by: Tony "RadarX" Jones

It's been a busy week soldiers, and the AFS has kept us engaged with lots of news and events. Here are the highlights of this week and what you need to know!

Delay: The most signinficant news of the week was obviously the two week delay of Tabula Rasa pushing retail launch date back to 11/02. Only two weeks you might be asking. Why? Starr Long stated:

Many of you have heard my mantra for game development: "Stable, Fast, Fun. In that order." We need a little more time to make that happen.

To this end we are moving our Pre-Order headstart date to 10/30/07 and our commercial service start date to 11/2/07. This short but critical amount of time will give us time to address several issues including stability and balance as well as allowing our players to test the continent of Ligo (L38+) and our major changes to crafting for a few weeks rather than a few days. Our entire development staff feels this extra time is needed as does our beta community. We feel confident that this extra time will make a difference on launch day.

That said we are excited about launching the game and moving into a "live" environment where the entire future of the AFS is ahead of us. Expect more posts from Richard Garriott, Paul Sage, and other dev staff over the next few days as they discuss plans for elder content and content updates both long and short term. One of us will also be posting to the website every Friday in order to directly address your feedback, which you can submit via the Feedback Form found on the RGTR.com website.

See you in game as we wrap up this final leg of testing and get ready for the end-of-beta blow out!

 

So there are a few stabilization issues they are working and probably some content they need to polish up in the end game. We've been waiting 6 years, another two weeks probably won't kill anyone. I'll admit I'm curious what exactly can be done in such a short time but I have no idea how big their team is or how much they are working.

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Be very very quiet, he's hunting Bane.

Friday Night Fights: In an interesting event announcement Community Manager CuppaJo announced this Friday on US1 there would be a series of boxing matches. That's right, players going at it hand to hand. Using a 32 person bracket system, the last man standing will face General British himself. Good luck to everyone involved, and be sure to stop in and watch it.

First person to bite someones ear off is getting banned though.

Operation Updates: NCsoft announced a change in the way they do content updates. While this will affect all their games, specifically Tabula Rasa will receive content updates every few months. While it wasn't stated clearly, the implication most people got was they will be free. CuppaJo gave us a little sneak peek by stating

What kind of content can you expect to see in some of the first Operations? Elder content for one. Paul Sage will have an update tomorrow on what is in store for TR's elder game. We'll also see more areas, PvP system enhancements, Clan system enhancements, more missions, and upgrades to our website services such as character pages. ".

It sounds fairly exciting. And just a few hours earlier they mentioned what the Elder update will entail. It appears mounts will be available at level 40 in the form of "Personal Armor Units," Flashpoints which require multiple squads (this may be raid content), and changes to clan warfare. You can read a few more details over at the official site but this is some interesting news.

Halloween Event: To reward the folks that pre-ordered Tabula Rasa will be having a Halloween event providing players some unusual content and the chance to collect up to 9 masks which can be worn. Trick or Treat will most certainly be a part of this event, and it's good to see the Dev team thinking of little things like this.

Designer Diary #4: Tabula Rasa Lead Designer Paul Sage provided everyone with another inside look at what goes in creating the game. This time around he went into detail on how the cloning system works. Why are there limited cloning credits, and where did they even get the idea to put this in? He answers them all and we've got it up right here. If nothing else they released some nifty new screenshots.

This weeks briefing has been a little shorter than last week because of no patch notes. However, we hope this has been educational for you soldier, because knowledge saves lives in the field. Be sure to keep checking back for more and check out our forums.


To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Tabula Rasa Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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