Tabula Rasa Interview

WarCry had the chance to catch up with Tabula Rasa community manager April Burba at this year’s Penny Arcade Expo for a quick Q&A about the sci-fi MMORPG.

Q: Gamers like to know that game companies listen to them. We asked before for something that has changed due to your beta testers feedback. Can you give us some more examples of how the beta has changed the game?

A: Oh ya, tons of stuff. I mentioned before about the character changes and how the original plan was that everyone would start out with the same ‘uniform’ and only really customize their gender, hair and overall body size. Now we have added in things like facial hair, eye patches, goggles, various clothes and coloring options. Also things like, we had made an adjustment to the XP curve, making it take longer to level. We ended up changing that due to player feedback. We had to decide if we were going to be the normal MMO, or if we were going to stick to our core, which is, “Stable, Fast, and Fun”. And we had to agree, it wasn’t fun anymore, if felt like more of a regular MMO. So now that it’s been adjusted back the other way. Ya its faster, you will go through the content a lot faster now, but its fun. It’s fun. That’s what it’s all about. If you are having a good time, so what, that’s what it should be about. There have really been all kinds of stuff; there have been chat adjustments, UI adjustments. We added in an entirely new UI control option, because of the way some of the more traditional MMO players are used to a UI. It was much more like a FPS style, and now it’s more of a cross over. We changed the tutorial, the first open area you get come to, all of that has changed due to player feedback. We got rid of the kill 20 of this mob quest at the beginning, because players didn’t like it. So all kinds of stuff.

They’ve also uploaded some footage of the PAX demo, in case you’re interested.