I'm in three betas right now, and I can say that TR is hands down the best of the bunch (it's also closest to release, so I haven't lost hope for the others). Nice advancement model, smooth gameplay, quests and activity that never feels like grinding - I find myself so focused on taking that enemy pillbox or wading up the river that I lose all track of kills and experience. Defending bases is fun, attacking bases is a blast. Respawns are logical (teleports and dropships bringing in more troops, relief units running up the road to take position). NPC behavior is great - the war rages all around me, few npcs are standing around waiting for me; when they scream that the base is under attack, NPCs charge to the defense just like me; when I reach a hill that's surrounded and cut off, there's fighting all around it, attackers pushing up the hill defenders pushing them back.

Negatives - Crafting isn't functional yet (though they seem intent on having it up and running by release), and there's no PvP yet. Some people probably won't like zoning, but I like the way travel by dropship makes it feel like I'm moving from hotspot to hotspot around the world instead of existing in some ridiculously small pseudo world.

Of course this is all from someone who never tracked the game development. I have no idea what features were planned and cut that might disgruntle the people who actually tracked the game. I just know that it's the first gameplay experience in a long time that made me think "hay, that's cool."

Yeah, delays are bummers, but I think we'd all (or very nearly all) prefer to see a good game that's a few weeks (or even months) late rather than a lousy game.

I think what Shadow was actually saying is 'wouldn't it be nice if game developers could actually make reasonable predictions about their abilities and actually finish a game and have it 100% ready for release by its original release date?

Maybe every company from now on should just take their estimated date of completion, add six to eight weeks and announce that as their release date, and then continue to aim for the original date. That will give them the motivation to keep working hard and get things done, but have the leeway to not announce a delay if something takes a little longer or if they have some last minute improvements.

On a side note, I haven't had time for any gaming lately and won't be checking out TR for quite awhile (there's a lot of other games ranking higher on my list right now too), but from what I heard when the beta first came out...it stunk. I hope that the changes they've made since then (that's why it's in beta, right?) have improved things a hundred-fold and that these last few changes they're making now will make it a game deserving of all the hype around it. Anybody that's recently been playing the beta want to share their opinions on that?

I think the Delay is a good thing. And shadow that mmo that comes out never haveing delayed will probably come out be so buggy so crappy that it hits the 5 doller bin after 1 week and closes its servers down in less then a year. Personally would rather a delay and have the game come out finished then actually pay for it and be unplayable for 6 months, 2 weeks of delay time pre-release equals about 6months of fixing post-release.

Just proves my point about delays being the flavor of the year in my blog entry.... It seems like this trend will never end, on the positive side the one company to finally end it will be put up on a stand and praised by the MMO community

@Jodou

yeah it's a shame that a company would choose to spend more development time on a game and try to release the game in a fashion where it;s a bit more ready for release....

I think its a good thing for the game and I think it out weighs the inconveinance of you not having an MMO to buy any other time of the year,

I think the release of TR should be indefinitely.

Nice, let's completely bunch all major releases for the holiday season into a two week spread. Sigh, I'll be playing Hellgate: London over this now; sure would be nice to have some of these titles over, oh say, the entire year when there's nothing to play.

Of all the betas I get into this is the one I wanted the most oh how I wish I had been invited.

edit: right after writing this I get a IM from a friends say dude fileplanet had Tabula Rasa beta keys! Downloading now