[PC] Tabula Rasa

The latest MMO to hit the streets has aspirations to be a shooter game. I've been playing the beta recently, and while I can't say it's revolutionary (KOTOR pretty much did the same thing with its laser accuracy), it is pretty fun for something different.

I've only gotten to level 9, but so far it seems like grouping isn't really encouraged. Sure, you can, but there's certainly no need, and you can take on groups of enemies at a higher level than you given that you play a little tactfully.

Where grouping and playing together is encouraged is at "control points." basically these are outpost towns that can be taken by either the player characters or the Bane, the aliens. It definitely makes for a more interesting play when you're not sure if you'll be able to make it back to the town you just passed or have to make a longer run. It would be nice if there was some actual risk involved so that people would have a reason to defend these towns, but really it's just another diversion in the game (if also fun).

For most of the missions, though, this is stuff you've done before. Fetch quests, timed fetch quests, talk to this guy, talk to his friend, talk to his mother, talk to the ancient runic magical symbols so that you can cast spells...

Well, you get the idea.

Because it's mostly a long-range game, it mixes up the classes a bit. There's still debuffer, healer, and a few others, but it's kind of interesting to see how the gameplay gets changed just by making the primary weapon a gun.

The past couple of weeks have been rough for beta testers because the servers were constantly going up and down, but they have a hotfix in place now so that a lot of the game's problems are taken care of.

One thing to note if you end up playing the beta: Any time you go from an instance, or the tutorial, into the game world, you're allowed to pick from one of 8 copies of the game world so that none of them get too full and laggy. (e.g. Wilderness 1, Wilderness 2, etc.) The problem is that there's a bug that won't let you select anything except the 1st instance of the game world until you find an actual teleporter in a town. This means that it tends to stay really laggy until you find a teleporter and switch to another.

Anybody else playing the beta or jonesin' for a new MMO? Stop on by the U.S. 1 server and friend up with "Umibwe."

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I personally haven’t played it but I am hopping to buy this NC sure knows their stuff.

I heard there is cloning system? How does that work out?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Basically at every tier (5, 15, and 30) you choose a path down the tree until you specialize in a certain class. Once you hit that level, it gives you a credit to make a clone of the character you're using, and then you can choose when you want to clone.

Clones, though, start out with all the quests completed that the host has completed, and with no weapons, base armor, and zero money. So unless you have a friend in the game that you can trust to transfer items from your original char to the clone, you might want to plan ahead and clone early on in the game, so you can gain stuff back for yourself.

Clones also start on whichever side of the tree the host happens to be on, so you can't be level 30 and decide you want to be a medic instead of a grenadier. All points you pumped into attributes (like body, mind, and spirit) will stay the same, but all skill points will be refunded, so if you put 5 levels into hand to hand, and change your mind when you clone, you're covered.

Clones can also look nothing like your character, which is a little odd. You basically get sent back to the character creation screen and make a new character, except they start with whatever attributes you have, and they're at your level, and they've completed all the quests you have.

One thing I'll say is that this game is addicting. It's much faster paced than a lot of MMOs, and run speed, questing, and even instances are easy to navigate. The fact that everything moves so quickly makes me wonder what the end game will be like at the end of the rush. I haven't heard much beyond that there will be some instances, and mutual PVP.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

This game looks promising, but I expect PSO/COH syndrome to strike it during it's early times (not enough content to warrant playing it for very long). I will give it a shot during its first month though.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Any ideas on what the system requirements are for this game?

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Manny Biggz

This game looks promising, but I expect PSO/COH syndrome to strike it during it's early times (not enough content to warrant playing it for very long). I will give it a shot during its first month though.

After the patch about mid-October, the game got a lot of really big adjustments. The most significant was the damage enemies do to players. Apparently earlier on in the beta testing they didn't have enemies dealing proper damage, so it made quests easy to solo or breeze through. The only (minor) problem I had soloing from level 1-15 was in an instance.

Now, though, because you can't take on a shit-ton of enemies at once and expect to live through it, it has slowed the game's pacing quite a bit. It's still a fairly fast game as MMOs go, but it makes cover and teammates all the more essential to the game.

I made a mistake on my last post, and the patch changed a few things as well, so a couple of clarifications on the cloning and char creation:

Your last name is universal.
When you make your first char, make sure the last name is something you can live with, because all your chars and clones will have the same last name.

Clones are basically a way to create a new character. They start off with all of the quests that you have completed done (so they have the exact same EXP.) They do not, however, have any of the quests that you are currently doing, or have in your quest log. So, clones will have to backtrack and accept a bunch of quests the host char has probably already accepted.

Your stash is universal.
Whatever pieces of equipment or money you place in your stash can be seen by any of your chars, meaning that if you find a great medic gun and you're a grenadier, you might as well save it for another char. This also means that resource management between clones is streamlined and done for you.

Originally Posted by GRUN-2

Any ideas on what the system requirements are for this game?

Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa®

I was kinda surprised that it requires a 2.5 ghz processor minimum for running the game. Honestly, it doesn't even seem like it looks that great compared to LOTRO or some other recent MMOs. It's not bad, I just can't see where all the system draw is going.


Overall I still feel like this is a game worth playing, but I have a hard time justifying spending $15 a month when there are so many other games I could be playing for free. It's the MMO's curse. =/
Something tells me that if these games made private servers less of a chore for players to set up, they'd sell more copies. I'm sure there's an audience out there that would love to play the game with friends, but doesn't want to keep paying month by month.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?