{"id":1901,"date":"2008-09-24T11:00:22","date_gmt":"2008-09-24T16:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1901"},"modified":"2008-09-24T11:06:45","modified_gmt":"2008-09-24T16:06:45","slug":"tabula-rasaintroduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1901","title":{"rendered":"Tabula Rasa:Introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the opening cinematic of the game: The last refugees from Earth exit the ships that delivered them from their burning homeworld. Like the Tabula Rasa players that embody them, there just aren’t very many.<\/td><\/tr>
From the opening cinematic of the game: The last refugees from Earth exit the ships that delivered them from their burning homeworld. Like the Tabula Rasa players that embody them, there just aren’t very many.<\/td><\/tr><\/table>Tabula Rasa<\/a> was a gift from Leslee<\/a> during the great games deluge of ’08<\/a>. (She was actually at the Tabula Rasa launch party and met designer Richard Garriott. What I want to know: Was he dressed like a general?<\/em>) Leslee was also one of the people who helped me with my WoW comics<\/a> for Stolen Pixels<\/a>. It’s things like this that warm my blackened heart and teach me the true value of friendship. (Or at least the true value of finding good people to leech from, which is pretty much the same thing when you put it on the blackboard.) <\/p>\n

Anyway, I really like the sci-fi vibe of Tabula Rasa and so I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. This series may or may not dominate the site for a couple of weeks the way my World of Warcraft series<\/a> did. Do bear with me.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Geeze. I don’t know why people aren’t playing this game. It has a hot girl on the cover. What else do you need? Buy it!<\/td><\/tr>
Geeze. I don’t know why people aren’t playing this game. It has a hot girl on the cover. What else do you need? Buy it!<\/td><\/tr><\/table>I’m entering Tabula Rasa without having read much about it. The game seems to have gotten a “meh” reception, but aside from Yahtzee’s review<\/a> and a few forum-level rumors, I don’t know why the game isn’t thrilling people. The gameworld will occasionally reach “Medium” population levels at peak hours, and is nearly empty at other times. Where is everyone?<\/p>\n

When I played World of Warcraft, I’d see people chatting about other games:<\/p>\n

“Have you tried City of Heroes? I got bored with it.” <\/p>\n

“I loved it. I still play sometimes.” <\/p>\n

“That’s cool. Let’s go to deadmines.” <\/p>\n

But in Tabua Rasa the chat often devolves into bitter complaining about how much all the other games suck, and in particular how bad<\/em> World of Warcraft is. It sounds more like sour grapes than anything else. I don’t usually think of annonymous open chat as something that can have a subtext, but if there is one here it’s, “Our game should be more popular than World of Warcrap. Or at least more popular than it is now.”<\/p>\n

Where is everyone? Why aren’t people playing this game? Is it bland? Buggy? Frustrating? An overlooked gem? A diamond in the rough? A great game forever marred by a bungled launch? This series is going to try and answer that. This isn’t anything as morbid as my Hellgate: London autopsy<\/a> series, where failure was assumed. Maybe the bitter Tabula Rasa players are right. Maybe this game should<\/em> get more attention. <\/p>\n

I want to clock a few more hours in the game before I start making definitive statements. I will<\/em> show my hand a bit by saying that my time with the game last weekend did not reveal any egregious faults. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the opening cinematic of the game: The last refugees from Earth exit the ships that delivered them from their burning homeworld. Like the Tabula Rasa players that embody them, there just aren’t very many.Tabula Rasa was a gift from Leslee during the great games deluge of ’08. (She was actually at the Tabula Rasa […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}