f13.net

Just noticed the new Tabula Rasa site up this afternoon.  I think the "new" look is impressive.  Shit, now really wishing I had gone again to E3 to see/play it.

New Tabula Rasa Site (http://www.playtr.com/index.html)

Hmm, is it just me or are the screenshots a touch underwhelming?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for gameplay over eye candy - just sayin'...

Interesting. Screenshots were killing me though- what is it with all the sepia-toned gameworlds? Everything looked so washed out and bland.

Looks like they have graciously offered females a choice between red or white skin-tight non-armor, complete with miracle bra inserts. 

I still have an issue of Computer Games with Tabula Rasa as the main feature, pre-Sci Fi infusion.

Some of the art direction looks kind of interesting but the engine technology itself looks like something out of the Quake III-era. Definitely underwhelming.

I swear my first read I thought it said "the mystical power of Legos!', which got me all excited.  Nope: logos.  Cue old school programming language ftw!

Built in voice chat will be nice.  Wonder if they'll include a headset in their retail box.

Overall art concept feel like someone trying to make a game out of Starship Troopers.....the movie version, not the book.

Would you like to know more?

Xilren

Screenies definitely have that Quake 2/3, blocky, any-color-as-long-as-it's-earthtoned feel.

But hell, if the gameplay's good. I'm all over it.

Iwas looking through some of the shit that didn't make it into Planetside, like some rudimentary rpg elements or things like PVE mobs that could wander into the middle of battles and start attacking random players. If this brings some of that into play it'll be worth the price of admission.

Its a now a game about killing bugs. Why? Man.. what did the bugs ever do to those people. For once I'd like to see a game about playing the bugs.. And a decent implant system. Yep.

Sigh. Well maybe it will be good.. I liked it better before though.

Since they want an action-oriented game, that looks like it would scale very well to large pvp battles. I like this new direction, it at least has me interested, whereas the previous design was more of a head-scratcher. It seems to lose all name-worthiness (not exactly a 'clean slate' any more), but seems to deliver what I've almost begged for over the last couple years: a Planetside with a bit more mmorpg depth to it - hopefully that won't translate into level treadmills and timesinks as well.

I like the more realistic muted earth tones when designing worlds like that. Beats hot pink grass, purple trees and orange water. Better to not stand out than to make one pluck one's own eye out.

I always thought Planetside needed big carnivores roaming around eating players. And you don't get any experience for killing them either.

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Read the bio's, they are hilarious. Starr Long says his best memory of MMO's is when Lord British got PKed in UO. And a lot of them list Aliens as one of their favorite movies.

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The ground in the screen shots looks like the Guild Wars engine.

That's exactly the way it was gonna work out. Sadly, the AI programmer decided he was fed up and bailed.

Those breasts are weird.  They're too round.

The graphics in general strike me as a cross between WoW for cartoony-ness and CoH for uh, cartoony-ness.  I didn't like either of those graphics either, much, but got used to both.

Must....Resist...

Don't jack...that....softball...

I want a game where I can kill bugs...  In suits of powered armor where I 'drop' into the combat zone from orbit and sweep and clear across hundreds of miles of terrain in moments and meet up with my team mates for a carefully planned extraction...

You can play the bugs if you want :)

I miss the floating islands.

In the bottom left screenshot on page 1, the chick has a shitty face. They shouldn't have put that one up.

It doesn't look like twitch.

More color plz.

What the fuck is it with game developers and artists giving adult male characters no balls or even a semi-decent bulge? Screenshot 7 looks like someone made a half-hearted attempt to give him a package, but wound up making him look like he's going to be visiting a penis enlargement web site some time soon. Then look at the two characters in screenshot 11. I dare you to see any difference in groin anatomy between that male and female. And then we have screenshots 21 and 22 where it almost looks like the guy has a fucking camel toe. For fucks sake -- all I can guess is that the artists and game developers' own dicks are so small or nonexistant that they have no idea what a decent package even looks like. What are people so afraid of when it comes to male genitalia? It doesn't need to be outlandish on the order of Vampirella-type sexual excess, but damn, a world without sausage is just sad.

And then what the hell is up with screenshot 8? Looks like they are fighting the lavender Eye of Sauron -- way to rip off LOTR. Come up with some god damn original architecture you cuntsucking douchebags.

(http://www.zxscreens.i12.com/zxscreens/pssst_inlay.gif)

That goes along with the skin-tight clothes on the female hardbodies.  Its a world of sluts and eunuchs, a great launching point for the masterbatory fantasies of the 14-yo male target demographic.

I can forgive the muted (read shit-brown) color palette, as it looked like all the screenshots were taken on one world, which means one instance or set of instances for this game. Being that they are instancing a sci-fi type of hub-world setting, I'd imagine we'll see LOTS of different types of terrain, some of which are much less monotone than these.

Or they could be just unoriginal. Who knows?

Lord British knows.

"First person shooter fans who crave a richer gaming experience will appreciate a massively multiplayer game that is reactive to player choices and allows for a broad range of character movement. They’ll also find FPS standards including explosions, vehicles and big guns.
 
Massively multiplayer online game fans will enjoy being able to garner rare collectibles and inventory, a large community to interact with, and frequently updated content to both the game and the storyline"

PlanetSide, but with lewt and more RPG.

Sounds delicious. Hope it can deliver a fun experience.

First thing I noticed. Might just be the Ep3 excitement.


(http://img266.echo.cx/img266/9099/slave10xz.th.jpg) (http://img266.echo.cx/my.php?image=slave10xz.jpg)

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(http://img266.echo.cx/img266/8146/slave20qc.th.jpg) (http://img266.echo.cx/my.php?image=slave20qc.jpg)

It also looks like the ships in the Sci-Fi Dune movies or something from Riddick.

Who are those people?

I dont think thats a niche as you make it sound.

Team based fps has overcome pure DM whereas I still remember the QuakeII days when it was just frag anything that moves.

FPS are already getting much much much more complicated, it all started with I'd say Battlezone or perhaps TeamFortress and grew from there now its the WWII sims with planes, vtols, artillery, tanks ect.  How many fps come out now that Dont involve vehicles?

Look at the fact that Neocron even got off the ground, or that Pside still has some numbers.  Neither of these are games I would consider a well-done mesh between rpg and fps.

Furthermore, the vast majority of the pvp population for mmog's would like to play a game where skill was a factor.  Kinda sick of the whole level/gear/class > player skill stuff we've been dealing with during the EQ clone wars.

Yup yup. Quake 1 was all about DeathMatch. Times have changed - slowly.

Ah, well yes, I can see the MOG players getting into this, but I'm just skeptical about the CounterStrike player.  I think any sort of lewt factor will be a big turn-off for those people.  The "richer gaming experience" line should mention just what it is richer than.  Richer than Doom, definitely good.  Richer than CS or UT?  I just wonder if the FPS peeps actually want that.

I don't think you two were paying enough attention to what servers were available at that time. QuakeWorld TeamFortress was by far the most popular game type for QuakeWorld by a huge margin. It had more servers and more people playing at any given time than all the other game servers combined. Even before TF's massive rise in popularity, Zoid's CTF and all it's variants (including my favorite ThunderWalker CTF) had easily surpassed pure DM servers as the most popular game type in QuakeWorld. There was still a contingent of hardcore DMers (like Thresh) playing on NetQuake servers (the version of Quake with the original networking code without all the latency compensation stuff in it) but that was a very small minority of the overall playerbase.

They have 5 new TR videos up that they posted today. Auto Assault has videos up too.

http://www.playtr.com/media/videos.html

Edit: Wow. After watching them I am pretty underwhelmed.

Great.

Tabula Rasa isn't twitch. Moving thread to Douchebag week.

I'm not sure I agree. For example in TR_Sizzle_Gameplay2 check out the action starting at 47 seconds. There you see somebody moving and firing at the same time. Pretty much everywhere else everybody is standing around getting hit like a bunch of idiots but I think that's more cause some Marketing droid thought it looked more "dramatic" to have people standing around shooting rather than running around like their heads were cut off like in your typical shooter. On the other hand we don't see anybody dodging shots so it's hard to say for sure.

TR_Sizzle_Gameplay_03 at 0:40 you see a guy standing there and a mob beating on him. It looks like EQ. And we don't see anyone playing as the aliens.

However, in at 1:04 you see players picking up powerups.

I'm gonna send our undercover PR Douchebag to the NCSoft booth. Hopefully I'll have an answer for you all by tomorrow.

I as well could not give a definite appraisal of whether or not TA is twitch or not. I need to see it being played with the GUI up and crosshairs (if applicable).

If it's twitch, why aren't they using available cover?

Because it's not twitch.

Does anybody fucking know yet?

This is unbearable that I'm still not even sure if this or HG:London is or is kindof or might be if you dim the lights and squint really really hard fucking twitch in any way shape or form.

I'd settle for Hellgate's bullets are spells as long as I can duck back around a corner and they wont hit me...  fuck I hate mmog's.

Just for reference, some of GW's attacks/spells require full LoS.

I seem to remember EQ had this feature, only it didn't really correlate to your actual view of your enemy.

No, no it didn't.  I got nailed around walls on EQ's pvp servers many a time by a supposed LOS spell.

Don't get me started on how Rogues got hosed in PvP...

I remember having the opposite problem, but then I was doing PvE.  No correlation to anything that could rightfully be labled "line of sight" in either case.