Ten Ton Hammer: The team must be working very hard in these final few weeks. Can you give us a short blurb on what the developers have been going through now that it's crunch time?

April: Sleep is in short supply. Empty food cartons and tipped over coffee urns litter the breakrooms and hallways. Silliness has reached an all-time high. Seriously, it’s been a crazy time around here and we are all excited about shipping the game and moving to the next stage of the game’s life.

Whether players decide to defend a base or take a base back from the enemy, they are still directly impacting the surrounding area. If they stay and fight to defend a base, they help ensure that it remains in the hands of the Allies, and ensures that the missions and NPCs in that base are available to other players. Likewise, if they seek out an enemy base, or fight to re-take an AFS base that has been captured by the Bane, they are deciding the extent of the front lines in that area, and how many resources are available to them as well as the players around them. In this way, the players are constantly reshaping and influencing the game environment.

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

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.

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!

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.

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".