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On Day 2 of the Trial, Wondering Why this Game is Not More Popular?
Majestico
Member UncommonPosts: 481
First off, I know from experience that when you first start a MMO, it always usually is fun. The novelty of a new game, a world to explore, new choices in classes, etc. I remember loving Matrix Online and wondering why it was not a more popular game, until I played it for several days and realised it is basically a piece of crap (which is a shame as it had a lot of promise).
I heard about the free trial with Tabula Rasa. Now, I am not actively looking for a new game to play, as I already am involved in far too many. However, I just cannot help myself. It seems as though every other day, I find myself downloading a free2play or trial, to see what a game is like. On top of which I am currently paying two subscription games, (used to be four! But found that was just stupid, and a waste of money).
Now, currently I am playing Lotro, and really enjoying it for the storyline. I am a Tolkien fan, and love the attention to detail which Lotro has. It may not be the Holy Grail of gaming which I have been looking for, but it is my current favourite. EQ2 is my second favourite. With WoW being my third (please don't groan -hehe, I know that it has caused a lack of innovation in the genre, but in essence, it is still a good game). I think I would like AoC if my pc could run it, and also WAR (but I doubt it wil run that either).
So you have probably noticed the pattern, that these are all fantasy based games. Even my favourite Asian grinder (if I can possibly have such a thing as a favourite in this sub-genre) is Final Fantasy XI. Another fantasy themed game.
I also love sci-fi, but I find that it is seriously under used in this genre. MxO I have already discussed. Then I tried SWG, as I loved the movies, and also wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I actually loved it, for a couple of days, and then realised that there was something wrong with the gameplay. I undrstood then what the pre-nge vets were talking about. I tried Face of Mankind, which I wish I had given more of a chance, as it had a really good premise, but at the time, I did not have a lot of spare time, and so I never played MMO's much. Now I believe it is gone. Shame, as I loved the way that the players actually policed the game.
Then of course, there is EVE. I have a feeling that if I truly paid attention, and managed to wade through all the tutorials, that I would love that game. However, I have tried twice now to get into it, and I just cannot find the dedication to learn how to play it. One day I hope. As I suspect that therein lies a true classic. (Btw, I am not complaining about the level of complexity, as I think that may be part of what makes it special, just that I could not be bothered at the time)
Now finally, I come to this.
I discovered the free trial by reading an article somewhere of Garriott going into space, and putting his DNA into the International Space Station. I thought it was a joke, or a publicity stunt. But I understand that he is actually going to be doing this for real? The man is either a genuis, or an egotist, or perhaps both.
Either way, it lead me to Tabula Rasa.
Now, I have followed the MMO genre for several years now, and I have played most of them out there. Tabula had never grasped my attention. One, I knew very little about the game, and there is still next to no marketing for it, so nobody really knows anything about it, apart from you guys. Secondly, what had been putting me off, was that I thought it was going to be like RF Online. Which I think is a dreadful game. Basically just an asian-grinder, set in sci-fi world. No thanks. There was no way I was going to pay full price for this game, and then a subscription, when everyone I knew was saying it was going the way of RF Online.
Then I downloaded the free trial, and everything has changed!
Now, this could be one of those occassions when I get egg on my face, but so far, this game is brilliant! Please bear in mind that I am stil only a few hours into playing it, and have just discovered my first logos shrine (or whatever it is called). But I feel as though I had to come here and write about it. The gameplay is amazing! No simple button pushing or pressing one or two hot-keys. This feels like true combat, fps style. Something I have been wanting for ages.
I have always thought that devs made MMO's in that button pressing fashion, purely to make combat a drawn out affair, and so it would take players longer to level. thus keeping them subscribing. It has always been a backwards logic to me, and I have grown incredibly bored of MMO's gameplay, in general.
Now this game, with targeting, concealing, crouching, shooting, all like your average fps game, but in a MMORPG. Brilliant. The game itself looks quite astounding, even on my low end rig. There appears to be a strong plot. Well thought out environs. An revoultionary system whereby you can make a clone of yourself, so that instead of making an alt from level 1, if you want to try a new class, you can use a clone. Sheer genious.
I don't know how pvp works yet. And I have barely explored the first map outside of the barracks.
So guys, my question is this. And before I ask it, I want you to be truly neutral, and not speak through a biased perspective. But why is this game not as well known and popular as other games out there?
Am I going to get MxO syndrome, and discover in a few days that the game has nothing new to offer, after the initial novelty? Will I find all the missions just the same, with no, or very little story-line?
What is the deal with Tabula Rasa?
I appreciate your opinions, and yes, I know that I will find out in due time my own answers, but I just wanted to know from you guys first.
Comments
Wondering why this game is not more popular? How can that be?
First off you can't talk in general with the trial, hence you can't ask questions of anyone. That is a number one fail in my book!
My character ran out of ammunition because I had no clue what I was supposed to do in the mission and I could not ask anyone where to get more ammunition. How lame is that.
It feels like any other FPS game I have played.
So far I am not very impressed at all with this game.
So basically you are doing the trial like me, and are denouncing the entire game merely because you cannot learn to read and do a mission without being able to ask the rest of the players. I take it you are quite young? It may be irritating for us trialist not being able to ask questions (try using the help option like I did) to the community, but don't you think it would be a tad more irritating if you actualllu paid for the game, and were being constantly bombarded by bots, and gold sellers using trial accounts to spam you? Because that is what would happen.
Can someone else give you a more reasoned answer please?
I tried the trial and loved it. Unfortunately that weekend, when trials were still hard to come by, my internet connection broke so I only got a day of play in. Was brilliant while it lasted.
Now my client encounters a patching error when trials are available. Damn you Murphy and your law.
one of the reasons for me at least there was a large lack of content once your off the first planet wich is about lvl 25-30 if i remember right
also there was no reason to group AT ALL when the game was released you could do basicaly ANYTHING alone.. i soloed the first 10 dungeons.. with no problems as long as i was paying at least a little attention.. then they changed that and made it nearly impossible to solo for awhile... currently im not sure where its at but hopfuly somwhere in between..
also alot of the skills in the game didnt work properly or at all... there were also major balance issues anyone that played launch remembers how op the net gun was..
i played from beta till 3 months after release then have done a few trails since..
I played the game (bought it and subscribed upon release) for a couple of months.
To answer your question, for me (not claiming this is the reason why others left) the game just got very stale after the first 10 or 15 levels (as I recall my highest toon was 17). I felt like I just kept running around doing the same thing in the same places. Also, although it had been hyped as a FPS-style MMO, it really isn't. You still just TAB to lock onto a target and then hold down your mouse, no aiming involved (granted you do have the concept of cover, etc. but it's not truly an FPS in my opinion unless you need to keep a target reticule centered on your opponent).
And then for whatever reason as time went on, more and more people left. So I found myself running around a server with hardly anybody else to be seen. It's a shame because I really like the "art direction" and the overall "feel" of the game, but at the end of the day the fun factor just gradually eroded and the departure of the fanbase left it feeling too empty.
I hope you have better luck with it though!
TR has a story line and a pretty good one really. It is a fun game until you hit level 30 and then there is little new to do. The quests are a lot of Fed Ex type and the game lacks epic battles. CPs are a lot of fun, but after a while they become tiring.
End game is as close to nothing as is possible with a few hours worth of instances and CP fights if you want. There is nothing that makes you feel like you really are fighting for humankinds survival against some huge enemy force.
The game is very solo friendly and to me that is one of its drawbacks. No group content means no epic battles, you never really feel like there is an overwhelming force, instead I always felt like Rambo, no odds against me were ever enough that you could not win against things your level.
If you like PVP I do not feel TR is great for that. I would take Planetside for PVP fights anyday over what TR has. They have done a lot of work balancing classes and fixing skills, but to me that was beta stuff to do and instead they spent 8 months of peoples money fixing their mistakes instead of adding content to a smallish game world.
I think TR is a fantastically great concept, and have often wondered why it isn't more popular as well.
I'm no longer subbed, but that's b/c WAR has gotten my wife, bro-in-law and myself interested (where the wife and BIL didn't care for TR).
Like every game out there, it needs improvement. But, it's not like they aren't listening. The devs have a lot of changes that have been coming into the game that the player base have been asking for. And more coming. they had a really bad launch and first couple of months. B/c of that, they progress they've made has really suffered. B/c it's blown off as "not enough". The stigma that "it sucked at launch, it'll suck now" is stubbornly viewed by a lot of players. The low pop is not necessarily a bad thing though. The caliber of player is much better from what I've experienced.
To get a MUCH more objective view of the game, I'd suggest going to planetTR.com. Honestly, mmorpg.com is mostly trolls and people that just want to belittle a game. Most lack the ability to be objective, w/out being offensive. Good write up btw.
Yes I agree if you want the rosy picture go to PTR, where they ban negativity so you never read a bad thing about TR. So if you call that objective then I agree go there. Objective does not mean only say good things by the way.
you answered your own question.
On Day 2 of the trial.
I played from launch untill about a month after. I quit because of the lag in the level 30 areas was unimaginale, The game was almost unplayable at that point and a lot of people quit.
Having returned a week ago I find that the lag problems have been fixed. They've also changed some of the special attacks to make them more usefull, added some weapons and armor sets.
Right now I'd have to give TR a 10 on the fun scale. All games have the delivery missions, and the kill 10 of this and 10 of that missions. But in TR fighting through enemy lines and across a trench to make them is just plain fun.
Subscribe for 6 months then come tell us why it isn't more popular. Are you for real or are you really pretending to be on the trial for stealth marketing reasons.....
i enjoyed the trial, but since they only offered a 3 day trial i was at the end of it and couldnt decide if it was something i wanted to pay for or not.
and if im not sure, i just wont do it
Sorry but flooded is not the right word. The GMs were banning them when they showed up and then in February they were gone. I came back in July and stayhed a month and I never saw one gold spam message. Gold sellers have no business in TR money is not all the important and no one was buying their leveling services.
The Devs had other solutions, they took the easy way and disabled the chat.
I was there in last Feb, GM ROFL was dealing with them in a very funny way, he'd teleport the spammer to heavily populated zones and flagged them pvp, they got ganked over and over. I'm pretty sure it has gotten better but the service is likely there, they're there for nearly every game you can find now. And buying money is less important since the decreased cost in ammo (and lower tier ammo like the chain guns), I'm so thankful for devs changing that back then, being a grenadier got WAY too expensive.
Agreed, to all of it.
I played Tabula Rasa and even made the mistake of dragging my guild into the game with me (well actually it was Bthorne's idea, but I'll have a talk with him later about that) and even with my other guild members in the game we couldn't find any group content worth mentioning.
I actually remember there was this one really awesome instanced mission that was very hard. You had to pass a "test" that the aliens (whoever they were, I can't remember now) had left behind on the planet. You had to go through these three chambers fighting huge waves of enemies while completing various objectives like guarding a specific point or killing off all the enemies in a specific amount of time. When I went through this mission the first time I was higher in level than the rest of my guild, so I joined a random pick-up group for it. It was a wild battle and a lot of fun. So I was looking foreward to doing it with my guild.
So a little while later when some of the members of my guild were ready to do the mission I insisted on going along with them to help out even though I was higher in level. Knowing how hard it was I figured they could use all the help they could get.
So we get into the first room and I'm telling everyone to get ready because I think we are about to get our asses kicked. Five guys come wandering out and we mow them down. I'm like "okay guys, that was just the first wave, get ready for the real thing!" and we end up waiting awhile and another group of five guys wanders out. We kill them and then wait awhile, five more show up. This goes on for a few minutes and its boring the crap out of us. I'm wondering what the hell is going on. Even room 3 which involved one of those huge stalkers was a joke.
After the mission was over I went to read the recent patch notes and I discovered that the developers were getting complaints that the mission was too hard to solo so they dumbed it down so that it could be beaten by a solo player. Which of course made it way to easy for the size of group that was previously needed.
Thanks TR devs. You obviously know how much we all hate group content... *sigh*
PvP was a joke too. You could challenge other players to duels and from what I saw that mostly consisted of people bunny hopping and blasting away with shotguns. There was GvG where clans could declare war on each other, but that seemed to consist mostly of people wandering around trying to figure out where the players in the other guild were. I heard a lot of reports of guilds kicking out all their members except for one alt character after they had gotten enough kills to win so that the other team couldn't catch up.
There was just no reason at all for a guild to play this game after a few months so we got the hell out of there.
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields
They show up in games they can make money in, for them it is a business and a game like TR is simply not going to make a profit for those people. Yes they were around heavily in the beginning but they are now more rare than Jedi were the first week of SWG.
You want to know why Tabula Rasa failed and basically became the largest financial dissaster in MMO history (next in line with Age of Conan).
The fact that Richard decided to ditch the whole game after three years of development and start all over again.
Meaning the game you see today was developed in only 2 years! And it clearly shows in the game.
- All character progression stops at level30.
- Different classes are poorly fleshed out. Not really distinctive. And lots of abilities still either overpowered or severely bugged / lacking! Only the idea that you unlock your last ability 20 levels too soon already, making the last 20 levels just a boring grind without any feel of progression anymore.
- Not to mention that most interesting and available content stops at level30. They filled up some gaps past level30, but it still lacking!
But the biggest disaster and failure is this:
The whole mystery around the Eloh's and their artifacts is the main drive of interesting storyline that could have driven the game. Be it not that they just dumbed it down into a dumb collection game to unlock your skills.
This was for most people the biggest dissapointment. You were soaked into the mystery of the Eloh's and so thrilled about it, especially the Eloh Vale questline, that was needed to gain access to the stargate and move on to the next Tier of zones.
But in beta bugs were plague'ing the Eloh Vale questchain and prevented people from unlocking the stargate. So instead of fixing it, they removed the access requirement from the stargate and so killed the best questline in the game.
As that's right, after this questline it's over and then the nasty truth comes afloat and you discover that eloh artifacts are nothing more then collection objects to unlock your skills.
No more plotlines, no more interesting questlines. Nothing. Nada.
You got some standard quest series to get you into the dungeons of the game. But that's it!
You could really notice the game was optimised and polished in content through the first three zones and after that the severe lack of interesting quests (missions) kick in.
The buggy Eloh Vale story questline is proof that they even couldn't finish and optimise that one.
Tabula Rasa was a game with great potential. And that is what it always will be. A great MMO it could have been.
And these are my words. A longtime Closed Beta tester of Tabula Rasa up till 2 months after release.
Cheers
yep thats pretty much it in a nut shell... shame too....thought we would finally get a good scifi game
Subscribe for 6 months then come tell us why it isn't more popular. Are you for real or are you really pretending to be on the trial for stealth marketing reasons.....
Shhh.... It's RG in stealth armor. Oh wait, that didnt work either.
The game got stale quick, and there seemed to be no reason to interact with any other people. The story seemed stale, lack of variety in gameplay removed any desire to clone or reroll...it was just a sad MMO.
If it were a singleplayer game and I were into those games, it might have been worth the cash. As an MMO, it fails on just about every level.
That is what a bunch of us screamed in the beta and a year later it's still made of pure fail...
Is the free trial still active? Would love to try this game. Anyone got a link?
Thnx
I guess this is the same for EU players. If not, I don't know the link for EU players to get the trial.
http://www.rgtr.com/trial/index.html
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Promote what you love instead of bashing what you hate.
nailed it.
i was in the CB too and i have the CE. i recently activated it (CB told me i should wait a while before actually playing it) and found the following things un-ignorable:
-they nerfed the draw distance, in cb it was like 120 yards now its about 70. so the game actually looks worse now than it did then.
-they STILL never synced the sound of the shotgun reloading with the action. sounds like a small detail right? until you go to reload, "hear" the click and switch weps only to find out next time you switch to your shottie that you have 1 shot in it.
-certain parts of the game look kinda like aion, my theory is right after launch (and maybe even a little before) most of the team switch to production of that game leaving a skeleton crew to actually "fix" or improve TR.
-no talk of an expansion and adding boxing to the game was about the most pathetic version of pvp imaginable.
if NCsoft switches to a model like station access i MIGHT play TR just because i am already paying for it, otherwise 15$/mo is way too much (ditto on COX). it would be more inline with the 5$/mo that it costs to play as premium dungeon runners member.
on a side note i think people need to put the stroke fest around AION on hold (well all games really) there is nothing there to suggest that it is going to be a great game.