With the launch of Operation Immortality, there is quite a buzz on the internet about Tabula Rasa creator, Richard Garriott's October space launch and 10 day mission on the International Space Station. Here are just a few of articles that were featured this week. Read Full article.
This Friday, July 25th, Richard Garriott will be facing up against two time featherweight boxing champ Jesus Chavez in the C.E.L.L.A.R. Arena. This will be held on the TR Test Server starting at 6pm Central time.
Are you ready for this? Orion and Pegasus are gearing up for a major clan war. That's right, a test of skills to see which server has the better players. Clans from throughout Orion server are teaming up to take on clans from Pegasus server in a major clan war on the Test Server.
Squad 288 Launches Newsletter
Squad 288 launched it's first newsletter on July 3rd. Featuring New Members, Upcoming Events, Member Spotlight, Member Miletsones, Game Updates, and more. To view the July Newsletter, click here
July 9, 2008 - Welcome to this week's Feedback
Friday! Today we're discussing the build status for Deployment 10 and
11, some upcoming creature changes, and a Progressive Weapons overview
with Art Director Victor Meinert AKA _Slash. Build Status D10 and D11
Deployment 10...
Welcome to this week's Feedback Friday! Today we're discussing the
build status for Deployment 10 and 11, some upcoming creature changes,
and a Progressive Weapons overview with Art Director Victor Meinert AKA
_Slash.
Build Status D10 and D11
Deployment 10 is on the Public Test Server.
We are applying another build today to fix a few nagging issues *looks
glaringly at the Military Surplus*, and it will be on it's way to Live
servers after a few weeks of testing. You can find out what was changed
for D10.3 in our Test Server Patch Notes section of the website (once the build is published later today).
As
for Deployment 11, we'll be wrapping up content building this week and
having our "stability week" to bug fixes and minor tweaks next week.
Creative Creatures
Meet
a new member of the Thrax family. Ya, he’s a little smaller than his
fellow Thrax cohorts, but don’t feel sorry for this guy – he’ll be
beating up on new recruits around Wilderness while his bigger brothers
move towards higher level threats. This is a new approach we’re taking
to make creatures “pick on someone their own size” and add variation to
your enemies as you get to higher levels. You see their unarmored
versions from 1-16 (except bosses) and the beefier versions after level
16. We plan to extend this concept with Lightbenders, Kaels, and
Amoeboids (but not with those specific levels). We don’t have an exact
time frame for when this will roll out to servers, but keep an eye out
in the next few deployments.
Progressive Weapons Update
Hello everyone!
I
thought I’d give everyone a glimpse of what sort of cool stuff we’ve
been working on in the weapons department. It’s gonna be art-centric
mind you…but it oughta be fun none the less. We started off a couple of
sprints ago with the high level objective of giving players more
opportunity to distinguish themselves, especially at higher levels
after a lot of investment in their characters. One opportunity we
immediately identified was new high level weaponry. ‘Kick ass weapons
for high level players!’ was the battle cry. We successfully got the
Series 2 and Series 3 Shotgun released in one sprint! That was really
exciting for the team to be able to do a release that fast and the
feedback so far seems very positive. Plus, who doesn’t love a Bad-Ass
Triple-Barrel Transforming Incendiary Shotgun!?
We want to
repeat that initial success of course, to feed new and cooler weapons
to the players, but with an increased focus on the classes over all.
Tom and I want to avoid the ‘tail wagging the dog’ in terms of art
being released for art’s sake (although as art director I have to admit
that it’s a very attractive idea to just make cool weapons and hand ‘em
out!).
Seriously though, I’ve been working closely with Tom and
a small group of our key systems designers to develop a design-driven
framework that we can then use to guide us in developing future
‘bad-ass’ equipment. Obviously that’s a complex challenge, but everyone
is really excited by it getting it right.
From a purely
art-centric perspective I wanted to give everyone a glimpse into what
we’re thinking about. I have to caveat this with by saying it’s only
early prototyping!! J….but it’s still super exciting. Right now we’ve
got a working prototype of a couple of new high level Chain Guns. The
Chain Gun has been really exciting in particular because we’re
developing it in collaboration with our overseas team over in Seoul.
We’ve got 3 super talented senior artists there that are attached to
the TR art team and are continually delivering really great content. We
just love working with this team because they are so talented and
intuitive. This is also the team that has been helping us out for the
past 4 months optimizing the armor and beautifying the females. All of
the facial improvements have been driven by those artists. They’re just
amazing!
The Chain guns still need some work, but we are
actually much closer on some new high level Rocket Launchers. "What’s
that?" you say, "New Rocket Launchers?" In fact what we’ve come up with
is an Over-The-Top, Bad-Ass™
Double-Barrel-Transforming-Rocket-Launcher. Folks on the dev team are
drooling over it. I cannot wait to get this equipment into players'
hands! As soon as we get the mechanics and some lingering audio
additions done we’ll get them into a build near you! (continued below)
I
just want to say it one more time because it sounds sooo good when you
say it out loud…everyone join me
now….Bad-Ass-Double-Barrel-Transforming-Rocket-Launchers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We’ve
also been doing a bit of top secret concept work on some very high
level content that I’m very excited about. I think I’ll save that for
my next Feedback Friday though…along with some impressive concept
imagery…
Thanks everyone for playing TR! I’ll see you on the battlefield!
Operation Immortality 
Tabula Rasa Olympics 
Garriott vs Chavez 
Orion vs Pegasus Clan War - Sign up now! 
Squad 288 Launches Newsletter 
