Tabula Rasa

when I first played this game in beta, I posted on the beta boards and suggested that they needed more futuristic settings.  Sprawling ruined cities for instance.  Just something to make me feel like the environment was different from all the fantasy MMO's.   I was so disappointed when I first started playing TR and 90% of the areas were wilderness or cave based.  It's a fantasy MMO with guns basically.  They should have started the game on Earth, with all the ruined cities, and made it a fight for survival and taking back humanities homeworlds.   when playing TR it seriously felt like they just took some old areas created for a fantasy game, threw in a few futuristic models, and said "there...sci-fi." 

I knew the game was in trouble when I went to one of the mid-level areas and it was filled with farms, caves, and what not.  My god, it's like playing on an NWN tileset.....

It's just not original enough in look and feel to be the landmark Garriot claimed it would be.  I seriously think large urban areas with impressive looking futuristic city landscapes would have been enough to make people feel like they were in a unique gaming environment. 

I had the same feeling, I was expecting something more like Matrix Online or even CoX. I hated the fact that I was running around forest all the time. But like you said, this game started to be another fantasy game at the beginning.

I think it's a case of being lazy.  Clearly, they didn't want to do all the work of making brand new urban landscape art, so they just reused some old fantasy stuff.  You just can't be lazy in the MMO genre.  Too much competition for those dollars.  I think this is one of the major things MMO companies don't seem to realize.  They just want to cash in, so they come up with a cool concept and then cut corners on the actual development.  MMO's are being announced way too early (star trek online comes to mind) which starts the scrutiny, countdown, and pressure to release. 

This site is a fine example of how disillusioned everyone is with the MMO genre.  Those who aren't satisfied with WoW just jump around from mmo to mmo looking for that special game, but the fact is that there just isn't much quality out there.  As sad as it is, I would honestly say SWG is the best MMO i've played to date, but it's still a failure considering they had this huge license to work with and still managed to blow it.  Ironically, the faults of SWG are very similar to those of TR.  SWG just doesn't FEEL like star wars.  It feels like a fantasy game with lightsabers and rifles.  TR doesn't feel like a sci-fi game.

My problem with TR, as well as other sci fi MMOs, is that you have a firearm, but still end up going toe to toe with the monsters. There is no taking up a position to fire from and then picking off the opposition, the game still feels like a fantasy hack fest.

I find the enviroments to be well done. You can go to the bases and visit bars and such. I agree tho that there needs to be more variation and being able to fight to liberate Earth would be great. Hopefully as time goes on there will be more types of worlds and enviroments to play in.

Wow that's disappointing to hear.  I would have thought that the environs where just like one would expect to see in a sci-fi game.

I was and perhaps still to a certain degree, willing to take a look at this game to get a change of pace from the typical fantasy settings available out there now.  But after reading this and other posts about the lackluster game play I'm more inclined not to.

  It's ashame really, that with all the imaginative creativity that Richard Garriott could of brought to the table regarding this game, that it's not so much better that it is.  Oh well...

the problem is that it's not a change of pace from fantasy settings.   The gameplay is like a dumbed down NGE SWG and the settings are like any fantasy mmo basically.  forests.  caves. 

Originally posted by mxbx

the problem is that it's not a change of pace from fantasy settings.   The gameplay is like a dumbed down NGE SWG and the settings are like any fantasy mmo basically.  forests.  caves. 

In my opinion if the NGE indeed would have come even close to TR's gameplay the NGE wouldn't be such a disaster for many people. So in my opinion its most definitly not a dumbed down version of the NGE.

But....keep in mind i view these type of games very different , where i saw/see SWG as being a MMORPG i see TR to just be a MMO....this might explain in how i persieve the game instead of those who expect or look at TR to be this full MMORPG.

Also looking/reading TR's background story would already make very well known that you will not be entering hugh abandon city's. You see with MMO's there is so much info on these games that you before you even played it you already would know what type of playground you be spending your time. Overall the game setting is very sci-fi. Totaly not Fantasy in my opinion. But each person looks at things differently so some might see it as fantasy type of setting. Where i see clearly many sci-fi settings, especialy when going into instance's.

NGE SWG was only a failure in terms of being a STAR WARS GAME.   As a star wars game, it's a flop.  but if you just judge the NGE by its own merits, I think it had very solid PVP with an interesting and complex team vs team aspect that TR is just not complex enough to touch.  

In my opinion, the gameplay of NGE SWG is better and more satisfying than that of TR.  SWG just has so many more options in terms of character building than TR.  Still, SWG was just an 'ok' game.  And if you can't manage to make a great game out of the star wars universe, you really have no business being a game dev.

and another non-sense rant about tr, and again the op has not played tr at all or just closed his eyes while doing so.

forest and caves? yea right, there is next to no forest, most of the zones are just plains with some trees here and there, wherever the bane are, nothing is growing at all, the actual mid-level zones (compared to the low-level zone you mentioned) are free of any kind of traditional trees. the zone you mentioned is probably palisades which looks like that only in the entry area (which is like a 10th of the zone), we are not on earth and even on earth the biggest part would be flat out nature, because as you see people still rely on normal agriculture.
the games settings were clearly stated in very early stages, if you don't like it, don't play and whine that it is not what it is not supposed to be.

and whoever felt the need to say that it all feels like a fantasy mmorpg because in the end you fight toe to toee, exactly 2 out of 8 classes are melee based, the rest is on range and picks out targets, most of the enemies are doing exactly the same, with the exception of animals (what a surprise!). please play the game before talking about it.

tr bashing is in and everyone wants to be a part of it, i understand that, but please at least have a fucking clue what you are talking about when ranting away, there are enough things wrong with the game, there is no need to make up crap.

I don't understand.  A lot of things are buildings.  Only wildlife stuff like fithik are caves.

Most stuff is open fields or a building.  Most control points don't even have roofs.  In the first zone 2 of the instances are a war zone and then infiltrating a base/rprison.

I think this OP is just wrong.  Sure caves exist but by no means is everything just a fantasy dungeon crawl.  Soem things yes.

If you were complaining that it was unrealistic because there was no mobile infantry, then I could sympathize.

Also who is saying everyone melees all the time?  That isn't true.  Some people do, many snipers almost never melee.  I'm not saying the AI is as good as Neocron where mobs actively sought cover and retreated in novel ways, but people certainly range with their guns.