
Upgrade? No thanks. Thanks to Microsoft, "downgrade" now means "improve".
Slashdot Mirror
I had an Electron too. Even had a joystick for it, which required a large interface board with a joystick port on it to be plugged into the back of the Electron.
One day my brother was playing some game (I think it was called Mr Wiz) and the joystick interface suddenly caught fire. Fortunately the Electron survived the ordeal.
Did you ever play a game called The Golden Figurine? I hurled my Electron across the room many times thanks to that game. That game should have come with a health warning.
To be fair... if I had presided at AOL for years, I'd probably feel the same way about the Internet.
Just tested this in Win7, it works fine. Hit Windows key, type D: or whatever and it opens the drive.
Forget the Start Button. Use the Windows key and free yourself from mouse tyranny! ;)
I'm getting very used to hitting the Windows key and typing "note", "calc", "fire" or "outl" etc. to launch my commonly-used apps.
The Start Menu is for people who don't know what software they have installed.
Most of the interviews with game devs I've read recently say the same thing: it's about content now.
You can create the best real-time 3D renderer in the world, with the most advanced game engine, but it's all for nothing without the myriad assets that comprise the game.
Game studios producing AAA+ titles these days require a small army of artists, sound engineers, programmers, producers, testers and various other roles to produce the content for their games. This burden is increasing as gamers demand more and more from their "next-gen" experiences.
Now, try to imagine the content required for your 10,000 completely unique characters and landscape with infinite draw depth. Sure, you can hypothesize about procedural generation of some game elements, but when it comes down to it you're probably going to need actual people churning this stuff out.
That's where the challenge is going to be now. The technology is going to outstrip game studios ability to create sufficient content within any kind of sane budget/time frame.
Coming soon on Slashdot: EA outsourcing texture art projects to China. ;)
Why is this modded up? To me, this reads like an advert for AMD written by a frothing-at-the-mouth fanboi, and the OP doesn't look particularly FUD. Why the modding bias?
There are those of us, myself included, who have used BOTH nVidia and ATI hardware, and know that BOTH have their quirks and issues. Different combinations of hardware produce wildly different results. Such is the PC market.
So, instead of spouting the usual fanboi shit, why not break the cycle of dick-waving and try to diagnose the problem? Why not try proving that your pet vendor is as good as you believe it to be, instead of a diatribe about driver quality and comparative price?
Check all your components when faced with a gfx BSOD, don't automatically assume it's the card. In most cases I've found it's either motherboard or RAM at fault. Bear in mind that Windows will frequently blame the gfx driver even if it's another component.
For weeks I got BSODs blaming the nvidia gfx driver, until i discovered my northbridge was waaaay overheated. A fan pointed at the NB heatsink cured all the problems.
NB overheating, as I discovered later, is a fairly common problem with nForce 780i chipsets. Since you're on ATI platform this probably isn't your specific issue, but thought I'd mention it anyway.
Sorry you've been marked Troll by ATI fanbois... It's a shame you can't actually discuss legitimate problems with either platform on Slashdot without stirring up the knee-jerk crazies and sponsored astroturfers on both sides.
For the record, I use both nVidia and ATI hardware, but not in the same machines. I'm happy with both.
The problem there isn't technology. The problem there is SOE and Sigil being stupid.
Create a service that relies upon having a large number of subscribers to be viable.
Next, construct a huge technical/financial barrier to adoption of your service - in this case, an expensive gaming PC.
Now, sit back and wonder why nobody plays your crappy game and you've had to consolidate down to just four servers, which is just a bump on the road to game closure.
Conclusion: anyone who makes an MMO with ridiculous system requirements has no common sense or business sense, and deserves to fail.
You're modded Funny but it should probably be Insightful.
I work in IT in Education. Trust me when I say that trying to teach teachers anything IT-related is utterly futile. Even the younger ones who have used computers through School and University are woefully computer illiterate bordering on technophobia.
I can picture the staff's heads collectively exploding as I attempt to explain the concept of a VM, much less how to actually use one. I think many of them would pass out from general fear and anxiety.
Indeed, virtualization need not be in a window.. here's a nice screenshot of Sun's VirtualBox running XP in "seamless mode" on OSX Leopard.
I realise that's not quite what you're referring to, I just think that feature looks cool.
Installing XP on VirtualPC (and I'm sure VMWare and VirtualBox are very similar) is already super easy right now, and takes well under an hour on reasonably modern hardware.
Ditching that second PC would decrease your electricity costs and allow you to reclaim desk space.
Plus, once you get used to working with the VM, you'll probably find it much more convenient.
The cost of that XP Pro license is almost certainly greater than the cost of a new scanner.
I also don't understand this "free with Windows 7" comment. (You're not the only one who has said it in this thread.)
It's part of the feature set, and you're paying for those features. So how exactly is it "free"?
It's a feature they've decided to include in the price. If you don't buy one of the more expensive Win7 licenses, you don't get to use it. Hence, it's not free.
The rabid pro-Microsoft sentiment seen on this site lately looks and feels a lot like astroturfing.
NB. I'm typing this comment on a laptop running Windows 7 beta. Please don't assume I'm just some MS basher. I'm just concerned by the sudden proliferation of MS fanbois and apologists.
FFS Slashdot, why did I get signed out right before hitting Submit?!
I swear this site gets buggier every day.
I get the feeling that Spector is still butthurt from when Quake 3 Arena (probably the epitome of what Spector is referring to - a plotless multiplayer game) outsold Deus Ex by a considerable margin.
There's room for both types of games, and I don't think there's much laziness involved in developing a fun, balanced, competitive multiplayer game. I mean there are plenty of godawful single-player "experiences" one could point at to refute Spector's claim.
It's not multiplayer free-for all vs. single-player guided experience, it's good game vs bad game.
I love most of the games Spector has had a role in developing, but that particular comment seems misguided. Of course, there's no direct quote in TFA so context is lacking.
Your nostalgia is infectious.
Holy crap, yes! Haven't heard canyon.mid for years! And I also discovered the MODPlug Plugin and .IT and .XM tracks soon after.
In fact, my GeoCities page may have had the modplug plugin embedded in it at some point, playing some tiny mods that still took 30-60 secs to download over 28.8kbps.
I was also an AltaVista fan.
On a totally separate nostalgic note, I still remember the very first website I saw incorporating frames. It was the Warner Brothers site (or maybe just Looney Tunes) and it was just a gaudy mess of animated characters, but it was split in TWO. I remember thinking "wow, how did they do that?!" and looking at the HTML source (in Netscape, of course) to determine how these newfangled frames worked (and then overusing them in every site I created for years).
Ahh, those were the days. When [hr size=10] was the very epitome of style and technology. ;)
This may be one instance where REDUCING the amount of fibre in the network may help ease the load.
So how did that yellow snow taste to you?
Admittedly, I didn't check the chronology of InstantAction compared to QuakeLive. Thanks for clearing that up, Mr AC!
I tried out Legions this weekend. It's very good for what it is, (a cut-down Tribes) but I'm looking forward to the original Tribes more.
I wasn't comparing Tribes to QuakeLive in terms of gameplay. As I said, Tribes was clearly different to its predecessors in the genre. I was talking about the nascent browser-based FPS phenomenon in general.
Also, I wouldn't say that QuakeLive has no real depth. It's a more traditional arena-style FPS, but that doesn't mean it has no depth, it just means it exposes its depth in different ways.
Given the choice between the two games, rest assured I'd choose Tribes every time. :)
Starsiege: Tribes was one of my favourite online FPS games.
At the time it was a breath of fresh air to the FPS genre. Quake II and Unreal were fighting for the FPS market share, but were ultimately very similar games. Tribes was different; suddenly Unreal and Q2 seemed very slow and static.
Tribes features jetpacks, vehicles with interesting physics, new gametypes and huge maps. It was an instant classic. I have nothing but awesome memories of Tribes matches.
Kamikaze scout runs into enemy flag rooms, disc-launcher jumping with jetpack to get insane height and speed, across the map in seconds rather than the minutes it would take on foot. :)
Suffice to say, if this revitalizes the Tribes community, it might be one of the best things to happen to online gaming this year.
The fact that the new IP owners are also (some of) the original creators of Tribes is just icing on the cake. I really hope they exceed their own expectations.
Have to tip my hat to id for leading the way with browser-based FPS games. If this kind of thing is the result maybe the future of PC gaming isn't as bleak as some have predicted.
I started playing a couple months before its closure was announced. My experiences pretty much mirror yours.
Combat - there's simply nothing else like it in the MMO genre. It's as close to real-time combat as you're going to see. Cover, aiming, crouching to increase accuracy and damage. No other MMO comes close.
The fact that you can solo most of the instances is a big win, imho. Rather than making it a single player game with a chatroom as others said, it removes the need to find someone else to run the instances with, which is sometimes a challenge in a game with such a low player population.
I'm actually surprised they're canning the game entirely. Most MMOs survive longer even with just one or two servers and a skeleton crew of staff and devs.
I'm _guessing_ that TR, thanks to its combat system and constant NPC-vs-NPC-vs-Player battles, probably has a heavy power and bandwidth requirement compared to other MMOs, contributing to high running costs. I could be totally wrong about that.
As others have said, TR only really reached release quality a few months ago. It's sad to see it go at this stage. It's by no means a bad game now. In fact, it's one of the better MMOs out there at the moment, and certainly a unique one. Given more time and money I think the developers could and would have done so much more with it.
Farewell, Tabula Rasa. We hardly knew ye.
From Wikipedia:
Also from Wikipedia:
In this case it means remotely changing system (BIOS) settings etc. while workstations/servers are 'powered down'. There's more to it than that, of course. Check the features list on that linked article.
When I read that I immediately thought of Brandon Lee.
Yet it's been in use with Japanese banks for years. You'd think with such poor performance they'd have abandoned it, which makes me think that what the NPL studied and what Hitachi are selling might not be exactly the same thing.
We actually considered this technology where I work, as part of a cashless canteen/print queue auth/building entry scheme, mostly to avoid the controversy around fingerprint scanning, which is tied in people's minds to law enforcement. We couldn't find any companies actually installing Hitachi's palm-vein scanning tech in the UK, though several we contacted were at least aware of it or evaluating it themselves.
I'm currently playing Tabula Rasa. Started just over a month ago. My main character is now level 41 out of 50.
Having not played in beta or just after launch, I have no idea what the interface was like back then, but now it's absolutely no worse than any other MMO I've played.
As far as grinding goes, I've found there is as much grinding in TR as there is in WoW or EQ2 or anything else. It's certainly not a Korean-style grindfest as a poster above claims. Perhaps it was in the past, but not anymore. I've done 41 levels - mostly solo - and I've never had to sit in one place doing the same thing over and over. I play through the missions in the zone and the move to the next one. I've never been stuck in the same place doing the same thing out of necessity or to progress. The progression is very well laid out, and the level range of each zone is pretty much exactly the levels you'll achieve in it, so no hanging around killing mobs just to level up so you can move on.
If what you mean is there's a lot of combat then YES there is a *lot* of combat, usually against the same enemies, but that's true of almost every MMO. Grind is when you don't enjoy it, and I find TR's combat to be a refreshing change from the "press the same number keys over and over in sequence" style of WoW.
The crafting system was reimplemented just last month. It's now probably the simplest crafting system in any MMO. A frustrating amount of clicking is involved in its current implementation, but it works, it takes about 30 seconds to learn fully and gives players something to aim for (fully upgraded weapons/armor). Hopefully they'll address the amount of mouse-mileage required in a future patch.
Military Surplus (auction house) has been in the game for quite a while, although it was absent at launch. It's buyout only at the moment, no bidding, but that may come later (and it's no great loss if it doesn't). Diablo-style bind-on-equip set items recently made their way in too.
True FPS viewpoint is coming soon, so the 3rd person follow-cam/shoulder-cam is going to be optional. They're also implementing a zoomed in scope view. How/if this will change gameplay I don't know.
Rideable mechs have been "coming soon" since long before I started playing, but it looks like we may actually see them this year or early next year.
Combat is different to any other MMO i've played, it "feels" a lot more real-time, even though it's really a kind of hybrid system. They've been adding more dynamic encounters to the world, so it's apparently less "static" feeling than it was a year ago.
I do agree about the story. It's poorly explained to the player what their role is and what is happening in the same at the start. It's only after playing for several days that the story begins to make itself clear(er). A couple of cutscenes or a little more voiceover work could sort that out. The background story could actually be quite good and inspirational if it wasn't put across so clumsily.
Tabula Rasa really deserves to be more popular than it is. It's by no means the worst MMO I've played, in fact it's one of the better ones. According to players who have been playing since beta it was launched *far* too early, and it's hard to tell who is really to blame for that.
It has a few serious flaws, but it is - at its core - a solid game, and I'm enjoying it. The small community on the European server helps in that regard too, getting to know the people on general chat. A symptom of the small population is that server-wide chat is actually possible without it becoming a spamfest.
It would be nice to see it reviewed again by the major gaming sites, revisiting it after a year of updates. And if you've read this and considered giving TR a go then I urge you to try it out, if only to see the combat system and how it differs from MMOs you've played. 7 day Trial Accounts are free so there's nothing to lose except your spare time :)
So, sure, computers will get much faster, but who really wants to spend $2,500 on a top of the line system when they can run an older OS on a $500 machine?
Exactly. Applications are the key to this.
What applications, except certain DX10 games, run on Vista but not on XP?
I'm pretty sure the answer is "almost none" or at least "absolutely none of the important ones".
If you can run every application on XP, do everything you want to do and have it feel more responsive, why the hell are you "upgrading"?
There is NOTHING built into Vista itself that justifies, in my mind, the move to Vista. It's just not better. Aero Glass doesn't even count; that's just MS playing catch-up to MacOS and Linux, and I don't even use it on my Vista machine. Don't think I'm the only one.
The bullet point list of features that Vista contains compared to XP... well, if you strip out the marketing gibberish, there is nothing there. Nothing for end-users anyway. I think Microsoft know very well that if Vista wasn't bundled with everything right now its market penetration would be utterly pathetic. XP works, it works exceptionally well on modern (and cheap) hardware and it runs everything that Vista does (except a few games).
Upgrade? No thanks. Thanks to Microsoft, "downgrade" now means "improve".