I am extremely excited to present to the community, Tabula Rasa Vault! The latest Vault for IGN’s Vault Network. This site was made possible by a dedicated and talented staff of hard working people who have a passion for Tabula Rasa.

Be sure to drop by the game overview section and check out the latest details about the game. I also want to point out our community database sections, which allows anyone to submit and manage their own content for the site. We also have obtained a couple exclusive screenshots for the launch of the site and numerous wallpapers to check out. Be sure to stop by the forums and consider it your new Tabula Rasa home when the game goes live.
To commemorate our launch, we have some thing that our readers would find to be most informative:

Dev Question of the Week - First Edition!

Exclusive Screenshots Found only on Tabula Rasa vault!

Maps to Find those hard to find Logos!

An Area and Instance Database!

A Mobs Database- for all those mobs you ever wondered about.

Skills Database - Unsure about a skill? Look it up in our comprehensive database.

Guides - For you to check out and read up on things You want to know about.

Fan Fiction - Stories created for your viewing pleasure! Feel free to submit your own!

FanArt - a Place to display your brilliant designs and artwork relating to the game. Submit your own and receive recognition!

Screenshots! Lots of Screens from the actual gameplay for you to view and enjoy!

We would be thrilled if you made Tabula Rasa Vault your #1 place to keep up with game information such as screenshots, concept art, storyline, new areas, planets, vehicles, and so much more!!!

Do you like the site? Do you want to get involved?
Well currently we're looking for dependable dedicated individuals who want to make this their favorite place by helping out with:

Database Filling
News Updaters
Guide Writers
as well as people interested in helping the community out in general with various site functions.

All those interested just drop me a line and I'll get back with you.

RGTR now has up a message directly from Richard Garriott himself. Here ya go:

Greetings Soldiers!

General British here to introduce a new weekly feature to our website, Feedback Friday. Every Friday a member of our staff will be responding to your issues, questions, and feedback or giving information on things the dev team is working on. You can use this link to add Tabula Rasa community news to your RSS reader and have the Friday Feedback sent straight to you along with all the other Tabula Rasa community news.

For this week, I want to talk about in-game economy and how it relates to our upcoming Operation 0: Fair Trade where we add a new feature, Military Surplus, to the game. Military Surplus outposts will allow players to buy and sell items in a fully-browsable store. We are working on getting them in-game as soon as we can with the idea that we will upgrade the Surplus stores later to support auctioning as well as consignment based buying and selling.

As mentioned by Starr earlier this week, we recently made changes to our crafting system to be more robust and more meaningful in the game, as well as making dropped loot more useful. Starting with the last patch you can disassemble items to separate their buffs from the item and use that buff on another item. For example, you get a weapon dropped from an enemy that has +1 to Body. You can take that weapon to the crafting station and disassemble it to get the Body buff off the weapon and then use a modification recipe to attach that buff to, say, a pair of boots. In the last patch you could only upgrade existing buffs, where in the next patch you can add new buffs. The grade of item determines how many different buffs you can add. This is a fun mechanic, however, there are literally thousands of recipes, items, buffs and component parts used in crafting. Getting exactly what you need to craft what you want can take some time fighting in the field. This is where Military Surplus really rounds out the in-game economy.

With Military Surplus, you simply go to the market and purchase the items you need to make that uber weapon you have always wanted. We really feel like our crafting system starts to shine once players can easily buy and sell items and supplies which is why we are working hard to get the Military Surplus outposts in the game as quickly as possible.

That’s all for this week! See you in game recruits!

General British

Gamespot now has up a new Q&A; with mission designer Rebekah Tran. Here is an excerpt:

GS: Give us a sense of the scale and scope of missions in Tabula Rasa. Will players only be killing 10 rats and returning them to the rat catcher? Will there be larger-scale, longer-term missions?

RT: You definitely will not be just killing X monsters while in Tabula Rasa. All of the designers work very hard to keep the feeling of a war in progress throughout the entire game, so most missions are very military in nature. Destroy a signal-jamming communications tower, protect a specialist while he hacks an enemy computer, gather intel on an enemy, [and] plant a communication spike to call in reinforcements and avoid enemy detection while infiltrating a base are just a few examples of things that you can do in our game. Not only do we have a gamewide, multicontinent mission arc, but the instances [a private copy of the world made for the player] really allow us as designers to craft very special experiences for the player.

Read the full article and come back here for all the latest Tabula Rasa news.

RGTR is reporting that on Halloween they are going to be running some contests and quests within Tabula Rasa. Here is an excerpt:

Join us in-game on October 31st during our 3 day Pre-Order headstart to celebrate that special spooky time of year, Halloween! Players will run missions spreading Halloween goodies and receive special Halloween masks as a treat from the Dev Team. There are 9 special masks to collect and keep, but you can only get them if you are in-game on Halloween day as part of our Pre-Order Headstart. Pick up your Tabula Rasa Pre-Order Bonus pack today and join us in game on Halloween to get your treats!

Read the full article and come back here for all the latest news.

Dev Sage has done it again, he's given some info about end game in TR or what they like to call Elder game. The things talked about should definately bolster the faith in TR as a whole. Check it out!

Our wonderfully talented artist Rhyssa_Fireheart was kind enough to make us an october desktop calendar. We've got it now so go and get yours and give thanks to Rhyssa_Fireheart for doing this for us.
October Desktop Calendar

The Vault Network is once again very excited to announce the launching of our latest site, Tabula Rasa Vault. Please take a moment and drop by to see what is going on with this highly anticipated game crafted by MMO legend Richard Garriott.

Tabula Rasa Vault

The NY Times now has up an article about Richard Garriott, referencing his space exploration fascination among other things. Here is an excerpt:

But Mr. Garriott, 46, has amassed a personal fortune that is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars, thanks to his pioneering role as a creator of computer games, so his treasures tend to be actual treasures.

The object that Mr. Garriott jokingly calls “Mr. Sputnik” is not, of course, the actual Sputnik that the Soviet Union launched 50 years ago, on Oct. 4, 1957. That one burned up as it re-entered the atmosphere three months later. But neither is it one of the many replicas manufactured after the fact.

Read the full article and come back here for all the latest news.

Planet TR now has up an article detailing the history of the challenge coin such as you'll be able to find in the collector's edition of Tabula Rasa. Here is an excerpt:

As we draw closer to the launch of Tabula Rasa more and more players are rushing to snatch up their copy of the Collector's Edition of the game. Who can blame them really? The box alone is reason enough to pick it up but that wasn't enough for NC Soft. They've crammed the CE so full of extras that players will be swimming in the swag. One particular item causing a stir is the Challenge Coin. A number of players have asked what the purpose of this coin is. While there is no special code printed on it to give the player some nifty in-game treat, the coin is an important part of the military aspect of TR. Want to know more? Join me after the jump and we'll discuss the history of the Challenge Coin and familiarize ourselves with the rules of the "Coin Check".

Read the full article and come back here for the latest Tabula Rasa news.

That is the question....
Some players prefer the endless grind from killing mob after mob after mob. They grind til their hearts content and find satisfaction in doing so. Other players prefer to grab every mission, quest, or task they're offered and explore the world at large to find every last little corner to get something to do that involves the story.

Which do you prefer? Tell us as we explore our Topic of the Week.

The developers at NCSoft are participating in a Dev Question of the Week feature for us and to commemorate our launch, they answered not one, but three questions. The topics include purchasing the game for download, monster play and cloning. Check out all the answers here!

We are now opening up the next round of questions to send to the developers. If you have a question, post it in the message forum thread attached to this news post. Submit quickly and often, as your pressing question just might get answered by the dev team!

NCSoft was kind enough to provide us with 5 beautiful images to commemorate the launch of Tabula Rasa Vault. You can view them all here or by clicking read more.

We are seeking player submitted screenshots. If you are in the beta, please send us all your prettiest images through our submission system and your image might just be picked as our highlighted image!

That's right! They've caught wind of players doing this on friday's during the beta lately and now it's official.

Attention AFS,

We got word that our players have been partaking in boxing matches for a little fun and friendly competition. Now we know that everyone likes to use fancy grenade launchers and full on armor when fighting the Bane, but straight hand-to-hand combat is the way to go when you want take out your aggression on the annoying guy in your clan. In these matches, rank doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s best to take out some of your aggression on your commanding officer as well.

Because of the growing popularity of these boxing matches, we’ve decided we’d like to set aside some time for “Friday Night Fights”. Meet us in USA1 this Friday, October 5th, with a level 4 character at around 8 PM Central.

We plan to set up a bracket system with about 32 players. The final fight will be refereed by the heavyweight champion himself, General British. If you’d like to participate in the bracket, or volunteer to be a referee, please send me PM and I’ll add you to the list!

See you there!

-Critters

So if you're into the Tabula Rasa scene so far or just wanna check it out come one come all to the Friday Night Fights!

MPOGD now has up an interview with April Burba about Tabula Rasa. Here is an excerpt:

Jason: For those who haven't got into the beta yet, how much of the final build are players experiencing right now? Is the current beta going to be a good indicator of ultimately what the final product is going to be like? How much of the beta right now is tweaking final things that were already in play and planned, and how much tweaking is being done specifically in regards to comments you've seen from players?

April: We have about one more patch before ship – we are getting pretty close. We have some big crafting changes coming before then and of course some balance passes, but we are close. Lots of tweaking is being done based on QA and Player feedback on ‘fun factor’ and balance.

Read the full article and come back here for all the latest news.

RIOTT now has up an interview with Tabula Rasa's creator Richard Garriott. Here is an excerpt:

WHAT OTHER GAMES DO YOU THINK HAVE INFLUENCED TABULA RASA, EITHER POSITIVELY OR NEGATIVELY?

I think all MMOs have influenced us. The whole team has played every MMO out there. We’ve been in the business for years. And we’ve basically determined that most of the ones out there are improvements upon Ultima Online and EverQuest. So we wanted to do something that is an MMO but is different, more active and more story driven.

Read the full article and come back here for all the latest news.

RGTR is reporting that they are going to have some new info on the Operations system in place for Tabula Rasa very shortly, but until then they've briefly gone over just what Operations are. Here is an excerpt:

I know everyone is excited about future Tabula Rasa content updates and it is our intention to add content and features every few months. These updates will be called “Operations.” These are similar to City of Heroes “Issues”, Lineage 2 “Chronicles”, or Dungeon Runners “Chunks.” However, this does not mean that we will never add content outside of these updates. Some changes, additions, and content will be released in patches between Operations as needed.

What kind of content can you expect to see in some of the first Operations? Elder content for one. Paul Sage will have an update tomorrow on what is in store for TR’s elder game. We’ll also see more areas, PvP system enhancements, Clan system enhancements, more missions, and upgrades to our website services such as character pages.

Read the full article and come back here for all the latest news.

RGTR is reporting that they've got up five new Tabula Rasa wallpapers for everyone to now download and dress up their computer.

Go download the wallpapers and come back here for all the latest Tabula Rasa news.

RGTR is reporting that in a recent posting by Starr Long that Tabula Rasa has been delayed oh so very slighty. Here is an excerpt from the post:

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.

Read the full article and come back here for all the latest news.

Pro-G is now giving away beta keys for Tabula Rasa if you haven't snatched one up for yourself yet.

Read the full article and come back here for all the latest news.