Tabula Rasa is nearly done, so two birds with one stone today, what with being rather more lazy than usual with the blog posting, and the last in my somewhat presumptuous What TR Did Wrong series, and another in my Many Faces of Van Hemlock one.

I’d imagine my own personal tale of Tabula Rasa was not so different form everyone else’s. I think gave it the old Three Month Rule, and didn’t start playing until early February ’08, coincidentally, during my last blog-vacation, and Episode #1 of the podcast features a few of my first impressions of the title. I think my own admission of ‘I’m not really playing this anymore, am I?’ came around mid-July of the same year; a stint of about five or six months of Playing it Properly. I since “resubbed” in December, on the news of the whole things immanent demise, paying one month before it went free, and I suppose, I’m still playing it now, or at least for the next three days anyway.

Tabula Rasa Van Hemlock

Who?

My main was always a Soldier > Commando > Grenadier path character. I did muck about with the cloning a bit, but none of the other classes felt quite as gutsy. For me, it was always about the Starship Troopers of it all, and I had little truck with the pseudo-magic ‘Logos’ system. I loved the collection/exploration aspect of it, but the actual spellcasting…pah! I’m a space trooper, not a wizard! My sole concession to the Logos Use was the low-end Rage buff, which you basically just had to keep refreshing now and then for a 50% damage bonus, and some resistance thrown in. Very handy, I’ll admit. Mostly, it was about the guns…lots of guns, and by the end, I had ‘Pump V’ in Firearms, Machineguns, Rocket Launchers and Propellant Guns. I also went V in Graviton Armour. And to be honest, that was all I ever needed – including Other Players.

I reached L47 under my own steam, during my time there, three short of the cap, before the Super-Crazy-Game-Over-2000%XP-Boosters went in, and I like to think I’d have made it to 50 anyway.

When?

During my active phase earlier last year, it was a once-a-week game for me, occupying the Monday booking that I now spend in LotRO. The pace of the game meant that I couldn’t really cope with much more obsessive play than that, and I’ve rambled previously about that extra draining effect on its players that the MMOFPS will have to overcome to become mainstream. The sessions were spent mostly duoing with a long-time friend, or soloing on those rare occasions I’d dip in at other times of the week.

This recent spree has mostly been a quick hour here a quickhour there, what with my already full evening week, but enough to remind myself of it all, and take a last look at some remarkable places and sights.

Where?

My main sequence of play saw me work all the way up from Concordia Wilderness, to Ligo Ashen Desert before losing interest a bit. While the overall geography of the two planets involved tended to repeat somewhat; Foreas with its very traditional MMO-like forests and the more alien crags and lava of Arieki, both had some very well designed zones which I will genuinely miss, including:

• The Trench Areas of Divide, an early introduction to a really wartorn bit of fighting, very well executed, with shellfire, emplacements and foxholes, very Saving Private Ryan.
• The Geyser Chimney Area of Plains, with nearby looming Atta colony and bizarre twisted crags, a truly alien place which did the whole Sci-fi angle a service.
• Most of Marshes, a swampy map which really lent a Vietnam slant to the ongoing bi-global conflict. I think I hated fighting in these places, which suggests that it was very well done!
• Ortho Post CP, in Incline. A problematic mechanic at best, here was oe of the few places where enough players seemed to congregate to make it work right. I’d grudgingly admit, it was fun when it did work as intended.
• Ashen Desert, a place of almost Dune-like surreal otherworldliness; huge alien machines rising from the ash dunes, saluting the vast boiling sun overhead. Every now and then, the game would really shine with world-design brilliance, but too often, it then relapsed into a very standard MMO look and feel to its maps.
• Favourite Instance: Torcastra Prison. While the typical Bane Interior tileset got to be very samey after a while, that hadn’t really set in at this point, on the Divide map, and in any case, this instance had a nice variety of areas throughout; canyons approach, outlying facilities, and the prison itself. The objective was interesting; a full on assault to get our guys back, the bosses were suitably challenging; a Hunter with insane reflection, and the first Juggernaut I’d ever seen among them, and in general, a hard fight and a job well done. There were even puzzles in there, in the form of coded doorlocks for the cells. All in all, very satisfying.

Later instances showed less panache though, and toward the end, I had trouble telling one from another – especially the ‘Go in this Bane Base and Blow Up A Thing, and Rescue a Dude’ ones.

Why?

I know, I know…I should know better these days, but back then, I was quite excited about a Sci-Fi MMOFPS. I’ll roll an elf if needs be – I need my fix after-all, but really, I’m a sci-fi person, and this one in particular interested me, as I thought it was going to be a PvE Planetside. I like Planetside, but its a shame that its only PvP – I like saving the day and killing monsters too you know! And I think I found that in Tabula Rasa – at least at first. Perhaps it wasn’t what I wanted after-all and it took a project like TR to show me that – who knows? I don’t feel cheated, and don’t regret my time and money spent in TR, but in the end?

I think it should have been a single-player game.

Seriously; tidy up the plot and story, add cut-scenes and some interesting NPCs, chuck it on the shelf and walk away.

One the one hand, throughout my time in TR, I never once felt like I needed anyone else. It was nice to duo most of it, for companionship, but much of what we did together, either of us could have done alone. I was soloing Instances, where I still got xp and was getting drops I could use. I’ve no idea if some of the instances were designed for solo play or not, but in general, the only place I could really have used a hand, was the Control Points, and I’ve ranted enough about those.

With the chosen weapon and armour maxed out – Rocket Launchers in my case, there wasn’t much I couldn’t cope with that wasn’t completely out of my level range, including red and orange type bosses, and with Launchers V, Rage V, kneeling and a few seconds to zero in, and I’d one-hit most things my own level, and some above. The challenge level of day to day play was just right – tricky in parts, but in general manageable, to the point that it simply didn’t occur to me that I ought to be seeking help.

From a mechanical perspective, I’m not sure the grouping ever really worked in the conventional sense. I tried it a few times, as Grenadier and a Medic type alt, and the inter-dependencies of the group in Tabula Rasa were never very strong. A healing ‘gun’ that actually has to be aimed in a hectic circle-strafe firefight is probably a bit much for an MMO audience really. The Leech Gun was quite clever (combined health drain and AoE group heal), but I’m not sure I ever worked out how to taunt as a Grenadier. mostly I figured that grouping was basically just MOAR DPS and that was about it. I wasn’t going out of my way to be social, true, but the few times I did PUG, the Usual Troubles (Time taken to organise/travel, mismatched mission journals, sudden disappearances, etc), weren’t really offset by the benefits, so soloing was the more natural choice.

On the other hand, I was quite getting into the story of it all. The tale of the Eloh and Neph, Mankind’s fugitive exodus, the Foreans, the Brann, the hidden power of the Logos. Interesting backstory that to be honest, the game got in the way of a bit. I wanted to collect the Logos, partly to be able to read the stories and fragments of wisdom dotted here and there on the strange monoliths. Studded throughout the game were momentary glimpses of a very good Sci-fi Ripping Yarn; the Palisades Temples and Eloh Value; the Temporal Chamber on the bridge in Plateau. Hints of the ‘Neph’, the real villains of the piece, whom the Thrax were merely servants of…all these moments that suddenly engaged me, drew me in, only to drop me back in the fedex missions and rat-hunts again shortly after, and it all seemed such a waste.

So yes, I think the biggest problem that Tabula Rasa had, was that it was an MMO at all. With a slightly different direction, it could have been an incredible narrative journey; a Mass Effect, a Halo, a Knights of the Old Republic, indeed, an Ultima 2025AD, instead of a problematic multi-player project that ended up bowing to the compromises required of sharing a world with a thousand other people who are all also The Hero, and breaking under the strain.

Incidentally, the inclusion of character name on the screen shot is on purpose! Tabula Rasa’s last day coincides with our podcast recording day, so it would be a shame to miss the opportunity do try a bit of a live broadcasting experiment!

I’ve no idea what kind of last day fun and games they game itself has planned, but I’ll be lurking about on the Centarus (EU) server, in the Foreas Divide base bar from 1:00pm UK time on Saturday 28th Feb, while we record the show, so do pop along if you can, and, er, sort of be on the show, after a fashion! A highly experimental kind of thing, I shouldn’t wonder…

Still going with Tabula Rasa, although possibly not giving it quite as much time as I should, what with the other three MMOs I have on the go too. Gotten myself to Level 48 now though, which is surprising considering how little time I’ve given it. Maybe one three hour session a week (with +50% Boosters), since early January, and more than three levels under my belt, levels at the very top end.

The game always felt fast; a constant flow of action, and to begin with, that did seem awesome. Pewpew lazors! Gogogogogo! Boot Camp (The original tutorial, now modified somewhat) threw you right into it, and Alia Das (The first non-instanced starting town), and its attendant missions kept the flow moving nicely along, with the Lower Eloh Creek area, a veritable ‘Saving Private Ryan’ Warscape, and the Divide map after that. Landing Zone, the first CP you meet, was always busy, and on the whole, worked as intended, simply because it was adequately staffed. (See elsewhere for ramblings on CPs in general – they weren’t all like that.)

It was very much a game where the emphasis was on the action, not least of all due to its pseudo-FPS gunplay. No standing there, watching special attack cooldown timers here, and if you ignored the possibly unnecessary Super-Lightning-Magic-Logos-Spells, (and I did, respeccing myself entirely out of Logos Powers and maxing out all the weapon and armour skills instead) the game could be played very well without any hotkey intervention at all, aside from the occasional weapon change when facing immune enemies. The very fact I couldn’t cope with the twitch-based gunplay AND the micromanagement of the weird Sci-fi Magic Powers at the same time, and so tried to spec one side of that gameplay out entirely, hints at a problem I had with the game, which others may have had too. FPS or Button Mashing – not both please!

The game straddles that awkward no-mans land where few other titles dare to tread, the Skill-Based MMOFPS, where its about the aiming, and yet is still cluttered down with stats and levels and gear. Not many other people have tried this, and those that do generally come to grief. Planetside, a game I have an enormous personal fondness for, needs you to be AIMING PERFECTLY ALL THE TIME for four or more hours a night. Auto Assault was about driving cars about at very high speeds, itself requiring sharp concentration, and in addition, all cars had a roof-mounted swivelling gun, aimed by the mouse, which also required you to be quite focused, as a player, the whole time, to use effectively. Wearying over long spells.

For many MMO players, which presumably was the core market for all three for these titles, the sudden shift of mental gears was probably a bit jarring and unexpected. I’m not suggesting that MMO players are untrainable slugs with geological reflexes; not at all! I am one, you know! But what I do wonder, is if FPS gameplay is meant to be a thing any players of any games can stay sharp at for the sorts of  spans MMOs are typically played for? Many nights, I’d come away after three hours in any of these three titles, feeling physically drained and mentally shattered. In many ways, it was like trying to sprint a marathon.

At this point, I’d like to direct you to this excellent post on downtime:

Raph’s Website: Ways to make your virtual space more social

…which I, peanut gallery chimp that I am, happen to think holds a lot of water, and is essentially saying that a game like Tabula Rasa, where its all go, all the time, is probably heading for troubles.

Out of all the jibes I’ve made in this little ‘Half-Arsed Guesses Why Tabula Rasa Went Wrong’ series, this one worries me the most, as it suggests, like the low numbers for Planetside, and the canning of Auto Assault, that the average MMO player is quite happy where they are, and doesn’t really want anyone to start mucking about with the format. Which in turn means dubious things for The Agency, among other upcoming titles. I suspect the future is in little tweaks, not huge genre-busting, but we shall see.

So far I’ve not yet posted what I think was the main reason, for me, that TR didn’t work. Look out for the last instalment soon, and congratulations to anyone who got a gun named after them in the recent and probably last, TR patch. You deserve it.

Back to rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic then, and more poking about what remains of Tabula Rasa. Right from the word go, one of the big features of the game was its Control Points. I’ve talked a bit about those back in April 2008, in my guise of free-faced newbie, and on paper, they seemed like a great idea.

The basic setup is simple enough; a base with a flag in the middle, walls, turrets and a force-field gate, which every so often, gets rushed by the Bane. If the players don’t put up a spirited enough defence the Bane capture it, and access to its facilities is lost. The whole thing needs then to be sieged and liberated to restore the status quo.

Sounds like a bit of quick fun, and an alternative to questing and grinding of an average session, (and indeed, for a moment, it felt like the PvE Planetside I’d dreamt of) but on balance, I wonder if they should have been ditched before they even went in. Unlike my previous nitpicking, I suspect that this is more of a substantial issue, and one with ramifications for existing and future other titles.

The basic problem is that the Enemy, in this case, the Bane invasion force, is relentless, tireless and inexhaustible. We, on the other hand, are not. As I warp about the two worlds right now, almost all of the designated CP flags are red – enemy hands, with the exceptions being the first one or two in Wilderness – the first zone a new player will encounter one in. Granted, the game is basically full of sightseers on a free pass right now, but even at it’s height, I have almost constant memories of not being able to get into these bases – having to sprint and hurtle at those few that did seem to come up blue when i was nearby, just to tag the waypoints or complete the missions there.

I expect to begin with, many people made a real effort to keep these outposts open, fighting hard and often, but every twenty minutes, on the clock, the invasion would start again. I’m doing research in the Purgas CP, in Divide at the moment, and every 20 mins, the alarms go and I’m seeing:

Wave 1: Approx 40x Incoming (Thrax, Machina, Caretakers, Grenadiers; both gates)

Wave 2: Approx 80x Incoming (As above, plus Super Thrax Boss commander; both gates; arrives immediately Wave 1 is destroyed)

All these monsters are Lv19-20, in a map with a suggested level range of 11-16. I ran about hosing the bejessus out of them all with the flamethrower, but then again, I am Lv46. It’s trivial for me, so no loot or xp, but I like to think I’m performing a public service of sorts, keeping the road open. I guess what was intended, is that a practiced and complementary team of 8-10 Lv16-18 players in effect, permanently man the stockade, for the greater good of the larger playing public, er, I mean the remnants of mankind!

They added Prestige Points and the like, for taking part at these CPs, but few people could have ever been doing this infinitely repeatable task over and over, as intended, even in it’s height, and I remember seeing all sorts of guides appearing, on how to solo-liberate the CP bases, mostly so folks could get inside and get on with missions and travel. Personally, using those techniques, as a Lv46, I can just about solo-capture the ones in the Marshes map (Lv 36-38), which isn’t terribly practical, and even then, it’s frighteningly easy to overpull and get decimated by sheer numbers. For anything more, I just have to do what many people seem to have had to do all along; ask forlornly on general chat for a bored high-level – not to help retake the place, but to just turn up and swat it.

I think this has roots in Tabula Rasa’s lack of obvious or coherent group dependency, and also in the often solo-friendly nature of the title. People don’t generally group for much, or didn’t in my day anyway; poor LFG tools, basic online shyness, and ultimately, lack of anyone else to actually group with, all helping to teach people how to over-perform solo, and indeed, eventually get the trick of soloing CPs as needed. (I expect many L50s can, with patience, solo any CP they need; hats off to you of course, but my point is that is shouldn’t be quite so necessary in the first place!)

It shouldn’t have to be such a pain to get from A to B or hand in a mission, and the absolute regularity of the invasions taught volumes on the nature of futility. In the end, I expect most simply couldn’t be bothered to retake that base AGAIN…what would be the point, when you turn your back for twenty minutes, and it falls? Very dispiriting that – seeing a red flag on the map, on a base you only just left, after fighting hard to win it back. And then, as a microcosm of MMOs in general, you start to ask yourself some very dark questions indeed…

So another possible reason, and one that worries me more than most, as in essence, what Control Points were was a kind of open ended quest, which anyone could just roll up and help with. A kind of Public Quest, if you will, with Open Grouping, if you like, and what TR has shown me, is that you absolutely cannot base automated gameplay mechanics on a permanent ‘staffing’ of a minimum number of players, ad infinitum. Sometimes there will be too many, mostly too few, and rarely will they all want the same thing in the same gaming session anyway…

Current TR General Chat Mood: Impotent Rage at WoW; ‘fantasy is for fags’; Huxley will be awesome.

Shine on you crazy diamonds…

In between the (once more) increasing number of online gaming appointments I now find myself with, I’m still finding time for Tabula Rasa, which has apparently gone completely free a month earlier than originally stated:

TaRapedia: News

Meaning that anyone who managed to recently snag a box for 97 cents or whatnot, can probably go have a poke about for the next two months gratis, right now. Have a look while you can!

I’m doing just that, cutting edge front-line journo-wannabe that I am, and nitpicking as I go. I’ve just got the one character on the go, nearly L46, and when that one gets there, I expect I’ll be done. I’ve almost no interest at all in trying out any other classes at this point, which is strange really considering how one of the title’s big departures from The Standard MMO, was it’s cloning system. I’ve even got the box here, and on the back, it’s there in the big list of bullet point features:

“Character Cloning System”

“Explore different character classes without the need to level up a new character”

Arguably, one of the few true innovations that the game brought to our genre, and I just had to check back in my previous posts because I wasn’t sure if I deemed it ‘Nifty!’ or not. It’s the sort of thing that might qualify, certainly, and at first glance, this does all seem like genius, but now I wonder if it wasn’t one of the reasons for TR’s poor numbers.

Here’s how it works: You make a new character, and don’t pick a class at all. You start life as a Recruit, as does everyone else. Recruits get enough gun and armour skills to get by, until L4, where you then choose either Soldier or Specialist. Similar divisions occur at L14 and L29, eventually shaking out into the eight Proper character classes, similar to early EverQuest 2.

Unlike EverQuest 2 however, (who pulled the whole tree thing anyway, retro-fitting it with more usual ‘Choose at L1′ stuff, a year or two in), Tabula Rasa also allows you to effectively take character saves, using the Cloning system.

Each zone has an overriding meta-mission called a Target of Opportunity. To complete this you have to do all sorts of different activities in that zone; kill X of Y, visit all X waypoints, capture all X Logos, complete all the Instances, etc. Completing one of these is more or less completing the zone, and for that, you get a Clone Credit.

You can then, at any time, use one of these, via the Character Select screen, to take a copy of yourself, at any point in your progress. The new clone will be the same class and level, with the same amount of XP. You can alter appearance here, even gender, but must give it a different first name. It keeps your ‘family name’, of course.

From there, you can just log in as that new character, just as if it were a ‘From Scratch’ alt, and off you go, or just log back in as the original and continue where you left off. The new clone effectively gets a free respec, and starts life with all points unspent, so the system has a limited usefulness that way I suppose, but you can do that to the original character in-game with actual  respec tokens anyway.

It became very quickly apparent that the only real and meaningful use of this system, was to clone just before making a L4, L14 or L29 branch choice, allowing you to basically pick both, instead of having to choose one and stick to it. Reaching L4 with a fresh uncloned alt was trivial anyway; an hour or less of play, meaning that really, you only ever needed to clone twice – three times if you wanted a Crafting Alt under the old crafting system.

As a L45 Grenadier, I’ve diligently cloned off a Ranger at 14, and a Guardian at L29, covering me for four out of the eight final classed, and now, I have nine more clone credits in my inventory which I can see no use for at all. To get the other four end-classes unlocked, I have to start a new Recruit and go up the other side at L4 anyway.

But what’s not to like? Having picked Grenadier and rolled with it a bit, if I decided that I want to try Guardian instead, I only have to redo that last fifteen levels, not the whole forty-five! Despite it being a genre about repetition, only a madman would pass up on the opportunity to skip the first thirty levels, surely?

But then I thought about alting in general. Would World of Warcraft (or [insert favourite MMO here]) actually work under a similar system? Taken to it’s natural conclusion; upon reaching L80 with your first and only character, you could create any other character at L80 that you liked – making the whole thing a journey that need only be made once. The TR cloning system isn’t quite that blatant about it all, true, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if removing the need to start from scratch didn’t rob the game of some much needed replayability, and therefore, cause many players to spend less months in there than they might otherwise have done?

True, that particular journey had only one path; ping-ponging back and forth between exactly the same zones on Foreas and Arieki, no matter what class you picked that time through, but I can’t help but wonder if there wasn’t a reason that EverQuest 2 scrubbed their branching trees in favour of something more conventional, before TR was even born.

I think that I’m probably quite unusual in that I go at Max Level once and once only, taking a long time to get there, but typically walking away happy once I do make it. But I wonder how many MMO players do repeat that journey, and how often? It’s possible that by being all clever with clones, Tabula Rasa robbed itself of a few more months of individual player interest than it could have had.

Still not done, more to come…

Surprising how easy it was to get back into the swing of things in Tabula Rasa. I’ve picked up my dormant L43 Grenadier and am already L45. One of the first things I did on my return was cash in my big pile of Prestige Points (Gained for looting rare stuff and killing Bane during CP battles), and bought enough +50% XP Booster buffs to last me all the way to the end, in a game not noted for it’s excessive grinding in the first place.

Its fun, and frustrating in approximately equal measure, but I’m confident of meeting my deadline in the time left. I’m sort of there on ‘business’ too though; an extended nitpicking tour, if you like, poking about the thing and trying to work out what didn’t work. One thing I remember being especially bad from my previous sojourn was the crafting.

Originally, you had the option of upgrading weapons and armour with various buffs, much like those found on any ‘magic’ items in almost every other MMO; resistances, increased stats, more damage and so on. Many items came with this stuff on it already, but you could put more on too. To do this, you have to loot the right kind of schematics from dead enemies.

These themselves were quite limited, and very specific. A typical randomly dropped schematic might be only good for one specific buff, on a very specific target item, of a very narrow level range. This in itself was almost impossible to work with, making it very unlikely you’d ever come across a schematic that was of any use to you at all. I suppose the intention was that a rather optimistically large player base would all routinely make these available on the Military Surplus, so they’d get to whoever could use them. Unfortunately, most people ended up selling these to vendors, simply to free up room in the backpack crafting tab, largely to stop your character going ‘I don’t have room for that!’ every time you run over a corpse.

Then you needed skills to be able to do the crafting. These came from the same pool and points that you also needed for actual combat skills. Another bad move, effectively forcing everyone to make a Crafting Alt as soon as they hit the first Clone point, or face spending valuable survival skill points on non-viability fluff. There was a account-shared bank-box though, so folks muddled by, passing the necessaries to the mules as needed.

Then, you had to find the right component to make up the buff from the schematic. You got these by dismantling existing, (and often perfectly good in their own right), items of equipment, which had a similar buff on it, to the one you wanted to put on the other item. With me so far? Again, rather complicated, and making it very hard work to get through the whole process, often for very little gain, when quests and monsters tended to shower you with enough loot that you’d probably find a better item with a close enough buff set on anyway.

Add to that the arcane and unexplained limits to how many buffs an item could hold, (a strange numerical balancing act between the [1], [2], [3] and [4] Power buffs and the item’s intrinsic ‘Green’ ‘Blue’ ‘Purple’ rarity, and no ability to remove unwanted or useless existing buffs, and the whole thing dissolved in a great big mess of ‘Can’t Be Bothered’ almost from day one.

There were also other schematics to let folks manufacture consumables; grenades, ammo, etc, but these usually required shop-bought materials which made the whole exercise not that much cheaper (and far more time consuming) than just buying the stuff ready made, from any vendor anywhere, and to be honest, I’d never worried about money in all my time in there anyway.

Clearly, Crafting V1 was Not Very Good; time consuming, unpredictable and certainly no where near robust enough for anyone to consider making a living in-game doing it. Possibly this put a particular subsection of potential players off the thing, and not just the Dedicated Types. Crafting fills a valuable niche as a Downtime Activity for all players; something to do between the CONSTANT ACTION!

A new and greatly revised system replaced the above, apparently in Deployment 13. Here’s how it works now:

You kill stuff anyway, and a lot of it drops vendor-trash loot. Most of this can also be Salvaged, resulting in a new kind of resource called Mimeomech. All the trash and even unwanted useful equipment can be reduced to this single resource, which now acts as a kind of currency to power the rest of the new crafting system. Good move – consolidate the hundreds of possible crafting materials into one single universal resource.

Next, any item with a buff on it, can have that buff removed. The item loses the buff, but is otherwise unharmed, and you gain a module that represents that buff as well. This buff module can then be upgraded to be more powerful, placed in a different piece of equipment, giving that the buff, or replaced with a different (and potentially more useful to you) buff. The whole system now seems to work like Lego, and appears to be a great deal more versatile than any crafting I’ve seen elsewhere.

To keep it all in check and balance things a bit, all of the above operations now cost Mimeomech to do. Removing and upgrading modules seem to cost a negligible amount of the stuff, but adding module to an item seems to become increasingly costly to do, per overall buff pointage the item holds. For each [1] point you add, the cost of the next [1] addition doubles, eventually resulting in a massively over the top fee which will take a phenomenal amount of farming to find the gloop for. However, because the player now has complete control over what buffs are, and are not, on the item, it becomes quite a manageable and flexible system, and such vast costs become desirable certainly, but not required.

All of the above appears to happen with a 100% success rate, which is vital in any crafting system that doesn’t have you learning anything (Crafting XP and levels) from failed attempts, and removing the fear of destroying a priceless functional item. It also requires no specific skills at all, meaning that everyone can do it, which given the almost entirely desolate state of the Military Surplus these days, is probably just as well.

I only get new armour every five levels, and have my L45 set now, so the above system lets me continue to upgrade my armour, but in more specific and focused ways. Almost reminds me of various ‘Levelling Items’ I’ve seen elsewhere; Anarchy Online had these, and I believe LotRO’s new Legendary Weapons do similar. The main difference being that in TR, I have to manually ‘level’ the items, but in the direction I want, by finding useful donor items, hoiking the buffs out of those, and gradually increasing the power of my own Perfect Armour Set (which is almost certainly different to other classes and players), as more Mimeomech allows.

You know, with its empowering versatility and seamless streamlining, I think I’d actually call this Nifty! thinking about it, but like much else concerned with Tabula Rasa, its probably too little too late.

Clearly, “duff crafting” isn’t the reason TR wasn’t a winner from the word go, but all these little things add up. More poking about to come…

I’m not quite sure why I’ve just gone and subbed up for what remains of Tabula Rasa. A number of reasons, I suppose. The game is effectively over; and will be gone for good at the end of February ’09; leaving about three months of play left. After that, it won’t be possible to play it at all.

I think this is one reason. I still have an Asheron’s Call 2: Fallen Kings box sat in my game-pile, an object with is absolutely useless now, and has been for some time. I still look wistfully at it sometimes, and would love the opportunity to have a wander about that place; an opportunity now lost for good. And so I sign up for another title that will shortly be removed entirely, in hopes of satiating myself perhaps.

Perhaps it’s a kind of solidarity, albeit a hypocritical one at best. I left the thing to hang many months ago, which in some small part, probably lead to its forthcoming execution. I doubt anyone will thank or praise me for this last token effort on the Numbers front. Its gone beyond that now anyway, and I expect even if two million people dashed out to sign up this month, it wouldn’t make any kind of difference, or repeal its sentence. Its a very personal kind of homage though; the game deserved better than this, I think, so the least I can do is hold vigil with it.

Another reason is my own completionism. Despite having played practically all of them, I don’t as a rule finish any of these strange offshoots of the Computer Game, which in its Single Player form, I complete all the time. Ten years at it in various forms, and all I have to show for it is two ‘Max Level’ characters, anywhere, ever. One is in World of Warcraft, a game noted for is comparative ease of progress and levelling; a pre-Burning Crusade L60 Warrior. The other probably doesn’t even count; a BR23 Terran Republic soldier in Planetside. Was quite chuffed with both of them, but some time after achieving these heady goals, both games have since moved the goalposts, damnit, and I’m now 20 levels short in WoW and two Battle Ranks behind in Planetside. It’d be nice to have ‘won’ one of these things, and what with one thing and another, if I can get to L50 in TR before the end, its a safe bet that those goalposts won’t ever be moved again.

Given that folks say you can go 0 to 50 in less than a week at a fair push, I’m confident I can fill in my last seven levels on schedule. Another aspect of the game I always enjoyed was hunting down the Logos locations and filling in my own little blank slate. If I manage the levelling in time, I’d love to make a big push at that if possible.

I think the main reason though, is one of academic curiosity. I left the thing, and had my own reasons, sure, (only some of which were even to do with the game itself) but I’m not sure I ever worked out why everyone else gave up on it. Post-mortems abound (and not just since the closure news), and I’ve seen many cogent and credible theories as to What Went Wrong with what, on the face of it, ought to have been an MMO revolution and step into a whole new phase of MMO design and gameplay. Its easy to just post a hearty ‘lawlscifi’ or ‘RG is teh sux!’, but I suspect its probably more complicated than that.

So in the time I have left, I want to give it a really good picking apart. There’s probably a great deal we can all learn from the whole project, and I hope, over the next, and final, three months, to analyse, and understand…

Oh dear, its that time again, and another in an increasingly long line of Exit Surveys. I like to share these with the whole internet, partly because it’s an interesting insight into what a game company thinks might be the problem with their own game; a set of questions that typically provide information in themselves, and partly, it’s an easy blog post to write!

This time its Tabula Rasa. For you, Van Hemlock, ze war is over…

Podcast listeners will have already heard about my difficulties with Maligo Base Grouping, P’reo Das Mission Troubles and my increasing fatigue with the title in general. Well, Monday saw a somewhat dissatisfying problem in the Incurables Ward instance, off Crucible. I was duoing with my longtime cross-game compatriot, and we were doing fairly well. Its another of the Underground Brann Facility type instances, fun enough in basic structure, if a little on the rambling side (much running backward and forward for keys, Doom 1 style), but not without it’s bugs.

The first was annoying, but not fatal; my Engineer friend’s robot pet thing managed to aggro a Brann prisoner NPC chap near the entrance, who wasn’t even red to begin with – to us anyway. I’m not sure what he was there for; (flavour text?), but we were going to leave him alone, just in case we needed him alive later on. No such luck – he took one look at our Engineer’s robot pet and opened fire. The robot fired back, and then he started shooting at the Engineer too, by association, and then I started shooting him back, to stop the Engineer getting killed, and then…meh. It all got a bit Reservoir Dogs, and the whole thing degenerated into a farce as we tried to run away and not kill him, in case it further broke some other quest, and he came after us with a Terminator-like tenacity that almost saw us have to leave and reset the instance entirely!

The real kicker, and as it turned out, straw that broke the camel’s back, came later on. We were doing well, and had gone without bugs for so long that we were starting to get back into the spirit of it all, when I disconnected. Happens now and again, to all people on all connections, and this one was literally a blip; downtime of less than a second, and an immediate reconnection to the internet and TR. I arrive to find myself still in the instance, but now I’ve been kicked from the group, AND, the main quest through the place, required for the Target of Opportunity tick, has now failed. Worse still, I now ‘cannot invite that player from this location’, to rejoin the group, despite them actually standing three feet away, patiently waiting for me to come back. Ridiculous!

We carried on anyway; no sense both of us failing the job, but were in effect, both soloing for the remainder of the instance, competing for xp and loot, and in my case, getting nothing mission-based for my troubles. Frankly I’m amazed I even ended up back in the same place, as on previous occasions, even the slightest disconnect results in me being thrown clean out of the instance, rest of the group be damned.

All in all, a bit of a chore these days, and I find it unbelievable that a modern MMO isn’t clever enough to maintain the group, and instance presence, for a couple of minutes, just in case, you know, the player didn’t actually mean to lose their internet connection. Still, at least 50% of our group managed something useful for their hour or so spent in there, and afterwards, outside, it was surprising that it was them that decided to throw in the towel first. I guess I’m more of a masochist when it comes to MMOs, but I certainly didn’t put up much of a fight, I must admit…

On to the survey then:

1.  How would you rank your overall experience with Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa™?

A loaded question; I’m quitting for a reason, after all. I put Average. A lot of it was quite good, but some of it needs a lot of work.

2. Why did you leave? (you may select more than one)

The interesting question, with a lot of different options. I picked a few, the most pressing of which were:

Game Bugs: See previous ranting on the blog and podcast.

Level 30+ content not compelling: True enough in my own case. Everything was a blast, all the time, until I hit Plateau, and then the grind did rather start to make itself felt, despite the occasional fun and inspired map or instance. My big powerful L30 weapon, the Propellant Gun, went almost unused in favour of L15′s choice, the Rocket Launcher. (I didn’t pick the Lack of 50+ end game content option, mostly because I didn’t get there, stopping at L43. I’d imagine it’s a popular answer though.)

Lack of social gameplay/reasons to group. AND I prefer to play solo and could not: I picked both of these, which at first glance might seem a contradiction. I’ve elaborated a bit on this strange duality on the podcast, but all too often, I’d find myself trying to get group tasks done alone (CPs, Instances), and then sometimes within the same session, be duoing or in a small group and massively overpowering the surrounding tasks and missions. Hard to explain, and possibly just me.

My friends/clanmates left: Well, I only really had one friend in there, but they did leave that very night, and so I went with them.

Items I did not pick include; World not visually pleasing (It was a very nice world, with a good backstory and design), No compelling story (Ditto), Did not like the game interface and control (Takes a little getting used to, but the basic shooting is a lot of fun, fresh and novel), and Character classes and skills not compelling (I liked the Grenadier – gutsy and powerful, although the flamethrowers are a bit rubbish.) I also didn’t pick any of the subscription related options – a game is either good or bad; the fee, or lack of, rarely comes into it for me.

There was no ‘I paid for RICHARD GARRIOTT’S Tabula Rasa, and never saw the guy once!’ option, which was a shame. I do feel cheated in that regard!

3. For approximately how many months have you subscribed to Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa™?

I’m glad I keep a blog now – I can look this stuff up, and not have to remember! 4-5 months, which I don’t regret in the slightest. All things have their time however…

4. What best describes your involvement with other players within the Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa™ community?

I went with ‘I teamed up with others but not on a regular basis’. I’ve ranted lots on the podcast about the general lack of ambient grouping in general. With the exception of my long time existing Friend of Many MMOs, I learnt to solo early and well, a habit that has probably stuck with a lot of players. Apparently, there is a community there, with a number of players on the EU server going out of their way to run events and such, and of course John and Matt’s excellent work on TabulaCast. Just never quite found myself connecting at that sort of level.

5. How many characters did you create from level 1?

Two – The cloning means that any more are entirely unnecessary.

6. How many characters did you create by cloning a character?

Eight – you’d be silly not to make a clone just before each career choice – the alternative is to do the last thirty levels over again. I also made a Crafting Clone, because for some reason, crafting skills uses the same points as combat skills. I think I actually used this clone twice, if that.

7. What level is your highest level character?

Level 40-50. 43 to be precise. So close! I didn’t see a need or reason to alt much at all.

8. What would bring you back? Please rank the following options

I skipped this one entirely, as it was presented in a ridiculous Sudoku-like format, where you have to rank fifteen items from Slightly Quite Important to Partially Rather Not Important, and also you aren’t allowed to give two items the same preference. There are many items there about which I have no preference at all, but it won’t let you set those all to Average. Couldn’t be arsed to master this minigame… next!

No free-text here, so I’ll put my own few here instead:

• Sidekick/Mentor Mechanic (See CoH/V, EQ2, etc, and I believe an absolute requirement for any future MMO that has levels in the first place.)
• More robust group handling (Disconnects, Instances, etc – give me a few minutes…I’m reconnecting as fast as I can!)
• More intelligent CP force scaling (If only one guy is there, don’t still send 50 Bane, two waves, and a boss three levels higher than the rest of the map!)

I’d add Improved Crafting and LFG, but they’re already on DG’s To-Do list, apparently.

A thing that Wouldn’t Bring Me Back, is PAUs (Player Exosuit Mecha thingies), as frankly, there are a lot more pressing things to attend to than a fluff player-mount that the maps are too small to accommodate anyway.

9. Please check the box next to the games that you have played. (you may select more than one)

See sidebar.

10. Please check the box next to the games that you are currently playing. (you may select more than one)

Also see sidebar.

11. Where did you buy your copy of Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa™?

A Shop. Couldn’t see any examples that matched UK outlets, so just ticked ‘Speciality Store’, mostly for its delicious undertones… nudge nudge, wink, ‘Know what I mean?’

I never pre-order, out of principle (It sends the wrong message), and only ever buy Collector’s Editions by accident!

12. How do you usually learn about games? (you may select more than one)

Shockingly, no option for Virgin Worlds or Massively here, so just ticked ‘Genre specific sites (MMORPG.com, TenTonHammer.com)’. Disappointed not to see my own blog listed as an example of ‘Major blogs’.

And finally…

13. If you are leaving to play another MMO, which one are you going to play next?

Age of Conan. More on that to come…

Number 14 was the usual freeform textbox, in which I left, what I hope was an encouraging few remarks, critical, but constructively so! I have enjoyed my time there, and will almost certainly be back in six months, a year. Looking forward to seeing how much better it will no doubt be. Right now though, the frustrations don’t quite outweigh the enjoyments, but when you add fatigue, well, probably high time to move on, once again…

In the dust and magma of Crucible, lies the Stall Junkyard, dumping ground of the self-liberated Brann ex-convicts, abandoned to their own devices on the harsh world of Arieki. With the destruction of the homeworld, the remaining Brann transportees rose up and tenaciously started anew, throwing off their shackles and forging a new and more gritty kind of society; functional, mechanical, and a far cry from the spiritual idyll of their original roots. Such industrialisation creates a tremendous amount of junk, and most of it ends up here.

Not the most picturesque locations for a away-day holiday, but we’d gotten orders to head in there anyway. Seems that a hard disk of monumentally embarrassing intel had been put on a dropship, bound for Foreas, and shot down over Crucible. Being just so much scrap now, the downed bird wound its way to the same place all other mechanical garbage ends up, Stall Junkyard, and it was us that drew the short straw, and had to go in and find it.

Aimed at groups of L40-45 players, the place turned out to be quite a challenge for my Grenadier self and my Engineer cohort, not only technically, but aesthetically too. A far cry from my last combat debriefing; the lonesome majesty of the Ashen Desert. This map is brown. Very brown. The ground is brown, the tottering mountains of scrap are brown. The air, is brown. In the words of my cohort; “This has to be the fugliest map you’ve ever taken me to.” Personally, I found it quite unique actually, but had to agree that it wasn’t the sort of place I’d want to work through twice, no…

The map is actually quite large, being perhaps the same kind of size as Treebark Camp, but unlike that one, is laid out in a manner designed to drive the casual instanceer quite mad. The entire place is essentially one enormous mountain of rusting broken machinery, in places compressed into pathways, ranging from the entrance, upwards as you head north. These foothills are mostly made out of slopes which are just too steep to walk up, and of course, as is usually the case in MMOs, our super battle-hardened space troopers are incapable of actual climbing. This all means that the route through the place follows an extremely tortuous winding zigzag, back and forth, as we try to just get from A to B, let alone deal with any of the mission objectives!

The objectives were quite varied, as Cirkin, the Brann in charge of the junkpile naturally needed us to do a few errands before agreeing to help look for the missing data disk. Much of this involved sorting through the pile itself, hunting for specific bits of rubbish that he was too lazy to go and find himself. The more extreme parts he wanted were still being used by some of Arieki’s ever-present insane ex-warden robots, which didn’t help, although I’ve really got Robots down by now; Laser vs Reconstructors, and EMP vs Wardens. One or two bolts from the appropriate shoulder-mounted launcher typically does the trick, even on the orange Instance-grade robots, and my cohort’s cluster of deployable turrets mops up stragglers quite well. Grenadier and Engineer makes for a pretty decent duo, we’re finding; with me dishing out the big damage, and my friend keeping me alive long enough to do so. Mind you, neither of us is too shabby solo, either.

Hardly a walk in the park however, and we came close to quitting in disgust a number of times. The Thraxx were rummaging through the pile as well, of course, and took some killing, especially when we got blindisded by the ‘Sentinel’ type of mob. These mini floating drones are quite lethal if you aren’t ready for them, as each is in fact a mini-dropship of sorts, and if it spots you, will teleport in 10 or so Thraxx infantry, which brings new terror to the panic-typed “adds”! Got trampled a few times like that!

Then there was what we took to calling ‘The Shoal’. For purely sadistic reasons, the level designer saw fit to add a roaming cluster of warden bots that traverse the map from east to west, about half way up. This wouldn’t be a problem apart form the fact that they are all L41-Orange, and there are at least 40 of them! We literally didn’t know what hit us the first few times; en-masse, they have a horrific alpha strike, making any thoughts of ‘luring’, ‘pulling’ or other similar strategy completely out of the question, and I wonder if they’re even possible to take out at all. We soon learnt to watch the minimap very carefully. You can see them coming, and if on the ball, just get the hell out of their way pronto. Luckily, they aren’t an objective, and you probably are just meant to avoid them.

Near the top end of the place we had the most troubles, a section populated by ‘Ultra Wardenbots’, full-on red boss monsters which took a hell of a beating, with me hanging on to my EMP Dispersal Gun* for dear life and the Engineer Turreting, Shielding and Area Repairing like crazy. We could just about managed to kill one of these, but there’s a whole patrol route full of them, and any adds at all here, are fatal, as we learnt early and often.

After the first few runs back up there from the respawn point, at the entrance, I remembered about Squad Waypoints, which helped a bit. A few more goes after that, I remembered not to put those where The Shoal patrolled, which helped even more!

A few more goes still, and we realised that these super-mega-death-robot Bosses, were respawning and that we were making no headway at all. There then followed a large amount of wandering about the map, to see if there was a better way up onto that section, where our mission objective was; mostly to no avail. The breakthrough came from desperation mostly, when we just decided to try legging it through the patrols, and out the far side, a comical moment with me drawing a huge amount of aggro, and the engineer trying to keep up and repair me as much as possible. Like a game of Rugby, I reached a point to the north of the main patrol route which looked safe-ish, and then desperately tried to slam down a fresh WP teleporter while my train of angry super-robots beat the everliving snot out of me, and the Engineer tried to keep me alive just long enough for the placement to complete. We both died horribly, again, but the WP finished forming, allowing us to use the WP at the respawn to zip directly back up there, and now, behind enemy lines! Possibly an exploit, but I prefer the term Lateral Thinking! It wouldn’t have been possible at all if the WP placement was interruptible, but there was no way the pair of us would be able to fight our way upstream fast enough through the continually repspawning super-robots, and I wonder how well 6x L45s would cope either.

From there we sneaked round the back of a larger trashpile and managed to take out the mission objective super-robot. Well, sneaked about as well as a rocket-launching kamikaze grunt and insanely-agroing turret-dispensing shield-dome raising techie can anyway.

Noisy old day in the junkyard, but we got the foozle Cirkin needed and reported back, only to find that all his workers have now gone on strike, and need convincing to go back to work. I tell you what they do need convincing; not to rush a flamethrower down a narrow corridor, that’s what! Not that I minded especially, and things were a lot easier going from there on. Predictably enough, the leader of the revolutionaries had some kind of sob story to tell, which my associate completely fell for. Me? I was too busy setting fire to people’s heads to trouble myself with complex morality at that point, but sure enough, it turned out that Cirkin was playing us like fools, and had the data disk all along, so it was back to the start, and a quick tussle with his own pet super-robot. We’d kind of seen this coming, to be honest and didn’t even talk to the guy that last time without setting up a massively brutal nest of turrets, shields, robots of our own, and my own small contribution, RAGE V! (I’m a bit slow these days, so have eschewed the complex micromanagement of multiple Logos abilities, and have instead, put all my points into weapons and armour, V across the board. Damnit, I’m a Space Trooper, not a Wizard! MOAR SHOOTY! Rage V is my sole exception, and only cos it makes my gunz even moar shooty!)

Bereft of bodyguard, Cirkin scarpered, but left the disk behind, which we promptly snatched. Mission complete, crisis averted and day saved! Back to the barn for tea and medals, and a very long hot bath! I hope our next assignment has more colours that aren’t brown…

* An unlikely kind of EMP based flamethrower. Given that the only EMP pulses of any sort I know about, are typically caused by high-atmosphere nuclear detonations, I tend to worry an awful lot about the accompanying large yellow and green backpack I wear that powers this thing – one stray shot in an hectic firefight and I’ll leave a crater the size of Concordia Wilderness! Mind you, on the plus side, it’ll be over before I can feel a thing. I would feel bad about the players on the adjoining maps however, who now have a short but lingering life of falling out hair and constant vomiting to contend with. Still, as they say, War is hell!

I do like a good desert. Despite never having been in a real one*, of all the Standard MMO Landscapes, I often find that the Desert Map is the most interesting. There often isn’t a lot in a desert, hence the name, but even so, it is perhaps this very emptiness that I find so appealing.

Very much an Explorer thing, I think, but a well done desert is a truly exotic place; howling winds blowing mournfully through rocky pinnacles, or over wide expansive dunes, which reach on into the distance like a solid sea. Here and there, perhaps, a ruined edifice of a people long since vanished, a statue, a sepulchre, eroded almost out of recognition by the perpetual and endless scouring winds. The occasional oasis, or settlement, the wandering tribes, and the empty lone places where the careless traveller can really lose themselves, for a time. Done well, it all comes together at sunset, as the light bleeds red and the sky becomes all colours, but in a subtle and delicate way.

Probably a lot more convenient in a computer game, than for real, but I do find myself drawn to these truly wild places. From the Desert of Ro in Everquest, to Tatooine in Star Wars Galaxies, the northern reaches of Rubi Ka in Anarchy Online and the wartorn planets of Ishundar  and Solsar in Planetside (where contemplative peace is hard to find, but does exist!) Tanaris, the Sinking Sands, the Crystal Desert and the Desolation…I’ve loved them all. Hell, if EVE Online had a desert, I’d go lose myself in that too, although it could be argued that the spaces between the stars, is the ultimate kind of desert.

When it came to Tabula Rasa, I was beginning to get a bit worried. Most of the maps I’ve seen so far are either temperate forestry (Foreas), or lava-riven moorland crags (Arieki), but I’ve now made it to the Ashen Desert, which seems to be TR’s go at the Desert Zone, and it’s another wind-scoured waste of rocky sandstone outcroppings, and in this case, volcanic ash instead of sand. Does the job though, and I’m more than happy to settle in here for the next few levels. Here’s a postcard!

Being a desert of The Future, it wouldn’t be complete without Vast Alien Machinery littered about the place. The curvy bits are apparently some kind of Brann moisture collectors, which is all very Dune. No sandworms as of yet, which is a shame. Johnny Bane wouldn’t know what hit him if I came riding into his CP on one of those!

From my perch above, I sit and drink in the lone majesty of it all, while occasionally taking very careful potshots at the White Oasis Post CP, which seems to be almost permanently in Bane possession. Presumably, not many other troopers feel quite the way I do about the desolation and ash, and a number of folks I’ve talked to say they hate the generally blasted and alien world of Arieki, much preferring the more comfortable familiarity of Foreas, with its mostly green, and painfully familiar, wooded grasslands. Bleh…give me a desert any day…

*(My only encounter with a real desert was from the window of a very aggressively air-conditioned Greyhound bus, travelling through Arizona and New Mexico. I was three days without proper sleep and probably didn’t appreciate it, to be honest.)

All sorts going on Tabula Rasa at the moment, and for want of a better term, I guess this is probably my main game just now. For reasons mostly to do with altitis and accidental sociability, we find ourselves on Concordia, again. I do quite like these first three maps; Wilderness, Divide and Pallisades, you understand, but if I have to go through Torcastra Prison one more time, I may go mad.

This time, and in a bid to keep level levels with a new-person we’d met, we’ve started over and swapped branches, with my usual and previously Specialist friend going Soldier and me trying out the Healer/Support side of the career tree. (I think everyone, in any game, should spend a few levels on an alt, as whatever ‘Healer’ class is available – it is always an education!) They’ve gone Ranger this time, and generally going a bit potty with all the revised and new Carpet Bombing stuffs; Ion Beams, Napalms and the like, and also using Stealth Armour, which a) Doesn’t protect that well in a tanking kind of role, and b) makes all the monsters not notice them much, and instead charge after me, the healer!

I’m a Biotechncian now, and in a complete reversal of my previous waffling about how suckey all the support weapon choices sounded, am now very impressed with them; the Leech Gun and Injector Guns specifically.

The Specialist’s Leech Gun, far from flinging invertebrate parasites, as I previously suspected, in fact shoots out a sustained beam laser type of thing, which drains the enemy’s armour/health, and then gives it not only to me, but to all members of my squad standing close enough to me. Genius! The actual repair tools and healing disks still seem more potent for actual healing, but crucially, I’m still doing damage to the enemy when I use it, which is very important in smaller groups and duoing. All in all, a very clever idea – Nifty, almost! Can be a bit of an ammo-hog though.

The Injector Gun is the Biotech’s weapon, and is a lot like the Space Syringes you see on many Sci-fi shows – click-hiss! This one was clearly designed by a madman however, as it is capable of delivering 25ccs of Undisclosed Green Serum X a staggering 50 feet, presumably for those more needle-phobic…er… patients. It also comes in a kind of insane ‘defibrillator’ variant, which swaps the green goo for a good 50,000 volts where it’ll do the most good, although quite when one would be required to restart someone’s heart from 50ft away, is a chapter I’ve yet to reach in my AFS Medical Textbooks.

They seem a bit wimpey at first glance, but the virulent version ignores armour entirely, and the electric one is a damage type that many things are quite weak to. I think both seem to have a mild short-lived damage over time effect as well – hard to tell. Surprisingly powerful, although they have a tendency to overheat more than other weapons, so something to look out for.

Our latest Torcastra run was as hectic as ever – that 20 minute timed rampage at the start with the mortars, being the worst bit. A lot of frantic Chaingunnery on my friend’s part, and me learning, at the very sharp end, the vagaries of being a healer in TR.

It’s quite a tricky business actually, mostly due to the FPS nature of basic gameplay. You can’t just hammer F2 through F6, and then blast off a heal and have it go automatically where it’s needed, and instead have to actually point the healing devices at the patient, in-world. Fortunately, just as you can’t accidentally shoot your own team, you can’t accidentally heal the enemy, but unusually in games of this kind, the healer does need to be a fairly good shot as well. Depending on how hyperactive one’s more front-line combatant compatriots are, this can be a bit of a headache, and the less potent AoE heal tools might be a better bet. Even with those, you still need to be near enough.

Swapping to the Leechgun became essential for the Bosses, there only being the two of us for damage, and in real panic, the Logos Ability ‘Reconstruction’, a kind of AoE heal-pulse, saved us from the brink on a number of occasions. All very hectic, and a far cry form the usual ‘heal-bot’ gameplay so lamented in the more usual Holy Trinity Class Based MMO. We still wiped a couple of times mind you, (leaving me, the only one who can resurrect, to run all the way from the start, while my lazy Ranger friend just lay there, counting down the mission timer at me!), but not so often that we couldn’t kill all four mortars in the 20 mins allowed. We literally finished with seconds to spare, which my colleague calls ‘exciting’, and made me nearly ended up having to use my Defibrillator Pistol on myself by the end of it all!

Quite looking forward to settling on a character, any character, and pressing on to beyond Crucible, actually!

Also we took time out to have a look at the new boxing arena, added this week in the patch. A curious thing, it takes the form of an entirely new map, with teleport connections from a variety of AFS bases; a bit like City of Heroes’ “Pocket D” nightclub thing, (So good as a travel route, if nothing else). Inside is a boxing ring, with plenty of room for spectators. A vendor sells the gloves, helmet and some very natty trunks, all for nominal amounts of cash and in you go. The boxing just uses the already existing Duel option, rather than being a spatially flagged FFA PvP option, but the gloves are the clever bit, being a new kind of weapon, doing, well, point blank melee damage, based on the wearer’s level.

We went a few rounds, with me consistently losing. I was even a level above my Ranger opponent, but found myself bare able to dent them, and going down myself in five or six hits. I think the problem was stat spending on my part. I’ve gone with lots of points in The One That Makes My Logos Abilities Do Lots of Damage/Healing, while my opponent is mostly spent in The One The Gives You Lots Of Hitpoints. This basically makes them far more robust than frail old me, and while not restricted by the game, there does seem to be house rules forming up already among the frequenters of the ring. For example, the use of a massive psychic lightning blasts (Which I’m quite powerful at) to even the odds would be frowned on, and most certainly is not Queensbury Rules! Similarly, the chap who leapt into the ring in full power-armour and toting a flamethrower and exploding shrapnel bursts, got a bit of a frosty reception, and strangely enough, no duel accepts!

I take it in good grace; it’s a bit of fun, but suspect anyone wishing to make a regular thing of the boxing ring should probably create a dedicated clone for the very purpose, able to respend attribute points specifically to become a good boxer. Without a respec, I’m not sure I could win that fight. While there were a few low-levels like us duking it out, the main event did seem to be the Lv50 crowd going mano-a-mano, and most likely dedicated pugilist clones at that. The thing could also do with a ‘block’ of some sort, (perhaps as a RMB ‘Ability’, free to all, that uses Logos Power or Adrenaline?) which it appears not to currently have, but I’m quite impressed with how they’ve managed to make a fun sport, without having to rewrite the entire of how combat works, mostly through the boxing gloves themselves.

I’m also impressed that it was done at all. Turns out that many of the community had already been doing this on some kind of ‘Friday Fight Nights’, only completely unsupported, just at some normal base, and having to pistol-whip each other for want of a decent fist attack. A patch or two later, the devs give them an entire arena zone for the very purpose – gloves and all. While it might be argued that there are more ‘important’ things for them to be getting on with, this kind of very hands-on involvement in player’s lives and activities does them enormous credit, and makes me much more optimistic about TR’s future, than I might otherwise be. There is never going to be ‘enough’ end-game content, ever, but the odd quirky addition like this can do wonders for morale, I think…