Tabula Rasa (Latin, stands for clean slate or chance to start anew) was supposed to be another game on the long list of fantasy MMOs, but during development Richard Garriott and his team decided to scrap that idea and start from scratch (a clean slate indeed, heh), this time going with a more Sci-Fi theme. If you saw the cinematic trailer for the game (which also acts as the intro sequence), you know that humanity no longer calls earth its home. After a brutal invasion that pretty much ensured nothing more than single cell organisms survived, Earth was left behind, forcing humanity to start rebuilding their lives on alien planets. The interesting thing is that at the time of the invasion humans weren’t yet a spacefaring species, so the question arises how they escaped the catastrophe? Well, unknown to most of the population, governments discovered portals left on earth by an ancient civilization. They used these portals to evacuate a limited number of people, all handpicked in order to ensure humanity lives on.
Obviously things don’t end there. The alien race that invaded Earth is still hard at work to eradicate the remaining humans, as well as any other sentient race in the universe, if only to ensure no one can ever endanger them. This xenophobic nature of theirs made sure that they aren’t particularly liked amongst the rest of the races (or should I say the surviving races), so our newly homeless race soon finds allies on the other side of the portals. Other than providing us with resources, medical aid and combat support, the Foreans taught selected individuals on how to use the Logos, almost mystical abilities based on the scientific findings of the Eloh (the race that built the portals). With their newly acquired knowledge these individuals can now shoot lightning from their hands, poison enemies from afar and do all other kinds of wicked things. Hopefully that will be enough for humanity to endure and actually write something on this blank slate that is their future.
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Building a character
The first choice players are always presented with in MMOs is how the player’s character will look. Now, most fantasy based MMOs (and the rare Sci-Fi one as well) give players the opportunity to select from a wide range or races, but Tabula Rasa revolving around humanity’s fate it is only natural that alien races are off the menu here. You will soon forget that once you start cycling through the available character appearance options though. It’s not that there are that many options available (I’d say there is a decent amount of options, but not too many to overwhelm players), it is just that they all look so damn good. Yes, even a completely randomly created look (be it by using the randomizer or by randomly clicking) will look badass if he is a guy or totally hot if she is a gal. Me being my usual self I immediately created a mean looking dude with black shades. Next in line was the choice of clothing, but even though the selection is decent (with all kinds of color combinations available) I didn’t spend much time here, knowing that I’d soon be replacing the gear anyway.
Now, once you have your first character’s look finalized it is time to select his class, right? WRONG! As soon as you are happy with the way your character looks and you settle on his name and surname (which is especially important, since all your future characters will have to use that same last name, marking them as siblings of the first character) the game kicks you into the middle of a battlefield. Well, I’m exaggerating slightly here, it actually sends you a couple hundred meters away from a battlefield. Either way, it won’t take more than a minute before you start shooting at the Bane (the universally evil race that destroyed Earth) and fighting to regain control of a nearby outpost. This bit of the game is completely instanced and is intended to act as some sort of a tutorial. Handy pop-ups and quest tips provide you with enough information that you can shell out some pain and stay alive long enough to level up.
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Now, let me remind you that by this point you still haven’t selected you class and are playing as a standardized recruit. Leveling up lets you spend some points in three statistics (Body, Mind and Spirit). All three statistics are linked, so spending points in Body will give you more HP and slightly increase you power (used to “cast” Logos). Putting points into Mind will primarily increase your power and give a minor boost to your regeneration rate. Finally, spirit will increase your regeneration by a greater margin and also give you a few extra HP. Now, as you can see you can’t really go wrong either way, and increasing only two out of the three stats is a completely viable option (as is increasing only one, but then your character will be highly specialized).
The second part of leveling up is assigning skill points to the various skills. This is where classes finally kick in. Up to level 5 you are a mere recruit, but you can still spend skill points on the various recruit abilities, which range from basic Logos usage (lightning) over weapons to crafting stuff. When you finally do reach level 5 your path will branch. On one side of the class three is the soldier, a class that specializes in dealing with the competition with raw firepower and doesn’t care much for support. The other branch (starting with the Specialist) puts more focus into healing and support abilities, making most of the high end choices excellent support staff. Level 15 sees another branching for each of the two classes – the soldier class splits into Commando and Ranger classes while the Specialists end up ranking up into Sappers or Technicians. The final classes, attainable at level 30 (out of 50) are the Grenadier, the Guardian, the Sniper, the Spy, the Demolitionist, the Engineer, the Medic and the Exobiologist. Each of the final classes focuses on one of the aspects of its “father”-class, so even within the same branch of the tree they end up playing quite differently.
As you can imagine the game would quickly get repetitive for a player that decided to level up his character into an Exobiologist and then have his next character be a Medic (they share the first 30 levels). This is where character cloning comes into play. The idea is quite simple – every time your character reaches a fork in his class training you are awarded a clone token, which you can use to create a replica of yourself. The only thing that this clone shares with you is the level and current class, but all of the skill points are unassigned. So, in my example the said player would only need to load up his last clone and train up as a Medic instead of an Exobiologist, skipping the first 30 levels of the game altogether.
On the field
What about the actual gameplay. After all, spending time in the statistics screen or inventory can’t be considered the main part of an MMO (though it is an integral part by all standards). If you are expecting a WoW-like experience you are going to be slightly surprised when you start fighting. The game is far from being a twitch shooter, but you’ll still be moving around and pressing the trigger instead of just sporadically selecting an ability. Long range weapons (pistols, rifles, shotguns and some more high tech arms) compose the greater part of the list and almost all classes use them almost exclusively to shell out damage. With the exception of spy players, who rely on swords to kill enemies, the rest of the cast tends to stay a dozen or so meters away from their target and exchange shots. That’s the theory at least.
In practice, many of the foes are either too primitive (local wildlife and such) to use weapons, or are strong enough to rely on brute force to put you 6 feet under, so they work hard at getting within spitting distance (which is usually enough to swing at you with their huge arms/tentacles). In these cases you can either frantically try to stay out of reach (which often ends with you backstopping into a new group of foes) or switch to a shotgun (if you have one) and keep firing. The more interesting fights are the ones between long range combatants though. While the slight lag often makes real-time jumping into cover almost impossible, firefights still have some tactics associated with them. Unlike in WoW where a rock between you and your foes never prevented them from striking at you, you can step out of harm’s way here, if only to reload your weapon or use a healing kit.
Like I mentioned before, all recruits (ridiculous, I know) get the ability to use Logos. As such swords and weapons only make out half of the combat tricks in your sleeve. If you have already acquired the necessary Logos (I’ll explain in a bit) you can use combat abilities, which range from offensive stuff, to healing and buffing “spells” that are needed in groups. The lower tier classes only get a single Logos ability, but higher up a class gets up to 4 abilities, resulting in a respectable amount of mystical powers a level 50 player has at his disposal.
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As promised, let’s take a closer look at the Logos. In other MMOs you gain new abilities when you level up. Here however the moment you select you class you immediately get all the abilities that class has to offer. It is up to you to invest skill points into them to make them stronger however. That is not all though – you won’t be able to use any of the abilities unless you posses the required Logos symbols. Low level abilities usually require only one or two Logos symbols to be used, but higher tier stuff either requires a greater number of symbols or forces you to have rarer symbols at your disposal. Getting the symbols is usually a matter of walking up to an altar and absorbing it. The problem is finding the altars. There are quests that lead you to the more common Logos altars in each region, but there are a lot of altars that can be quite tricky to find. Asking other players or relying on Google to find them takes a lot of the challenge out, but you also won’t feel the pride you would when you find them on your own.
Tabula Rasa innovates elsewhere as well. Combat experience for example is dynamic. There is no rest bonus that we have grown accustomed to from other MMOs. Instead, players get more experience if they keep the downtime between foes at a minimum (10 seconds). Killing a few enemies in a row will net you a 125% experience bonus, which isn’t much. But keep at it long enough and you can supposedly get above 500%, which makes leveling up by simply killing stuff incredibly fast. The problem is that you will often run out of foes to slay by then (at least in the standard zones). This way Destination Games managed to balance the grinding with an adrenaline rush – actual skill is needed to successfully grind, so the time constraints usually associated with grinding aren’t as noticeable here.
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Since the game obviously wants you to jump right into the middle of an enemy group for the highest XP yield, it goes without saying that it expects you to die a lot as well. Thankfully there are no serious repercussions to biting the dirt, as except for a 5 minutes long resurrection sickness (which can be stacked, so try not to die to often) and some equipment damage (easily fixed at any vendor) the only thing hurting will be your pride.
What about grouping? Well, there are obviously quests (many of them instanced) that can’t be accomplished on your own, but you can get pretty far in the game without relying on others. This is even more apparent in the main zones, where at least for now there are plenty of people running about and due to the very relaxed encounter locking rules even tougher foes fall under a barrage of fire from all nearby players. After some meticulous testing I have concluded that encounter experience and quest drops don’t get locked so that only the player who initiated combat can get them, but instead anyone who has been fighting the monster long enough or has done enough damage gets them. As a result there is a greater amount of camaraderie even between total strangers, where people help out outnumbered allies both out of the kindness of their heart and because of the experience reward.
Helping the cause
Time to discuss what can be considered the cancer wound of most MMOs – quests. We all know that unlike their single-player counterparts MMOs rely heavily on grinding and thus even the most mundane quests end up being “kill X amount of Y” massacres. Tabula Rasa obviously isn’t immune to this and a lot of the quests fall under that category as well. But thanks to the more dynamic combat system and the very light-hearted approach (a lot of the quests have a very humorous background) the problem isn’t as apparent here. More importantly however, a lot of the quests put the player before a decision, which affects the rest of the quest, as well as the outcome. As an example, one of the early quests sends the player to pick up a Forean recruit who hasn’t show up for his military duty. Once you finally find him you realize that he is just a kid and are presented with the choice to let him escape (thus avoiding army duty) or bring him back (forcing a 15 year old to fight). Other quests present you with similar dilemmas, but so far there doesn’t seem to be any real reason to go one way or the other. Still, even without any long term effects it is nice to be able to make a choice.
Borrowing from Guild Wars several of the instances have their own intro cut-scene and acts of sorts of chapters that help present the global conflict. It’s nice seeing them, but in the end the instances play the same as in other games and you quickly forget about the grand scheme of things, focusing instead of getting the most out of the expedition. There are some problems, mainly with the navigation. The mini map clearly points into the direction of your goal, but it often happens that the goal is underground, with the entrance to the cave system on the other side of the map. As a result, you often reach the quest marker only to realize it is located beneath you. With no way to find cave entrances other than explorations, this can turn into a real nightmare when you don’t know the layout of the terrain.
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Interesting stuff isn’t limited for instances only either. The main zones are all constantly contested for. Outposts all over the map are constantly under siege by Bane forces and if players don’t watch out the entire settlement can quickly get run to the ground. The result is a hostile outpost that needs to be retaken to access all the quests and items that are offered there. Again, these random fights help players bond and there is a real sense of accomplishment when you manage to push off an enemy attack. The downside is that you can log out in a friendly outpost, only to find it was overrun after logging back in. Only happened once to me so far and it wasn’t that bad (those 5 minutes of res sickness were over before I got to my quest target).
Being a true MMO Tabula Rasa also offers limited PvP. And by limited I mean really limited. Currently players can only engage in one on one duels, so unless Destination Games build up on this in the future Tabula Rasa won’t get many players due to its PvP appeal. The other aspect of MMOs is crafting. Since crafting isn’t covered in the manual (which is, by the way one of the best manuals I have ever seen) or the in-game tutorials it can take a while to figure it out, but even then it doesn’t offer all that much. Currently the greatest incentive people have is making color vials so that they can customize the look of their gear. With no auction system on the live servers the economy is virtually dead and as a result crafting has little to no appeal.
Technicalities
With thousands of players running around the world, MMOs can’t really look breath-taking if the authors want them to run with a decent performance on most rigs. That said, Tabula Rasa has a pretty solid engine pushing lots of detail onto the screen. It never goes to the extremes the Everquest 2 engine goes with pixel shaders, instead opting to use very nice animations and a highly stylized look. The end result is a game that runs well on most systems and looks similar to a Sci-Fi World of Warcraft with characters that look a tad more realistic. I personally think that the draw distance should be extended somewhat (right now it doesn’t go beyond 100 meters or so), but other than that I have no real complaints. I would have them if I tried playing the game on an older rig though. Sure, the game engine can be scaled back considerably, but unfortunately then the decent looks turn into a very bland, flat and lifeless version of them.
Another area that could do with some work is the interface. Overall it is pretty good, but there are some minor quirks that make it cumbersome at times. Because the mouse controls aiming the authors couldn’t use the standard approach where players would click an ability to trigger it. Instead, the weapons are bound to the left mouse button click and Logos and items to the right. This makes switching between them in the heat of combat rather problematic, especially if you are about to die and are struggling to use that med kit!
But while the graphics and interface aren’t as polished as one might hope, the audio side of things more than makes up for it. Combat music is a nice mix of rock tunes and pop rhythms, so it definitely helps get the adrenaline pumping. Exploration music on the other hand has a nice, slow flow to it, so it doesn’t get tiring even after prolonged listening. Sound effects are also of the highest quality, with weapons sounding really powerful and enemy sounds pretty gross (as expected by the look of the damned things).
Conclusion
Tabula Rasa has been in development for a while and saw a huge overhaul midway, so skeptics were expecting a huge flop. Thankfully for all MMO players that are fed up with the run of the mill fantasy style Tabula Rasa is an excellent game, bringing many new features to the table that should become standard as soon as possible. With cloning you’ll never have to play over the same sections of the game and the interesting Logos system rewards exploration. The dynamic battlefields and relaxed locking settings help tie players together even when they are soloing, so underneath the line the core is very solid. There are obvious issues that prevent it from being perfect, such as bad graphics scaling, minor technical issues, a sometimes awkward interface and total lack of economy tools, but most of them should get ironed out by the frequent patches the game is receiving.
