I was a latecomer on the Tabula Rasa train, and it is by far the MMO I most enjoyed up to now. And when I read the scathing reviews on it, I have often wondered if it was the same game…

So, yes, I’ll wait a few months for maturity, and then give a try.

As a side note, the starting areas from the original WoW did not grab me at all, Lore-wise or anything, contrary to the one from DAoC. BUT, the blood elves one was really excellent in design. It was quite a shock when i left it to come to the classic areas…

TCoS on the other hand downloaded flawlessly for me, heh, and I’m sure lots of people had no trouble at all with RoM.

I’m sure I could try dl’ing it again, but after reading this…why bother eh?

Jason (resident drunken idiot of Channel Massive who likes to sign his comments because it makes them 10x more valid)

And I’ll state again: I hope I am proven wrong.

@DM Osbon: I’ve always loved City of Heroes. Despite its grindy missions, it is a game that tried to be different, and importantly tried to make things as fun as possible, even if that meant making player characters stupidly overpowered. And it worked. And you know what, I heard about it through word of mouth from friends and colleagues.

@ixobelle: I actually liked WAR’s starter areas, they were well done in my opinion and echoed WoW and Dark Age of Camelot in being an interesting and smooth introduction to the game. Mythic’s mistake, I feel, was that they didn’t then funnel the players from their starter areas all into one big impact area, which is what such an RvR game probably needed. As such, they spread their players and their content too thinly. As for EVE, well, I think the starter tutorial is comprehensive and overwhelming, but that’s EVE. If that’s what you like, then you’ll keep going and you’ll find a game that is perfect for you at the end of it – no surprises. Darkfall is not my sort of game, and I won’t judge a game I have no experience of. From what I have read elsewhere, it’s a fantastic game for the player who desires dedicated group-centric PvP.

I hope we can still have the babies, though.

@Sorcefire: Spellborn is free to play up to certain level, so don’t let my review stop you from giving it a try! There’s no guarantee that my view will be your view, and as I said at the end of the review, I would be happy to be proven wrong in the long term, because again it’s an MMO that’s trying to do something different, and we need these games to find an audience if at all possible.

I’m sorry you found WAR’s starter areas to be no good, I thought they were quite well done, and I couldn’t help but draw some comparisons to WoW. I haven’t experience them all though, so perhaps some are better designed than others.

@Toxic: I’m afraid I disagree. I think WoW’s starter areas are very well crafted, but yes the Burning Crusade editions are refined even further. My first game was Dark Age of Camelot, by the way, and I enjoyed that game a great deal and stuck with it for a long time. It also had well designed starting areas too, in my opinion. Second game was City of Heroes. WoW’s starter areas still… uh, wowed me.

@Ysh: I hope nobody, especially in this day and age, would read one of my reviews and make a decision based upon it. If anything I would prefer that they used it to arm themselves against what they might encounter, and then try the game anyway, and perhaps explain to me why they think I’m wrong. As I say, I’ve followed the game for a while and it excited me with what it was trying to do, but ‘first impressions’ and all that. It’s free to download and try, so nobody has any reason not to do so, really! I may well go back myself some time. Van Hemlock has a ‘wait at least three months before trying an MMO’ rule, and it is oft proven to be sage advice.

@Historian: I’m not going to lie, when I say ‘starter area’ I mean right at the very start. I wandered around, grabbed the quests immediately available, for bears and Notaboars, and attempted them. I’m sure there are all sorts of derogatory comments that can be made about my opinion here, and I have tried to clarify to readers just how little I have played, but it was enough for me. I didn’t subscribe to Tabula Rasa, I didn’t subscribe to Pirates and I didn’t subscribe to Auto Assault, for such similar reasons, that I am firm in my belief that this game has made the same mistakes. As I said at the end of the review, though, I will be exceedingly happy to be proven wrong.

@Brent Michael Krupp: “All grind is relative” as Oscar Wilde once said. EQ’s grind is legendary, as it is in other games – take it from someone who tried RF Online. However, what is undeniable is that, relative to the content preceding it, Stranglethorn Vale and the levels surrounding it were quite a shock to the system with respect to XP slowdown in WoW for quite a while; it’s a well known ‘hump’ in the game’s levelling curve, and is to what I was referring.

A couple of things to finish up:

Start to (Nota)boar is a rule that applies here, as far as I’m concerned.

And everyone should be reading Tipa’s excellent adventures in Spellborn, because if nothing else, she can stick with a game despite any misgivings others of us might have.

My biggest problem, personally, is with reticle-based combat and that’s not something you or I can do anything about at this stage. ;) Besides, it’s a system many many other people get on with really well. It is what it is.

I have extreme trouble getting on with the reticle-based combat (had the same problem with SWG, but you *could* fight in pointer mode, which I have yet to manage in Spellborn). That said though, the world, the lore and the atmosphere were rather good and certainly novel in many ways, so I’d like to give it another go. I just don’t want to do it in conditions that are likely to irritate me and skew the learning process.