Tabula Rasa On Hold

I quit WoW once I had seen all the sights I wanted to see and I knew that the rest wasn’t worth the effort. I quit Lord of the Rings Online when I realized that the gameplay just didn’t do it for me anymore. So why am I deciding that now is the time to quit Tabula Rasa? I’ve been totally digging this MMO. It’s managed to turn traditionally slow MMORPG gameplay into something much more exciting. So if the game plays great, then what’s the freaking problem?

As time passed playing Tabula Rasa, I began to realize that it was a really lonely game. I grouped up whenever there was an opportunity, and that was always fun, but over time it happened less and less. I started making it more of a priority, but the vast majority of my time was still spent solo. I think there are a couple factors at work here. One obvious problem is that the game hasn’t been a smash success, and the population is on the decline. Spread the few players over segregated servers and level ranges and the result is that there are few people that you can actually play with. This is made worse by the fact that the traditional instanced group activities have zero replay incentive - loot is completely exchangeable in Tabula Rasa, so the only reason to run an instance is for the quest, and once you’ve done the quest there’s no reason to return. So your only potential partners are people that are in your level range and haven’t run the quest yet, and there just aren’t enough of them. The fact that Tabula Rasa is lenient about group composition and travel is great, but it can’t make up for a lack of players. It makes me feel guilty, because I know that me leaving doesn’t make it any easier for the people I’m leaving behind, but the whole thing was starting to feel like a diluted single player game.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem whatsoever with a single player game in a large persistent world. That’s how I find myself playing most MMOs. But if you’re going to survive completely on that, you need something driving you forward that’s as powerful as a traditional singleplayer epic. Tabula Rasa is overall weak on story and environment (although it does has its moments). Towards the high 30s I ran into a long stream of lackluster content that just killed my mojo. If there was some social gameplay to distract me I’d probably keep on truckin’, but without that there just wasn’t enough to pull me through.

I can blame that weak content for my waning interest, but there’s also a bit of a flaw in the character development track. Through the lower levels you are very involved in shaping your character to your play style, with your final class decision happening at level 30. That’s a great moment, and after that you’ve got quite a few levels to break in your awesome new abilities. But after you’ve pumped some points into them and found your balance you realize that there’s nothing more coming. You’ll get more points to allocate, making your abilities slightly more powerful, but there’s nothing significant that will change all the way from 30 to the level cap at 50. By the late 30s I felt like I’d already mastered my arsenal and had nothing to focus on next.

So it was that I found myself with no one to play with, no interesting story to pursue, increasingly repetitive environments, and no long-term developments to look forward to. Basically, the long-term appeal was gone.

So I’ve put my Tabula Rasa account into hibernation. I could go back and start with another class, and that does intrigue me. In fact, even after everything I’ve said above, just thinking about the game makes me want to play it some more. But I think I’d rather put this one on the backburner and see if the development team can flesh more things out in the following months. I hope they do, because the moment to moment action of this game is still my favorite for any MMO.

Broken Flowers

I don’t bust out the 1 star rating on Netflix very often, but Broken Flowers has received that honor. You’d think a movie with an 86% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes would guarantee at least some level of enjoyment. Nope. The critics seem to love it, but if you look around at forums or user ratings you’ll see I’m not alone in my disappointment.

It doesn’t take much for me to enjoy a movie. I have to be entertained or walk away thinking. Either is acceptable, both are great. Broken Flowers managed to come up with neither. For a movie billed as a comedy it was decidedly not funny. No laughter, no smile, no dry statement aloud of “That’s funny,” not even a pleasant retrospective afterwards of some ridiculous moment.

Okay, so it’s not humor I’m going to get out of this… maybe there are interesting characters? Nope. I’m cool with many forms of Bill Murray (everything from Ghostbusters to Lost in Translation to Life Aquatic), but his character in Broken Flowers has crossed the line from being understated to stating nothing. The women of the film provide the only personality, but they are constrained to short vignettes. So really you’re stranded with no emotional anchor for the entire film.

How about plot? Certainly this slow, unfunny movie with bland characters must tell an interesting tale? Not the case. The setup is forced and the plot goes nowhere. No really, nowhere - the ending was extremely unsatisfying. You know, the sort where the credits start scrolling and you say aloud “Really? That’s it?” You can squint and say that the movie made a statement about a man going on a journey to find out he wanted something he didn’t know he wanted. But really at that point you’re just trying to find a way to justify the wasted hour and a half of your life.

28 Weeks Later

I quite enjoyed 28 Days Later. It’s a zombie movie that’s not a zombie movie. In this world it’s not about the dead rising, it’s about a virus that turns people into rage-filled assailants. This curates a different theme from the normal shambling hordes (even compared to those movies that do have fast zombies). The story is unveiled in an interesting way too, with the events of the movie happening well after the initial outbreak. You usually don’t expect mystery from a zombie flick, but 28 Days Later delivers. Thoroughly enjoyed it, and highly recommend it to anyone with the stomach for the thrills and gore.

So I decided to check out its sequel: 28 Weeks Later. And I’m decided more conflicted about this one. With one hand it makes bold statements and presents interesting scenarios, while with the other hand it frustrates me to no end with people making stupid decisions.

This movie takes place after the Infected have died of starvation and Great Britain is being reclaimed. The United States military is securing an area of London, incinerating any possible remnants of the virus, and slowly reintroducing the citizens that had escaped the outbreak. It’s an interesting setting with lots of possibilities. Well, as far as moviemaking goes there’s only one possibility (another outbreak), but you know what I mean.

I don’t take any offense to the core events that unfold after this, but the details of how they came to pass drive me nuts. I don’t like movies where the world is saved by the actions of one child’s, nor do I like movies where one child’s actions damn the entire world (although the latter is far more likely). There are too many key moments in 28 Weeks Later where everything goes to crap because of something stupid. There’s no guard looking over the potentially infected mother; the civilians are frantically relocated to an unsecure location; nobody tells the kids nor their eventual caretakers that they might be different. These events unfold for stupid reasons, when perfectly good reasons could have been given with just a few more minutes of footage. There are guards posted over the mother, but they get distracted or just plain overtaken; There’s a proper heavily-drilled procedure for locking down the civilians but something else goes wrong and the protection is compromised. Blah, blah, blah - it’s not hard to switch the blame here from stupid people to something more reasonable. Yes, I realize that there are people out there making dumb decision that just might destroy us all, but I don’t think that makes a good movie. That just gets you cursing that the screen, rolling your eyes, and saying “well I wouldn’t have done that.”

Despite these faults, the movie does manage to make some bold statements. It’s not easy to get a viewer to sympathize with the military opening up on innocents, but in this movie you totally do. There’s a theme throughout the movie of various people making sacrifices for the greater good. The ballsy thing about the movie is that these actions cause the end of all civilization as we know it. In other words, compassion and heroism not only leads to failure, but repercussions on an epic scale. It is by no means your standard zombie movie message, and it’ll keep your brain churning well after the movie is over.

I’m finding that the movies in this genre I like best are the ones with smart people making smart decisions in a difficult situation. That doesn’t guarantee success for them. That’s a good message: the right choices don’t always lead to success. Saying that dumb choices lead to failure is a worthless message. I liked the original Dawn of the Dead because it was a story about people trying to carve out a life for themselves in a horrible situation. You watched what they did and though “hmmm, that’s an interesting idea - I wonder how it’ll work out.” You cared for the characters because on some level you could relate to them.

Now I’m not saying that 28 Weeks Later is a bad movie. It’s not. It’s has an interested setting and premise, it’s well executed, and it’ll keep you thinking afterwards. But there were some serious lapses in storytelling that almost ruined the experience for me. Almost. I would still take another ride through this world again 28 Months Later or whatever, but this time no freaking kids, okay?