Pirates of the Smoldering lakes and Blank Tablets with no Pencil

Well with a month long hiatus out of the way I have several things to talk about. Two long posts in two days! I am going to call it a fluke for now.

  I was able to get in a few new game demos to see what they had to offer.  I guess I will go over the bad one first. I got into the beta for Pirates of the Burning Sea just prior to its launch; from the start this one was a painful experience. As many others did I got the key from Eurogamer then downloaded the huge three part installation from fileplanet. To my disappointment after installing, the game would not completely update. After several hours I finally had to delete it. During the process of attempting to get some information on my problem I did find the posting on an alternate installer on PoTBS’ website, a smaller initial download but a longer patch process. I downloaded it and let the patcher do its thing. This time success! I launch the game and built out a character and that process was pretty decent not great but not bad. The first half of the introduction was the avatar combat, I have read several places that this was the weak spot of the game so I was prepared to be underwhelmed. I was but not to the extent I was dreading.  The second half was the ship combat portion and contrary to most opinions out there I just didn’t like it. I at first brushed it off as maybe I was not getting the “feel” for it yet.

So the intro is completed and I’m off to the first town, running around it and the first two missions I picked up were enough to tell me I would not like the game but something else kept nagging me. Then it hit me -  the problem I had was  the whole experience felt like an updated MMO version of Age of Pirates which if any of you have played it knows that is not a good thing.

The crafting is supposed to be very in depth but for me the comparison to EVE on that front left me not looking forward to suffering the rest of the game to really look too deep with the time commitment to get into it.

There may be a good game here and I wanted to like this one but alas I was almost immediately turned off by it.

The other I played was the 3 day Demo of Tabula Rasa as this is a somewhat a dated post it was prior to the doom and gloom web rumors floating around about the title. It was fun for those three days, the character creation was somewhat bland and uninspiring compared to other titles but the game was fun stating off. Well the good is out of the way.

Now the not so good, by the end of the third day I could see the issue with the game while fun I could tell within a month or two I would be tried of the game sort of like a really cute new girlfriend that after the first few dates you realize she just doesn’t have that spark that will kindle any long term interest. I have to agree with everyone else their crafting system is useless which to me is a big negative.

The combat is fun and I liked the dropship spawning on the map as opposed to the standard magical pop up of mobs. The outpost attacks were really the best part of the whole experience but I am afraid it was just not enough.