Tabula Rasa Preview

It's a little like Mass Effect

It ends up being some half-way house that, for me, doesn't quite work. You have a whole bunch of buttons you want to press but you can't because your mouse only moves the targeting reticule and only fires weapons and abilities - there's no mouse icon on the HUD. You have to press a button to access the game's menus, for example K for your character window, or L for your quest log, or B for your back pack. Once you've done that, moving the targeting reticule is disabled so you can click on icons and buttons and interact with the game's menus as you would do normally. Maybe I'll get used to this the more I play TR, but right now it all conspires to give the game a disruptive stop start feel.

I can understand what the developers are trying to achieve here - they are trying to make the game's combat feel more like an action shooter and less like your bog standard dice-roll RPG. But unfortunately the effort feels a little pointless, because the dice rolls are still going on in the background - if you've targeted a bad guy and shoot then your chance to hit is down to your character's skill level, not yours.

On a more positive note, I like the way the game doesn't force you to decide upon a particular class right off the bat. One of the criticisms of WoW is that it makes you pick your class before you know anything about it or indeed the game. So you might end up investing loads of time in something you don't like. In TR, everyone starts off the same and you slowly create your class as you level up.

I experienced my first taste of this at level five, where I was given the option of branching off my character class into two areas, the soldier or the specialist. I chose the specialist, and opened up some new abilities, including a damage over time poison "spell". But the best thing about it is that you can clone your character at that point. So if, in another five levels I decide I've made a horrible mistake by choosing the specialist, I can go back and play with the clone and choose soldier. I haven't used this yet, but it sounds like a great idea in principle.

You build your character class over time

Graphically, I'm impressed by TR. It's certainly one of the best looking MMOs out there. I like the art direction, which has a very Starship Troopers feel to it. But there are odd problems I've experienced - like pretty noticeable texture pop-up and quite a few bugged mobs that just stand around and can't be killed. Listening to general chat in game, it sounds like quite a few of the quests are bugged too. I know all MMOs are released as a work in progress and with a promise of more to come from upcoming patches and expansions, but TR feels like it might need a patch more so than others.

So as my first few hours with TR come to an end, I'm left feeling a bit, well, indifferent. But I have hope for the future. I'm looking forward to some player versus player combat, feeling some real effect on the game's storyline from my decision making and I'm hoping that I'll soon experience TR's hyped evolving battlefield, where NPCs and quests change depending on how the fight with The Bane is going. So, until next time, it's a clean slate...

Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa is out now.