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Tabula Rasa

Alien Landscapes

As the action is set on several different alien worlds, the designers could've gone nuts with outlandish ideas. Sadly, the world design can only be described as "conventional". Sure, we have our local natives and their slightly odd villages, and some ancient pieces of Eloh architecture here and there, but overall the setting is fairly conservative. Zones are fairly small, and if you start nitpicking, the whole war raging around you looks very much staged for the entertainment of the player, making very little sense, militarily-wise.

In addition to the outdoor areas, each zone has several instanced sections - comparable to the instanced dungeons of some fantasy MMOs. Underground caves, AFS facilities and other points of interest act as self-contained areas for small groups to quest in. Each instance has it's share of quests, and while you can solo these by waiting a few levels before venturing in, they are clearly designed for groups - 3-5 players or thereabouts. Instead of the WoW style of "pull - kill trash - pull - kill trash, kill boss, loot epics", the instances are more like harder pieces of normal zones spiced with scripted events and special quests. The only problem I had with the instances was that there were lot of bugs related to multiple players completing same quests - it's easy to "break" the instance so that one or more of the players in the group can no longer complete a quest unless you all go outside and reset the whole instance.

If you choose your spot carefully, Tabula Rasa can look outright beautiful.

Wormholes allow travel between several different worlds, while dropships and teleporters transport you around the battlefield.

Visually, at maximum settings, the game does look pretty good - the closest existing game for comparison might be Everquest 2, just without all the shadow-related engine bugs and plastic characters that dragged down the visuals of that game. It's hard to pin down the exact reason why Tabula Rasa is visually just "pretty good" instead of "great". I guess it's a mixture of bland animation and uneven world design. It all looks like the product of an overworked art department being pushed to crank out tons of assets for a tight deadline. It's technically passable, and does it's job, but somehow the overall art direction feels a bit inconsistent. I'd guess that the practical job of turning great concept art pieces into a consistent game world, filling in the blanks as you go, didn't go quite as well as it could, and in the end Tabula Rasa looks passable, yet unimpressive.

Performance

Tabula Rasa is utterly CPU limited across the tested hardware configurations. With an  NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB, at 1600x1200 with maximum settings, the performance still scales completely with your CPU, no matter how you configure the graphics settings. The only difference is that, by degrading your visual quality from maximum to low, the fps will double on a given CPU. With a 2.8 GHz dual core  Athlon 64 X2 FX-62 the frame rate hovered around 40-60fps at maximum settings. Drop the CPU to a 2.0 GHz  Athlon 64 X2 3800+, and the same video card can barely push over 60fps at the Low settings, and at the maximum setting you are floating at 25-35fps. The video card does matter, but the bottom line is that Tabula Rasa needs lots of CPU power, in addition to a fairly modern video card.

Low - the Ugly Mode for those with low end systems. Runs on the manufacturer's minimum system, but looks pretty bad.	Normal - Playable on the YouGamers minimum system.
High settings - turns on the lighting system.	Very High - adds more lighting detail. Playable on the YouGamers recommended system.
Maximum - Adds the Dynamic Shadows and enables 64-bit lighting. Ultra is the same, except for the high precision lighting.	ATI's 7.10 drivers and HD2x00 series have slight issues with Tabula Rasa. Current solution: "Roll back to Catalyst 7.9".

Graphics settings are also fairly limited - the lowest setting turns the game into "ugly mode", and while that allows you to play on a very marginal system, the game looks bad. Normal and High settings look far better, but they also need a reasonably modern card. Anything short of a  256MB NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT or  ATI Radeon X1800 XL won't get you a playable frame rate, so the realistic minimum without dipping down to the "ugly vision" is a fair bit higher than what the box says. And if you want the fancy dynamic shadows of Ultra or Maximum setting, only the latest high end cards will do the job, and you better have a matching high end CPU as well. Overall the system requirements are high, and while there are some bits and pieces showing off the advanced features of the engine, the game just doesn't look like it should need such hardware - it just does.

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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