MMO Gamers

     I like Tabula Rasa.  The combat is fast and furious and can be a lot of fun.  There’s a little bit of strategy involved so much as in crouching increases the damage you do and crouching behind sandbags, walls etc decreases the damage you receive.  The world itself looks good, a planet in a perpetual state of war.  But having said all that, the game, at least for me, gets boring.  You are killing Lightbringers at level 1 and still killing them at level 30, albeit more powerful ones.  That’s not any different than any other MMO out there; you kill low level orcs and then you kill higher level orcs.

     But the thing that keeps turning me away from TR is that you spend all of your play time by yourself.  It’s a very solo friendly game and my biggest criticism of it is that there is no need to group.  And no one does.  And I don’t think I’m the only one to feel this way.  The developers appear to be doing things to encourage grouping, like this from the official website. 

Fellow AFS soldiers, General British has authorized Double XP to be awarded to those soldiers who play as part of squads between Monday, May 5, 2008 10AM CDT and Monday, May 12, 2008 at 4pm CDT. All soldiers fighting in squads will earn 2x the XP normally awarded while in a group.

     Unfortunately my subscription expired on the 5th and I’m not going to renew it just to see if this latest effort works (though I must confess extra XP sounds nice).  I don’t mean to sound like a pessimist but I’m not sure it will make a difference.  There is no dependence on other classes to achieve any objectives.  You don’t need a main tank or healer.  There’s no requirement for crowd control.  And my experience with groups in TR was mostly terrible.  It’s more like 5 solo players running around in the same area sharing XP rather than one cohesive unit.

     I’m not sure what the solution is, whether the classes need tweaking or making the instance dungeons more difficult and offering some replay value to them.  Or perhaps the solution is in finding a big clan (guild) to join.  Either way, there are other games to play so I won’t dwell on it.