The WC Saga team has created several small video clips of their Freespace/WC mod. Advanced effects such as the shock wave and lit environments are clearly visible in this new batch of clips. Each scene is fairly short, but the video quality and file size are pretty good. The atmosphere of the game seems to have been improved over previous iterations, and more Wing Commander (and less Freespace) shine through than ever before. Specifics about each clip are broken down below. The divx videos range from 1 to 3 megs.
Hurleybird tipped us off about a recent GameSpy article on Tabula Rasa. We've covered a variety of recent Richard Garriott interviews and revealed the logo last week, and this new piece attempts to really dig down and look at what is really going on these days. It points out that the game has had many talented and distinguished developers involved with it, but the focus has changed and now Tabula Rasa is struggling to find itself. A fifth of the dev team has been laid off and three quarters of the initial game has been scrapped and reworked. On a positive note, the game's lead designer and publishers continue to have a lot of faith in the product, and sooner or later they'll hammer out something. We'll just have to wait to see how that something turns out.
The team was comprised of numerous game development veterans, including, among others, Garriott himself and NCSoft's star programmer Jake Song. Collectively, the team had hundreds of years of development experience under its belt, not to mention some very distinguished titles: Ultima Online, Lineage, Wing Commander, and others.
It was a recipe for disaster.
Not quite what anyone was expecting, but to hear Garriott tell it, it sounds like the most logical thing in the world. The famed game designer gave a very candid lecture on the MMO's turbulent development history...
Garriott unabashedly stated that, once upon a time, Tabula Rasa was intended to be the be-all, end-all MMO. It was to be the one that unified the then-disparate Eastern and Western audiences, and it would marry the expansiveness of the MMO with the sense of individual empowerment that the single-player RPG grants to users. The means by which the team hoped to achieve all this seem quaint at this point, because it's all been realized already; Asians and Westerners play together in games like Guild Wars and Final Fantasy XI, and, to varying degrees, it can be said that a multitude of games are approaching single-player RPGs in terms of narrative immersion.
You can check out the full article here.
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