Probably the best news we’ve heard for the upcoming Sci-Fi MMORPG Tabula Rasa. Starr Long has posted on the official TR site saying they need the extra time to polish the game. This delay pushes back the original October 19th launch date to October 30th for pre-order customers. Not exactly a lot of time, but hopefully it helps.

However if we do have to nitpick, it’s how they’re going about polishing the “Stable, & Fast” part while neglecting the “Fun” that really deserves the attention at the mid and end-game. Which means they’re only have about 2 months after launch to tack in some elements to satiate gamers hitting their level caps and keeping them playing before they start getting flamed on their forums by the very fan bois that latched onto the actiony shoot em’ up MMO in the first place.

As the TR dev team goes into crunch mode, it’s a good to know Richard Garriot is taking the title that bears his name on the box so serious, he’s prepping to leave Earth on a promotional space flight for Tabula Rasa where he’ll stay aboard the International Space Station.

Many of you have heard my mantra for game development: “Stable, Fast, Fun. In that order.” We need a little more time to make that happen.

To this end we are moving our Pre-Order headstart date to 10/30/07 and our commercial service start date to 11/2/07. This short but critical amount of time will give us time to address several issues including stability and balance as well as allowing our players to test the continent of Ligo (L38+) and our major changes to crafting for a few weeks rather than a few days. Our entire development staff feels this extra time is needed as does our beta community. We feel confident that this extra time will make a difference on launch day.

That said we are excited about launching the game and moving into a “live” environment where the entire future of the AFS is ahead of us. Expect more posts from Richard Garriott, Paul Sage, and other dev staff over the next few days as they discuss plans for elder content and content updates both long and short term. One of us will also be posting to the website every Friday in order to directly address your feedback, which you can submit via the Feedback Form found here on the RGTR.com website.

See you in game as we wrap up this final leg of testing and get ready for the end-of-beta blow out!

Starr Long
Producer