Massively^™

In the past, we've reported on some excited bouts in Tabula Rasa's Friday Night Fights, but nothing compares to what they have in store for you now. Next Friday, July 25th, Richard Garriott will be facing up against two time featherweight boxing champ Jesus Chavez in the C.E.L.L.A.R. Arena. This will be held on the TR Test Server starting at 6pm Central time. They will be in C.E.L.L.A.R. 3, which can be accessed via teleporter from the barracks in Alia Das.

If you're new to Friday Night Fights and aren't sure how it all works, TR's Community Coordinator Amy "Critters" Crider has assembled a handy Q&A which you can see right after the cut, as well as a hilarious promotional video created especially for this event. We hope to see you there!

In this week's Weekend Wrapup for Tabula Rasa, we get a few tidbits from within the community at large. Friday Nights Fights is still going strong, with this weekend's winner being Glass on his fifth FnF championship! Plus, the FnF ringleaders have announced some changes to the regular matches to help liven things up a bit. A new match type called the Gut Check pits the final winner against 6 of the previously-defeated competitors, who form a squad to take down the final contestant one at a time. This week, Glass made it through two fighters before finally being taken down by the third.

Also, be sure to check out a new video compiled by Kaczmanchoy which showcases all of the weapons in Tabula Rasa. However, the video goodness doesn't stop there as Chae compiled some footage of his lottery event from last Friday.

The folks at Destination Games sent over another one of those Tabula Rasa developer diaries, giving us some insight into the content coming in the game's next big content drop: Deployment 9. We already knew generally what was coming thanks to the official site preview: a squad merge feature, a PTS-only tag, and a new questline leading to the subject of today's diary.

Designer Brian Hudson is onhand today to walk us through the process of putting together the Velon Hollow instance for TR players around level 30. Hudson walks us through the different elements that lead to the area's development, and even goes so far as to recognize something we've seen as a standard in Tabula Rasa play now: post-level soloability. While the area is designed for 2+ players of a given level range, they're now tuning with the knowledge in mind that players will likely come back several levels later to take on the content in a solo fashion.

Interesting stuff. All that and more are after the break.

As we announced a few weeks ago, the folks at TabulaCast landed an exclusive interview with Tabula Rasa's lead designer, Tom Potter. They reached out to the community during these last few weeks, asking players to submit their own questions for Tom to answer on the show. Now, that episode has been recorded and is ready to download.

In this audio interview, we hear more than just the usual about how new features are coming "soon", Tom actually gives us some specific deployments where certain changes may be made. For instance, when asked about concept art for the much-anticipated Personal Armor Units that Destination Games has been promising for around 8 months now, Tom says that we can expect a finalized design within the next one or two deployments, and then after that, concept art will soon follow. He also discusses some exciting features coming down the pipe such as completely new enemies, more PvP maps with the possibility of class vs. class battles and a working prototype for the new crafting system they're developing, which will work on a more streamlined infrastructure.

Take a listen to this episode to hear more about what Potter reveals on the future of Tabula Rasa.

There's been a fairly substantial amount of buzz surrounding Tabula Rasa over the past couple weeks. Ever since long-time designer Paul Sage was announced to be leaving the game to be replaced by designer Tom Potter, fans and observers alike have been left to speculation about the state of flux surrounding Destination Game's sci-fi MMO. To their credit, they've really stepped up to the bat, both with the recent War College meetings at their Austin studio, and with other interviews around and about the gaming media.

Adding to this steady trend is this week's Feedback Friday, penned by none other than Tom Potter himself. Potter really goes all out and addresses many of our complaints, including the hyper-active enemy aggro, buffs to Logos users, a link loot system, and a true, blue repeatable end-game. Perhaps best of all, at least in this bloggers' opinion, is his acknowledgment that the crafting system needs a near-complete overhaul.

Now, we have to emphasize that there is a serious difference between knowing what needs to be done with a game and actually accomplishing these changes in a reasonable amount of time. Now that we know Potter is wise to what's wrong with the game, we're expecting him to push the changes through, and soon!

The third episode of the Official NCsoft Europe Podcast has just been released, and in it, we get treated to a bit of a pace change. Avatea, NCsoft Europe's Community Team Lead for Tabula Rasa hosts this show while interviewing three of the main developers for the game: Producer Starr Long, Lead Designer Tom Potter and Art Director Victor Meinert. Luckily for those of us Rockjaw fans out there, he is not completely left out of this one!

This 40-minute show gets into the minds of these developers, and lets us know a bit more about what it's like to work at Destination Games, their visions for the future of Tabula Rasa, the importance of player feedback and much more. We even get a glimpse into the crazy practical jokes the team has played on each other! So give it a listen and don't forget to follow along with the complete episode transcription.

Last week we got a chance to visit NCsoft's Austin offices to attend the first ever AFS War College, where some of Tabula Rasa's finest soldiers were invited to join NCsoft's developers for a day of discussions, questions, and demos. We took a tour of the facilities guided by Richard Garriott himself, and we invite you to join us as we learn all about the design of Logos, hear all the details on how Tabula Rasa is developed, and see the TR developers' top priorities. Have we piqued your interest yet? Click along with us and see what came of this year's War College!

Let's get started in the audio department >>

This most recent Feedback Friday is chock full of the usual bug fixes and the announcement of Deployment 9's arrival on the live server within days, but we thought we'd address one particularly interesting response given to a question the developers received regarding the direction of the game recently.

When asked why they're making Tabula Rasa a PvP MMO, their response was, "PvP has never been and is not going to be the only direction we want TR to take. It is true that a lot of changes and additions have been made with PvP in mind and the Wargame is a good example, but in this case for instance, it is mainly because we had the systems mostly in place already and could reuse part of it in that map."

The most recent iteration of Tabula Rasa's Feedback Friday brought the announcement of a change to how the client will work in future deployments of the game. "The Bubble," as they call it, is an optimization that the developers hope to roll out in a future build of Tabula Rasa's Deployment 9. Until now, all static map objects such as rocks and trees loaded up front, but at the cost of decreased system performance. The Bubble will limit the client to loading only those static objects within a certain distance from the camera. The end result promises to be a client that uses less memory and delivers increased performance. They would, however, like help from the players with testing the bubble feature once it's viable.

As always, Feedback Friday also addressed player questions and concerns, namely that logout countdowns in PvP will stop being exploitable in Deployment 10. As it stands, players can evade combat during clan-wars by simply logging off. Another issue in the game that's being resolved is the common complaint about how difficult it is to keep track of friends. Presently each time a player creates a new character, they must reinvite all of their friends, ad nauseam. So beginning with Deployment 9, both the friends and ignore list are now user-based instead of character-based. This change alone will eliminate a number of headaches for TR players, but check out the Feedback Friday page for more details on how the game is evolving.

When it was announced that designer Paul Sage was stepping away from Tabula Rasa to pursue other projects within NCsoft, many players in the community were understandably concerned. So much so, this blogger observed, that many didn't even pause to reflect on the ideas of the new guy in the lead designer hot seat - Tom Potter. Perhaps mindful of this, their PR squad appears to be shopping him around to various sites so players can get comfortable with the man and his ideas.

In his latest interview, Potter doesn't step out of the box terribly much. After describing his history in the game industry, he pretty much toes the existing line of restrained enthusiasm for features already announced (like the clan-controlled CPs we've heard about for months), without really giving any concrete facts or ideas for us to chew on. Potter said that with unlimited time and budget, he'd love to implement things like space stations and Bane motherships. While this is a neat idea, it's something we were sort of expecting from future expansions anyway, and not something that would be liable to bring TR off of life-support. Perhaps we're asking too much, but we just want to be excited about the game again.

This week's Tabula Rasa Friday Feature is all about Deployment 9, coming soon to the live servers. The primary systems change slated for this next update is called "Squad Merge". Essentially, it will allow players in two separate groups to band together into one group through a simple command. The TR dev team is also working on a content tag: "PTS Only"; this will be applied to certain content that they want explored purely on the Public Test Server. Some of this content may eventually migrate to the live servers, but some might not.

They're looking for more testers, and are providing a number of new tools to PTS players who want to try out in-development content. Sign up if you're interested. The first content that tag will be applied to is the new Velon Hollow instance. It's (obviously) going to eventually make it to live. In the meantime, though, the PTS will be the only place you can take on this new 30-32 map just off of the Plateau. Formerly known as Howling Death Burrow, it can be accessed via the "Book of the Velonar" questline in New Velon Village.

Deployment 8, the most recent patch to Tabula Rasa, just rolled out to the live servers earlier this week. With that patch came a number of changes, including avatar tweaks, a number of combat balance changes, and a wholescale reshaping of some parts of the world. Probably the most pronounced changes can be seen in the upper-level instance known simply as the Magma Caves, a group instance for players around level 45. Some of the lore elements behind these changes are explored in a pair of Journal entries, hosted over at the GameZone site.

For your edification and enjoyment, we have for you today a pair of developer diaries that explain precisely how that instance was reshaped - based partly on your input. Mission Designer Jason Ford and Michael Hutchinson, the game's Lead World Designer, have comprehensive discussions of map remoulding, NPC prepping, and mission re-writing as it applies to the new/old instance. Read on below the cut for a look at the new face of Tabula Rasa's Magma Caves.

Recently, WarCry had the chance to sit down with Tabula Rasa's Lead Designer, Tom Potter regarding the state of the game as we see it today. He discusses how successful some of the game's features have been and what they plan for the future of the game. He also touches on Richard Garriott's space flight plans and how involved he still is in the ongoing development of the game. We can't help but wonder what type of inspiration his space flight will evoke.

One of the most interesting pieces of this Q&A is the admission that the game's developers consider themselves more prepared now than they did at launch. While this is perfectly normal for new online games that depend so heavily on the community aspect for its success, it's still interesting to note that Destination Games, being so new to the development world, have finally licked their wounds and are ready to move forward full charge! This includes plans to offer incentives for existing players to stay, and more free trial periods to entice new players to come see what the game is really all about.

The newest Tabula Rasa PvP arena, named the C.E.L.L.A.R. (Coalition of Enlistees Likely Looking for Aggressive Retaliation), has been gaining some attention since its introduction in Deployment 8 this week. This arena is set up as a boxing ring, complete with suitable equipment, colored corners and the whole nine yards.

Earlier this week, the members of the TR MOG clan held a tournament in this arena, and we were lucky enough to attend. We figured we would take this opportunity with the tournament in play to snap some screenshots and create a handy guide to the arena for those who aren't familiar with it just yet.

In yet another long line of tragedies for the Tabula Rasa community, the Alpha Wolf Pack has announced that it will be packing up and retiring from their duties. This group of dedicated players have mostly moved on to other games, or simply retired their characters from Tabula Rasa itself. There were no other reasons given, yet we all know that simple lack of interest is all that's needed.

What was the Alpha Wolf Pack, you might ask? It was a group of nine players (one for each tier 4 class in the game, plus one for overall game mechanics) that was dedicated to acting as a liaison between the community and the devs. This group wrote reports and filed them with the NCsoft dev team as a way to get the players' most-pressing concerns heard. This group lays claim to such successful endeavors as the respeccing changes and the Prestige system which was recently implemented. This most recent set-back to the TR community seems to be a big one, but we hope the community -- and the game -- can recover.