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Tabula Rasa

Spells... I mean Logos

In addition to just blasting away with different weapons, you can use Logos-based abilities. These abilities are effectively "spells" of Tabula Rasa. Player characters are special "Logos-attuned" people who can learn and use these glyphs to perform magic-like abilities: direct damage, healing, buffs, resurrection... the usual lot. All the basic "spells" of your average MMO are present as Logos abilities.

Logos are collected from Eloh shrines littering the landscape.

Logos also act as keys - some locations are accessible only after you posses the required Logos glyphs.

Logos also double as an alien language of the Eloh - each symbol represents a word or a concept, and Logos are used for flavor in many alien structures around the game. It's a nice bit of backstory and adds atmosphere, just like the runic writing did back in Ultima series - which is probably where Mr. Garriot transplanted the general idea. The Logos language is constantly expanding and only a very small portion of the Logos are available in the game for the player to find and collect at this point.

It's all so simple - too simple

The combat isn't I'm-Gonna-Uninstall-This-Crap-Now-bad, but it's just simple; uninspiring and lacking variety. The main reason is the lack of different abilities. A maximum-level character in Tabula Rasa has about 20 non-tradeskill abilities and skills available to him, with some of them being just passive abilities to use certain type of weapon or armor. That's pretty limited when you compare it to the obvious yardstick from Blizzard. In World of Warcraft your average maxed out character (depending on the class) has about 60-80 unique abilities and skills (not counting separate "levels" of spells, just functionally unique spells, combat moves, active talents and such). Sure, many of them are rarely used, but no matter how much you prune it down, any given WoW character has at least 30-40 active abilities and tricks available in combat. Compare that to the dozen or so active abilities of a Tabula Rasa character, and it's inevitable that the combat is simple and without much variation. Early levels are even worse - before level 15, you are limited to just a handful of abilities, and early game is essentially quest-grinding with a gun and a stack of health kits. "Exciting" isn't the word that first comes to mind.

The user interface copies most of the critical features from the contemporary competition, but once you have gotten used to a player-modifiable UI, any default UI feels restrictive and unintuitive - and Tabula Rasa is no exception. It's like WoW, except that you can't fix all the weak bits with user-created mods, and most of the configuration options have been left out. The worst part is the lack of quickbar space - you have five slots for different weapons and five slots for other abilities and items, with additional five slot pages you can shift to on the abilities bar. I know I said the game only offers a handful of active abilities, but by level 15 you'll have more than five, at which point you'll end up fiddling around with multiple bars. So I guess it isn't enough that you have very few abilities - the UI must also be designed so that you can use only five of them at once. Great.

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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