News
Feedback Friday - 11th April 2008
11th April 2008 16:00 Posted by Avatea
Spring is in the air, the Treemites are coming out to play and it feels like update time again. As stated in Starr’s update, the team has gotten smaller. With a smaller post production group, you have to concentrate on the things that will make the product better and prioritize features that will make the game enjoyable for the players. So the team got together, and talked about what would make the project better in the short term based on their thoughts of the game and player feedback. We came away with two big features that we felt would really make a large amount of difference.
The first feature is a better ‘looking for squad’ system. We want to make sure people can find other players to play our game with. Tabula Rasa is much more fun when you play in a squad, so we need to facilitate that. Speaking of which, one of the things to enhance this system will be a better lock feature. When you
The second item we wanted to concentrate on was clan owned control points. This feature won’t just be a PvP feature, but a PvP and PvE feature. The reasons the team felt this was a good call was that it highlighted certain things:
- Need to continue concentration in class balance for the PvP end
- Makes use of one of our more popular features – control points
- Adds a sense of ownership for control points (and the game)
- Rewards clan participation – encourage more socialization
The clan owned control points endeavor will also include a currency for common actions that will contribute to your personal glory or your clan’s glory. This system is called prestige currently. Names have a way of changing in development however. You have already been introduced to the baseline of the system. We will be converting control point tokens into prestige. There will no longer be an assault and defense token, but rather a single currency. This prestige will be able to be earned in several ways and will be able to be spent like the current control point tokens. How prestige is earned may change, but currently includes the following ways for PvE: killing a control point attacker or defender, killing a control mini-boss, reaching the maximum killing streak, getting a blue or purple drop, gaining a level, or perhaps completing some special missions. We hope this system goes into test with release 1.8. With the introduction of the prestige system, we are basing the system for ownership of control points and prestige rewards on merit rather than the original idea of having clan size be the deciding factor in clan rewards.
So this begs the question, where are PAUs, flashpoints, and command opportunity? Well, as I said above, names have a way of changing in development. Flashpoints as instances requiring more than one squad aren’t currently in development. However, we did put in missions that would activate for more than one squad on overland maps. We are calling these missions flashpoints now. That doesn’t mean we won’t be doing multi-squad instances in the future… it was just a name change to these new types of missions.
PAUs are still being worked on by our artists. The design for them is fleshed out, but we have to get them to our coders. When we feel that enough people have freed up after Clan Owned Control points, we will likely begin work on PAUs. I’m personally looking forward to seeing them implemented with the new design.
Finally there is command opportunity. The team felt less strongly about this feature than PAUs, LFS, and clan owned control points. In order to even begin work on something like command opportunity, we need to make sure our current summoned minions respond better to orders. Given that class balance is an important part of getting to clan owned control points, there is a heavy concentration on getting things like reinforcements, clones, and the reanimated working up to snuff. We can look at command opportunity again and gather your feedback after all the work is done with class balance to see if it still makes sense for Tabula Rasa.
That’s where we are now. We have a ton of good quality of life features coming down the pike that I am really excited about. We also have some new instances coming up for the level 50 crowd, and maybe even one new one around the level 25-30 range. We’re continuing work to make sure that all the maps have very high quality standards.
I’ll see you out there.
Paul Sage
Lead Designer
Comments
Sounds good, I look forward to seeing what the team can introduce to make Tabula Rasa even better.
About the commands. Early on, a similar system to the Ctrl menu rose, we could get a similar system implemented for squads of players. Two “roses”, one for squad leaders (orders and the such) and a smaller one for squad members (acknowledgment, data like actual enemies rather than just seeing a red blimp etc).
just tossing it out
Pau’s, CP, Flashpoints and Command Oportunities there must be released in FEBRUARY. you are playing with our money, personaly, i’m cancel my account now. In this game there are nothing to do at lvl 50
Thanks gor the update. i can certainally see where you are comeing from with regard to command squads , and hope to see the minion improvements soon (i play a exibio) . keep up the good work and thank you again.
as before any demo stuff??????
Make the game to be more party oriented - playing solo is boring!
Can’t wait to see those changes in PvP.
It all sounds good but we need expanding PvE content and some big challenges for L50 players if TR is not to become another enjoyable journey to a dead end, the achilles heel of Autoassault.
How about a monthly event mission for a nice recipe or something in the meanwhile? A long cryptic journey collecting obscure creature drops for an event npc, with the ultimate goal of earning a unique item. Very little development required to keep us occupied whilst we wait for something bigger.
<Avatea> Valid comment and the idea has been passed on to the developers.
Great idea for improving the game: How’s about you make it simple for your customers to actualy register and get online? Great eh?
<Avatea> Hi, our Billing team replied to your petition on the 16th April and never heard back from you with the required information, could you please update your ticket on your PlayNC Support account to get this issue fixed? Thank you.