Tabula Rasa
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ESRB:
Alcohol Reference,Blood,Language - Mild,Suggestive Themes,Tobacco Reference,Violence
Publisher: NC Soft Genre(s): MMORPG Home Page:
Humanity's Last Stand Bane forces have a habit of dropping on you at the most inconvenient times. The backstory and setting is quite original: Earth was invaded by a superior combined alien force Thrax and Bane. Luckily, just as humanity was getting it's ass kicked to extinction, a handful of humans managed to flee the planet using ancient Eloh technology. Eloh being "good guy" aliens, now scattered around the universe after a devastating war with Thrax. Players join up as members of ASF - Allied Sentient Forces, waging a guerilla-style war against technologically superior Thrax and Bane forces. The plot is bent quite a bit to justify the usual MMO conventions in the Tabula Rasa setting. Yes, you have to buy your own ammo and weapons, and even pay for repairs, just like in every other MMO. The story here is that AFS wants to avoid the waste of precious resources, so the soldiers are issued credits for successful missions and enemy kills, and those credits are deducted when players visit the resupply depots for ammo and weaponry. Looting is also encouraged, and AFS also issues credits for any alien weapons "sold" to the AFS. So, it's a war, but you still need to work for the necessities. I wonder when real armies will start doing this? If you forgive the parts where history is forced to conform to today's MMO conventions, and take just the setting, story and the fictional factions, it's clear that a lot of work has gone towards providing Tabula Rasa with a coherent storyline, and it continues to unveil as you start running around and doing the multitude of quests available. The system is very WoWish in this regard - talk to a guy with a yellow walkie-talkie icon, get a quest, kill X enemies, collect X items, go to place X and do Y, fed-ex item X to NPC Y - it's all very familiar, but instead of just dishing out objectives, the NPCs actually have partial voiceovers and actual quest lore to read. The gameplay might be derivative, but the story works.
NCSoft made made a lot of noise about Tabula Rasa's dynamic battlegrounds where ownership of areas may switch between Bane forces and AFS, depending on player actions. While this is technically true, it's limited to a handful of designated Control Points, and the whole point of fighting over the control of bases against the ever-present Bane invaders is made irrelevant by the fact that all zones are instanced based on server load, and on your average day there is usually at least four or five copies of each zone up, so if the base with your quest NPC is temporarily under enemy control, just hop to a nearby teleporter and switch to another instance of the zone, and chances are it's under AFS control. With the combat being so uninteresting, there is little incentive to defend or retake bases - I guess it's a way to grind experience, but most players seem to ignore it, unless they are doing it to gather tokens for related quests. Character DevelopmentThe core element of an MMO is creating and developing your character. Tabula Rasa tries to break some new ground here, with a slightly unconventional take on the status quo. When you create your first character, you better make sure you like your last name - all your characters on the account will be sharing that last name, and you will appear in chat channels by your surname too. Your first name is character-specific. Initially all characters start out as Recruits - basic newbies with limited skills. At level 5 (after a hour or two of gameplay, a bit more if you complete the tutorial) you choose your career, becoming either a Soldier or a Specialist. Both types specialize again at level 15 - Soldiers can choose to become either Commandos or Rangers while Specialists can pick between Sapper and Biotechnician. At level 30 comes the final specialization: Commandos can choose between Grenadier and Guardian, Rangers between Sniper and Spy, Sappers between Demolitionist and Engineer, while Biotechnicians can specialize as either Medic or Exobiologist. The class system reminds me of Everquest 2 - with the exception that this time all classes start out as a single class, instead of several different base classes. Everquest 2 proved it was a bad idea, and it's still a bad idea. Except that this time it just might work. Huh? Enter Cloning.
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