Massively^™

The good folks over at TR Vault have reportedly gotten their hands on an early preview of some of the goodies we have in store for us in patch 1.7, and boy will these changes knock your socks off! They went way beyond the Skitterin hybrid class Destination Games announced today, going all out with three additional hybrids, three new PAUs (check out the Exobiologists' sweet ride!), and a whole slew of weapon and class changes that should make any Tabula Rasa die-hard chuckle.

Among my favorites were changes to the Spy's blade that would increase both damage and range (!), the reduction in damage and increase in threat for the already woefully useless grenade launcher, and best of all, a new "poledance" emote for Exobiologists' clones to make them actually worth a darn in PvP combat, even just as a distraction. All we can say is poor, poor Exobiologists. Barbie cars and poledancing? April Fools' Day has not treated them kindly.

Ever since patch 1.6 dropped, we've been diving back into Tabula Rasa, milking that sweet sweet experience modifier for everything it's worth. Scanning the air-waves though, we've been hearing about a few wonky things from the patch. Nothing big, mind you, and nothing serious. Just a few things that have stuck out to players that any enterprising player would probably be keen on knowing.

• Blades now do physical damage with their alt attack. - Players in general chat have been emphatic about this one, noting how the Spy's alt attack (hitting F while wielding a blade) still does type damage, and not physical damage as promised. Evidently, this is already being looked at.
  
• Powerful Kael can now leap long distances in pursuit of their target. They do not utilize this at close range, but will do so to prevent their enemies from escaping. - Be prepared to be a little frightened by this one. Kael have gotten a fairly substantial buff. Kael used to be big brutes who you could kite around and destroy with a pistol, but with this and the addition of a new stun attack, they will close distance in a blink and make quick work of you.
• The only circumstance where you cannot interrupt a reload is when you manually reload a weapon that still has some ammo left in it. - With this thread as our witness, this is not true. You can still interrupt a manual reload. For our money, this seems like a good bug to keep in - who wants to die while reloading?

All in all, a pretty good patch with some neat new tricks and no game breaking unfun.

The Tabula Rasa crew has sent down another missive from the heavens today, instructing everybody to give themselves a big pat on the back for the rigorous testing that made patch 1.6 a success. Looking forward to patch 1.7, they've stressed that while the changes to the Ranger sub-classes are their first and primary focus, they will be making an effort to look into every class to see what needs to be changed. Specifically, they mention making a global pass on all abilities for every class sometime between now and patch 1.8 and 1.9.

In the immediate short term, they're looking to make changes to the minion system, which should give classes like the Exobiologist a little more utility than they have in the current build. Pets will also now receive a damage bonus from the mind attribute, giving them some added reason to spec something other than body for a change. In addition to some other, smaller UI changes, they also sought to make it apparent that the current costs for redeeming items with CP tokens is not set in stone, and can and will be tweaked if they're not seeing the desired results server-side.

If you're anything like most members of Tabula Rasa's Spy class, you were first intrigued by 2 things: the chance to scare noobs in Alia Das disguised as a Thrax, and the immense power of the blade. Seriously, does it get any better than that? In a recent announcement for patch 1.7, we're informed of a reduction in the blade's damage coming soon. It was inevitable that this would happen, as it is general knowledge that the blade is extremely overpowered. It is also inevitable that many people who play the spy would get upset about this change.

Fortunately, the good folks at Destination Games have offset the cons with some pros. For one, we have the wonderful new changes to most of the Spy's best abilities, as well as complete revamps of old, under-used abilities. Cloak Wave will now... well, it will now work. This includes the intriguing concept of the spy's entire squad actually being invisible to other players when in a PvP situation.

So will a high percentage of spies completely ignore the ability buffs and concentrate on the blade's damage reduction on this upcoming patch? Yes, probably, but not this spy. I look forward to the class being more about real stealth and strategy, and much less about hack and slash.

We're pleased to report that this week's Tabula Rasa Feedback Friday is uncharacteristically juicy. The decision was made in the Classes and Combat teams that Rangers and Spies needed a serious looking at in patch 1.7. Their logic was that the two Ranger classes, Spies and Snipers, are too narrowly restricted by their class-defining weapons. Snipers have been struggling with this recently with the changes to Torqueshell rifles. And while Spies have been anything but hindered by their spectacular Blade damage, their effectiveness discourages Spies from trying different tactics.

Among the changes that will be heralded in patch 1.7 (it's worth reiterating here that patch 1.6 is still in testing and has no confirmed release date) is a new ability called Fire Support, which will take the place of Carpet Bombs in the Ranger repertoire. It's different effects at different ranks should give it increased utility for single-target DPS. Another ability with the potential to be quite cool is Tactical Evasion, which, at pump 5, would give the Ranger player the ability to set up a temporary beacon that you will teleport back to after a given amount of time. It sounds like a near way to rush into a crowded area, take out an important target, and get away quickly. To check out the full range of changes, make sure to check it out on the official site.

Well, it took quite a bit of concerted bitching, but it looks like the worst of the effects from Tabula Rasa's patch 1.5 have been addressed. A hotfix went live this morning which corrected the issues people were having with the resolution automatically resizing to 1158x864 every time the client was restarted. The patch notes say that some players may still experience problems if they run the game full screen at resolutions of 1280x960, but I got the game running silky smooth on my GeForce 7600 at 1440x900, so it's probably a driver issue affecting very specific cards. If anything, I've actually noticed a performance increase in graphic-intensive outdoor areas, so this patch is quite welcome indeed.

Also coming as part of the hotfix is a respec for the Spy class, whose abilities underwent a number of changes in patch 1.5. This change is perhaps the stranger of the problems fixed. It was not a coding or optimization error, as with the resolution problem, but simply a lack of foresight on the developer's part. One wonders how they didn't initially foresee the need for a respec, but were so quickly able to amend their position once the patch went live? It's very strange, but hey, kudos to them for seeing the light.

With Tabula Rasa already on the ropes with recent reports of financial failure, the last thing the TR community wanted or needed to have to deal with was the awfully-implemented patch 1.5 that rolled out onto live servers yesterday. Pushed out of testing a scant five days after it was revealed on the public test server, the patch was bugged by resolution issues and big changes to the Spy class weren't accompanied by a respec to make them worth the trouble. Morale among the AFS-faithful was not terribly high this time yesterday morning.

Evidently, the developers actually paid notice and took a rare opportunity to break their usual Monday/Friday announcement schedule to address these concerns. They're working on a hotfix for the resolution problem, and suggest in the meantime that players run the game in windowed mode. Not that doing so addresses the fact that the resolution resets every time you load the game, but at least it doesn't crash. They've also revealed that part of their plan in patch 1.6 is to make respecs a more readily available resource. Instead of the crummy awards players currently get for defending and attacking CPs, players will soon be able to collect talent and attribute respec credits for their trouble instead. It's a good idea, and enough of a distraction that most of the doom and gloom has abated, albeit temporarily.

Yesterday we handed out some new The Agency screenshots from SOE's CES presentation. That was cool enough, but in case you still weren't satisfied, there's a video of the presentation up on GameTrailers. Oh, and it's embedded above, obviously.

The presenter calls The Agency "24 meets Alias meets Counterstike," and that seems appropriate enough. The game can be played either in first person mode, or in a Mass Effect-esque over-the-shoulder perspective. It looks like you'll be able to run through instanced encounters with other players and/or NPCs, and there are scripted heroic moments in addition to the usual shoot-'em-up stuff. Our favorite moment occurs when the player revives a fallen ally with defibrillators.

It looks like the game borrows a lot from single-player game conventions, so it's not super innovative, but it's still refreshing to see an MMO that's not an action-bar-based, numeric-stat-grinding, sword & sorcery, D&D-style DikuMUD clone.

We're here at CES and in between long stretches of bedazzlement by hot gadgetry we had a chance to sit down with the SOE folks and have a look-see at their upcoming cross-platform, spy-themed MMOFPS, The Agency. Stay tuned for our upcoming impressions, but for now we'll leave you with some new eye candy from what looks to be a seriously promising title.

IGN's TRVault has the first part up of a new series covering the major classes of Tabula Rasa, and first up is the Spy. It's reasonably concise, as primers go. For those who don't know, Spies are TR's version of the rogue class. They're stealth armored, blade wielding killing machines that can do everything from polymorphing into an enemy soldier, to causing hostile foes to turn traitor, to calling in bombing runs.

Currently, Spies are not only the most popular class in the final tier, but arguably the most powerful too. Spies are the only class that can tank, heal, resurrect, and DPS as the situation requires -- though some of these may change if Polymorph gets the rumored bug-fix in 1.4. Spies are great for experience multipliers when played properly, too.

Spies are amazing at PvP as things stand, so I can see the temptation to level one built for PvP. But unless you're in a very active PvP clan, the better option is to level yourself as PvE, gather as many clone tokens as possible from Targets of Opportunity, then clone yourself a pure PvP Spy when relevant updates are implemented. Tabula Rasa Capture The Flag, anyone?