Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Tabula Rasa - gone, but Face of Mankind returns

With the doors closing in Feb of 09, what is a poor Sci-Fi player to do?

Seems someone is taking up that mantle.

Face of Mankind makes a return.

Originally released in March of 2006, the game has seen some financial difficulties. It closed doors in 2007. It tried a relaunch in June of this year, but this fell through as well.

What the issues are is unknown at this point. But, luckily the original developers have found a group to share in the games relaunch.

Nexeon Technologies has taken the mantle of the game to have servers available.

The technology does look a bit old, but has a visual likeness to Tabula Rasa. Some scenes from a video that follows looks like it may take place on Earth, and is a "real time" combat engine in First or Third person. One reading of the game even stated having apartments, and a full crafting system.



Guess we will have to see. But, it does have my favorite price tag.

Free.

2 comments:

Talyn said...

I tried it out a year or two ago for one month. I was the only player on the entire server.

The engine itself reminded me of the old AvP shooter (the first one, not AvP2) quality graphics. A *major* failing of the game was that it revolved 100% around player-generated content (content meaning quests) -- there was no dev-created pre-generated (or even randomly generated) quests. Therefore, much like the problem with WAR, if there are no players there is nothing to do; the game becomes utterly broken at that point.

I don't even remember if there were NPC's or mobs to just go out and grind. I recall running around all alone in some city/complex and with the population always reading one (me) I had no incentive to go out looking.

If I want a single-player game, I'll get one...

On the other hand, FREE might get some players.

Unknown said...

If free is good enough to get players, its certainly not good enough to keep them. Since this game is designed and modeled to operate on a scaling success contingent on numbers, the lower the player base, the faster it dies, the lower the player base becomes. It is a compounding problem, easily resolved by adding a secondary advancement system that isn't contingent on players.