Tabula Rasa Preview

Ever hear of Richard Garriott? No? Shame on you. Back in the day Richard Garriott, aka Lord British, unleashed upon the gaming world the Ultima games, which eventually spawned the massively multiplayer online world Ultima Online. UO had a massive effect on the game industry. In the same way that we wouldn’t have had Oasis or Blur if we hadn’t had The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, we wouldn’t have had EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot and even World of Warcraft had we not had Ultima Online. Now, Richard is back in the game with his new sci-fi shooter/RPG MMO Tabula Rasa. VideoGamer.com logged on to bring you regularly updated impressions as we teleport into the deepest, darkest corners of the universe. It’s a clean slate…

Tabula Rasa diary review – level one to six

They just drop out of the sky whenever they please – The Bane that is – an alliance of extremely upset alien bad guys hell bent on humanity’s destruction. You’ll be jogging around Concordia Wilderness, a lush, green tropical jungle area on the alien planet of Foreas, the place where you’ll spend most of your early levels, hunting Boargar parts, minding your own business, when bang! A Bane dropship will spawn out of nowhere, and five or six bad guys will beam down to the surface and start causing havoc. It can be quite unsettling I can tell you.

At the very least it’s a decent effort to do something a little different with the whole mob re-spawn thing most MMOs simply ignore. It’s actually pretty cool to think that you can be pounced upon at any moment by The Bane. And it’s a good thing that they do, too. One of the first quests you pick up from the human outpost in the Concordia Wilderness will be to kill 200 Bane. Ouch.

What I and you will notice pretty quickly about Tabula Rasa, at least from its first few hours of gameplay, is that there are loads of nice little touches in there that are an attempt to do things a little differently to, say, MMO megaton World of Warcraft. But they’re often let down because, as quickly as you’ve seen something pretty refreshing, you’ll do something you’ve already spent hundreds of hours of your life doing in a tonne of other RPG games, sci-fi or otherwise.

Here’s an example. One of the early quests makes you make an important decision about a friendly alien NPC – it’s intended to pose a moral conundrum. You can decide to please your alien allies and arrest the little blighter, as his own race want you to do, or listen to his hard luck story and set him free. I was expecting my decision to have some real ramifications, perhaps deny me a quest line or some other effect. But, after I decided to let him go, all I got was a ticking off from the alien quest giver and a pat on the back from my human officer back at the outpost. Perhaps this kind of moral decision-making gets better at later levels, but for now, only a few hours in, it didn’t feel like Earth-shattering stuff, and ended up being just another run of the mill run back and forth between NPCs quest.

The combat is another prime example of TR trying to do something fresh and it not quite working. The combat is built to feel more like a shooter than your bog standard MMO. So you have the traditional third-person view and a targeting reticule, as you do in, say, BioWare epic Mass Effect, which at times TR feels a lot like. So you move your character with W,A,S,D, and you move the targeting reticule with the mouse, like any shooter. But this isn’t a shooter. This is an MMO.

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.

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.