Questions by Cody
"Micajah" Bye, Managing Editor

style="font-style: italic;">
Answers by Starr Long,
Producer for Tabula Rasa




In the past, the release of an MMORPG was fraught with bugs, delays,
server queues, and more. Gamers would often have to wait weeks to play
a finalized version of their game, and many would drop their
subscription before those fixes ever took place. In the case of style="font-style: italic;">Tabula Rasa, the
launch has been incredibly smooth, with only a few other MMOG titles
even comparing to the problem-free release of the game.



With Tabula Rasa
finally out the door, the NCsoft developers can begin looking ahead and
plotting their course for the next few updates and expansions. While
Cody "Micajah" Bye was visiting NCsoft this last weekend, he sat down
with TR's producer, Starr Long, and asked him what the plans were for
the future. In response, Starr talked about briefly about their first
retail expansion and in-depth about the next few Operations that are
set to impress MMO gamers.  style="font-weight: bold;">


style="font-weight: bold;">

Ten Ton Hammer: How have
things been progressing since launch? Everything seemed to go pretty
smoothly, but we just wanted your take on the process.


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href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/14185" title="Burn!"> src="/image/view/10311/preview"
width="200">

style="font-style: italic;">People are
generally having fun in Tabula Rasa, and that's the biggest thing Starr
Long cares about.

Starr Long:
Things have been pretty smooth. The game’s stable. *he knocks
on the top of his desk* Knock on wood, but people are having fun.
That’s the biggest thing that I care about, and I think that
people are enjoying the game.



Everything that we wanted to come out of launch seemed to happen.
Things are relatively well balanced. The key features that we wanted
people to enjoy – the control points, character cloning,
class system, and the whole RPG-Shooter blend – they all seem
to work!



On top of that it was all very smooth, so I have no complaints! Of
course, I would always like more people to play the game, but I feel
that with the buzz and feedback we’re getting, more people
isn’t going to be a problem.



Ten Ton Hammer: When are
you going to release your first post-launch Operation?




Starr:
Operation 1 is going to go out in late January or early February, and
it seems to be on track. We always need to get the development done
well ahead of the actual date, so we’re going to be wrapping
that up in just a few weeks. I think the official date for that is
December 10th.



Ten Ton Hammer:
That’s less than a month away!



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href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/14182"
title="Playing with Robots"> src="/image/view/14182/preview"
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style="font-style: italic;">The Personal Armor
Units will function like a smaller, more personal version of the mech.

Starr: Yeah,
and that’s going to have Hybrids in it.



Ten Ton Hammer: How are
the Hybrids going to work?




Starr:
We’re going to give out those details really soon!
I’m not really allowed to say much about that….



Ten Ton Hammer: Just that
they’re called Hybrids, right?




Starr:
*laughs* Yup! And it’s contrary to what April told people;
it’s not going to be Star Wars characters meets musicians
like my href="http://www.rgtr.com/image_gallery/pictures/20_15.jpg">Toby
Wan Kenobi costume. Although
hilarious, it’s not what Hybrids are going to be.



Ten Ton Hammer: Any other
future content plans in the works?




Starr: The
artists are actually working on our first retail expansion, which will
come around the end of next year. And so they're working on the new
“secret planet.”



They’re also working on
the new Personal Armor Units, which I can’t tell you about
right now. (Editor’s
Note
: He actually did tell me more about them, and
you’ll be able to read all about them in tomorrow’s
article that will run on our Tabula
Rasa Community Site
!)



Ten Ton Hammer: Aside
from the last bit of Operation 1, what else have you been working on
lately?




Starr:
We’re just continuing to make ongoing balances to the
gameplay. We’re looking at all the abilities on all the
classes and determining the ones that are cool and the ones that
aren’t. We want every ability to be as bad-ass as possible,
and some of them just aren’t as bad-ass as they could be.


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href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/10060" title="TTH3"> src="/image/view/10060/preview"
width="200">

style="font-style: italic;">If you're having a
particular problem with TR, you can probably wait a week or two and the
problem will get fixed.

Ten Ton Hammer: For my
final comment, it seems like the game has been received very well.
However, there are still people who are hesitant or downright
aggressive towards the game, even going so far as to say certain
elements of the game are broken. What would you tell those people who
are naysaying Tabula Rasa?




Starr: I
think a lot of people’s opinions were formed during the early
stages of our beta test, and we were really rough around the edges. We
had a lot of problems, and I think we really pulled it together in the
last phase of beta. That said, there are always things that
we’re working on and every patch is going to have continual
optimizations. We will continue to improve performance and stabilize
the game.



We will continue to work on the abilities that may be
“broken,” but there really aren’t that
many performance issues regarding the abilities. That said,
we’re going to continue on this two week publish cycle that
we got on during beta, where every two weeks we put out a patch with
literally hundreds of bug fixes. We’re just trying to stay on
a really fast turnaround and continue to stay on this really aggressive
schedule. If something isn’t working like you want it to,
just wait a couple weeks and it will probably get fixed.



Ten Ton Hammer: And do
these two week cycles include new missions, quests, items, etc.?




Starr: Yes.
So every two weeks players can see new items, armor, weapons, recipes,
maps – something new in addition to the bug fixes.



Ten Ton Hammer: Thanks
again and I hope Tabula Rasa continues to do well!



Excited to hear about an
upcoming retail expansion? Want to discuss the new PAUs? href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?p=181707#post181707">Talk
about it
on the forums!



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articles!



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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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