While these sound cool, one complaint Beta testers had was that for all the hype, they really a small fraction of the overall content. Long admits the game has its share of more traditional quests, but also noted that they have done some work later in Beta to make sure these show up earlier in the character arc and more frequently.
"You didn't even encounter your first one until between level seven and ten," Long noted. "We made a change that one of the very first missions when you come out of the boot camp tutorial is a little ethical parable." Over the Beta, they endeavored to add as many as they could, but nonetheless, like many MMOs, the really cool stuff must wait until the end.
"When you get to the level 45 plus missions, that's when it becomes really interesting and unique," he said. "A lot of people haven't gotten there yet, but when you do, there is a big pay off."
This is still an MMOG and so it follows that some grind and element of a hidden treasure at the top of a mountain is to be expected, but NCsoft has mitigated that through another tweak on tradition: character cloning combined with a branching class system.
In simple English, that means that players do not select a class on day one, but instead go through a series of forks that make their character more specialized. They combined this with cloning, which is where players are able to copy over an exact copy of their character's progress through the world, but under a new name and body (or even gender). Thus, players can essentially "save their game" at each fork in the road and never need to start from scratch if they want to experience a different class and the content associated with it.
Originally, Tabula Rasa had been slated to launch earlier in October, but NCsoft took the unusual step of a very short delay to further polish their project. Many found the move curious and Long explained.
"It came down to there was just a list of critical things we wanted to fix," he said. "Balance was a huge one." He also noted optimization and sever stability as two other things they tackled that should make their launch much more smooth.
"It wasn't a lot of time, but it was exactly enough time to get there," he added.
MMOG gamers always want more though and now that launch is finally here, what else does NCsoft have planned?
"Interestingly, we are already rolling into post launch plans for a while," Long told us. "The art team actually moved into expansion art at the end of August."
The plan is to release several free content updates each year, but unlike most other NCsoft games which only do these free updates, Tabula Rasa will also have retail expansion packs. Long believes they'll make it an annual event.
So how is Tabula Rasa going to do? Long played it smart and didn't make any bold predictions. "We're prepared for just about anything," he said and explained how they have the hardware on hand for any kind of launch imaginable.
