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Tabula Rasa

Meet Joe, my freshly cloned relative

Tabula Rasa brings in something genuinely innovative to the table with clone "alts". When you start your first character and gain the needed level to specialize (or complete certain quests), you gain a clone credit. This means you can create a clone of your character at that point, and save it up as an alt. Different first name and different looks, but the same level and specialization tree point. All skill points are refunded and can be reallocated, and the clone starts with no money or gear.

Cloning at Level 5 is mostly pointless, as you can reach that level in just a couple of hours with a fresh character, but the principle is sound, removing the tediousness of replaying same low level content again just to experiment with another character. By first cloning your Soldier character just before Level 15, you end up with one Soldier that can proceed as a Commando, and another that can proceed as a Ranger - and both get a fresh clone credit at Level 15 that you can save until you are about to hit 30, so you can produce two further clones, ending up with four characters covering all the Soldier sub-types. This is a definite improvement over Everquest 2, removing the need to re-play the first couple of zones eight times over.

All clones and alts can access a common storage at any of the AFS camps, so sharing armor and weapons among your happy family of clones is easy.

Guns Blazing

Tabula Rasa being a SciFi game had to try something new with the combat too. In a way the goal has been to somehow merge the twitch-based first person shooter gameplay with a MMO. Last one to try that was Planetside, and it wasn't a bad try. Tabula Rasa is much less like a first person shooter, and instead has taken the route of modifying the normal target-and-hit-various-attack-keys MMO combat.

Initially the gameplay seems very much action-oriented: you aim at a Bane thug with your mouse, and left button fires your gun. Except that what actually happens is that you target the enemy and then hit an attack key - the rest is just smoke and mirrors. If you turn your crosshair away and fire, your character will keep firing the last target. You can even lock your target to avoid any chance that you'd accidentally switch your target to something else while you mash the mouse button.

Yes, range, weapon type, aiming and crouching do affect the damage dealt, and cover affects the damage taken, but it's all very simple. If you don't need to move just now, crouch for some extra damage. If you are taking aim, crouch for quicker settling of the crosshairs - in fact, the only major thing is that the slow-firing weapons need more time for the crosshairs to settle on the target for maximum effect, and snap shots using rifles or rocket launchers trades lot of damage potential for speed, giving you a reason to use different guns in different situations. Range also has to be taken into account - pistols, shotguns and chainguns are good up close, while standard rifles and their specialist variants tend to work better at longer range. All characters can fire the basic types of pistol, shotgun and rifle.

Weapons are further divided into different damage types. Laser, EMP, Electricity, Sonic... there is a gun for every damage type, and there is plenty of reason to swap between different weapon types depending on the enemy and range - suddenly the reason for providing five quickbar slots for different weapons becomes apparent, and very soon you'll really want to have fifteen slots with all the different weapons and their variants cluttering the backpack.

Available armor is also split into several different types, each offering different bonuses and level of protection. Advanced armor types are limited to specific classes, and while each grunt starts out equal, the armor used dictates if you can actually take hits, or just keel over and die under any serious fire - so the usual split to tanks, hybrid tank-wannabes and cloth-using weaklings is present in Tabula Rasa. Only the labels change, so it's Graviton Armor instead of Plate for the tank types.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Story & CharactersPage 3: Clones & CombatPage 4: "Spell casting" = LogosPage 5: Graphics & HardwarePage 6: Bugs, the Future and Scores

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