Starr Long announced on the beta boards today Tabula Rasa will be delayed a few weeks to do some additional testing (including that of a new continent). The pre-order start date is now slated for 10/30/2007 with retail launch landing on 11/02/2007. A press release shortly followed stating:

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 here 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!

Starr Long

Producer

You can find the press release here. Stay tuned to Ten Ton Hammer and feel free to stop by our forums to discuss this breaking news!