Part 2

That last one was getting long, so I'll break it up.

Tabula Rasa is another thing entirely. It's fun! Think of a standard MMO like Everquest or WoW... you get quests to go kill N critters, or collect X from somewhere and bring it to Y. Standard fare. You level up, get better gear, fight more stuff.

Now, think of an FPS like Unreal Tournament, Quake, or Battlefield. You aim the mouse at things, and shoot stuff. If you aim for the head, you can get headshots. The mobs all dodge around and try to keep to cover to avoid this. Now, tone it down just a notch so you don't have to be dead-on to hit, but can't just shoot randomly in the general direction and expect results.

That's Tabula Rasa. It manages to merge the two pretty smoothly, and while the RPG side isn't particularly clever, having the FPS elements keeps the adrenaline flowing. PvP would be fantastic here (the beta server is PvE, since they want folks testing content, not trigger finger skills).

I haven't been playing this all that much either.

I've been playing Everquest II. You read that right. I guess it's time to make my SOE position clear. I never got very far into Star Wars Galaxies, because when that game came out, I had a crappy machine that couldn't run it well... and I had an ISDN line which was laggy as hell too. The combination meant the game wasn't much fun for me, yet I did play for several months because it was a cool game! So, I didn't get my peepee smacked with the NGE, I'd stopped playing long before that horror.

Prior to SWG, I played the original Everquest. I played through the first two expansions and thought SOE was nerfing things a bit much for the sake of "balance" between classes. Personally, I never though much of balance since some classes just seemed better solo classes, while others were needed in groups.

In November of 2004, Everquest II launched. We all hopped on that game, because some of us had played EQ before, and WoW didn't seem like quite as big a deal yet. EQ2 was quite fun, but had some serious problems. First, you had to group... anything past level 15 was just about impossible to solo. Secondly, there wasn't much high level content... My friend is one of those power gamers, and he ran off the end of it and was disgusted that after getting to the end of the continent, you crossed over to the other side and found... the same stuff. Finally, whomever was in charge of the servers didn't test things well enough... frequent crashes and several database rollbacks spelled the end of that game for us. We moved on to WoW, and I eventually moved on to EVE and Vanguard.

Vanguard was the bomb. It was fun, it had unique ideas... diplomacy! Ship building! No instancing at all. Absolutely stunning world.. super immersive. I played for several months. However, it was buggy as all hell.... the performance was horrible, even on high end systems (and it wasn't network lag). Eventually, we all stopped playing because everyone else did... MMO's aren't that fun when there's only 5 or 10 other people on the server.

Let me say upfront that SOE did NOT botch this game. The guy in charge of Sigil screwed it up and conned SOE into paying for it. SOE might have been able to save the game, if Brad had been willing to sell it earlier, but he was hoping it would still do well at launch and held out.

Well, I got an email. SOE offered me every expansion that had come out for EQ2 plus free game time until September 15th (this was in July). Two full months of play with all the expansions? Ok, I was curious enough to load it back up and see how it had changed.

Beta, beta, terminally ill, second chance?

So, it's that time again... yes, I'm waiting for a DVD to burn and have nothing new to read, so I'm writing something here. I'd make a comment about how thrilled you are, but I'm almost certainly the only one who reads this. :)

Anyways, for posterity, I've managed to get into the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta (blah blah NDA blah). I'm also in the Tabula Rasa beta (blah blah Other NDA blah). Impression time.

If I hadn't ever played EVE-Online, I'd be pretty impressed with PotBS. Graphically, it's pretty sweet with everything cranked up. It also plods along at 10fps in that case, so I can't really play it that way. Oh yeah ----> aside.

My Dell half-died a couple weeks back. I was sure the power supply popped, and since it uses a custom sized, custom wired supply, I figured I'd be SOL trying to find another one. Doing a bit of browsing, I found a used one on ebay for about $70... cheaper than I'd feared. Note that it is used though. A new one costs about $300 *IF* you can get one from a warehouse... the newer Dell Dimension XPS models use different ones.

So, I whined at my friends and Steve was kind enough to give me his old machine (which he had to dig out of the closet). It's a nice machine (Athalon 2800, 1.5G, Raedeon 9800), and I figured it would serve as a temporary gaming machine for a month or two while I scrounged up enough for the new PS.

Two surprises. One, my Mom was nice enough to lend me $100. Two, it wasn't the power supply! I, of course, went to put my old Nvidia 6800 into the new machine, and couldn't get it to boot. After a couple runs through the cables, it dawned on me to try powering on the old machine (which I'd moved the 9800 into). Bing. Booted up! So, my nvidia fried itself somehow. So, now I spent the $100 + the $70 I'd been saving to get a new video card (Raedeon x1950) and am back online.

<-- aside.

Ok, so anyways, as I was saying... looks nice but needs expensive new hardware. Turned down so it gets 30-40fps, it looks ok, but bland. But who cares what it looks like, let's talk gameplay. I haven't spent much time on this game, so I don't know much about PvP or exploration yet. The starter area is a bit lackluster. The missions are all instanced, so you can spend your days never interacting with anyone else if you so choose.

Combat is fun, but tedius. That is, you have to pay attention and switch targets frequently, managing your angle to the wind to bring them into your broadside gun position. This could be quite fun in bad weather and choppy seas.... in the calm of newbie land, it's just tedius. EVE combat doesn't have the positional requirements, but you feel like you have more options because there are different kinds of weapons..... do I want to web them, nos them, shoot missiles or guns? Do I sick my drones on them, change ammo types for better damage? Do I orbit to stay out of their guns, or keep myself lined up for emergency warp out? Here... I shoot guns. I can choose solid, chain, or grape shot (they have different names, but that's what they are). That's it.

The PvP system *sounds* great... but I can't say anything about it yet.