Changing the look
Changing the Look
One of our highest priorities was to change the initial moments of the game. We really wanted to convey that Tabula Rasa is a science fiction game and that you, as a player, are on a world far away from home.
In the previous version of the tutorial, you started out on in a dusty ravine that looked quite a bit like Earth, surrounded by human military and military equipment. In the new version, you step out of a wormhole into in a glowing cavern filled with alien artefacts, where ahead waits a massive holographic alien. As you head across a long stone bridge, the alien speaks, telling the basic story of why you are a chosen one, a ‘receptive,’ saved from Earth for the great battle for control of the universe.
The opening cavern is also home to a band of AFS refugees that have set up camp after barricading themselves from the Bane threat outside. While they keep a close eye on the barricaded cave entrance, they have some time to spend keeping in shape, doing calisthenics, and practicing on the new target ranges.
Once you’ve progressed outside, you’ll battle inside a destroyed human outpost, and make your way to safety at a remote dropship pad set among Forean ruins. Outside of the missions, you can actually join in the battle in this new version of the map and play as long as you want, as the Bane will never stop trying to claim this outpost as their own.
If you’ve played Tabula Rasa previously, you may notice that the map is rather familiar. Because we were on a tight timeline, we decided to gut the old tutorial map and repurpose it, rather than building a new map from scratch. I admit, as the mission designer of the previous bootcamp, this was possibly the most fun part of the whole process. Much like tearing apart a house before a big renovation, I gleefully went through the map I’d spent so much time on last year. Downed dropship that never, ever worked right in the beginning of the map? DELETE. Collector and Dissector? Never again will I care that you randomly got stuck on the cave walls, somewhat ruining your whole big scary entrance. And you three Bane that spawned an ambush on the bridge? Yeah, you guys? I no longer care that you would always, always show up with one of you under the bridge like an intergalactic troll, because you. are. deleted.
But it wasn’t all just changing the pretty-pretty, we had to make adjustments to the gameplay as well…
