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:
MIA: Why We Fight I guess the evacuees managed to lug some ancient computers with them when they escaped Earth... As is unfortunately common with MMOs, Tabula Rasa has launched woefully incomplete. Granted, it's much better than it was a month ago in beta, and lot of the broken things in the early portions of the game have been polished and completed - up to a point where you could call the early leveling portion of the game (Level 1-30 or so) as complete and mildly entertaining. The problem is, what's after that? With shallow combat and limited abilities, there seems to be a definite lack of an endgame. Grinding up multiple characters can be fun for a while, and the cloning system takes out the worst bits of that, allowing you to experiment with both available class options at each specialization point, but in MMOs, leveling is generally just there to offer you a fun road to the end, and with Tabula Rasa, the "end" bit seems to be still under development. Sure, Destination Games has promised many great things for high level characters, such as personal "mounts" of sorts (Personal Armor Units), the ability to control NPC troops using Command Points, and Raid-style content with Flashpoints - as the designer states, "Each Flashpoint will require multiple squads to solve. Certain objectives will need to be done simultaneously to fight back the Bane and each objective will require a dedicated squad that is at their best." Sounds good, but I'm sure major parts of these features are currently nothing but words on a design document. Right now, all you can subscribe to is a level grind to 50. Even basic gameplay features are also still "coming soon", or exhibit the signs of a last moment rush job. The most obvious example is the lack of an "auction house" - Military Surplus depots are coming, so the feature is under development, but it's not here yet. Crafting is bit of a mess: whoever figured that allowing you to spend skill points either on combat skills or crafting skills should be "re-educated" with a heavy blunt instrument. Sure, Cloning helps here too; if you have a spare Clone credit, you can just replicate your main and allocate all his skill points towards crafting instead of combat, but I would've preferred a separate crafting skill tree, allowing a single character to specialize in both combat and crafting. The Cloning route works only when you have a maximum-level character with a Clone credit to burn, as you won't be getting levels and experience with a crafting-oriented character. Crafting also fails to offer anything useful to build, so at this point it's just a sink for time, money and skill points. But, it's still a fine attemptAt this point, it may sound like Tabula Rasa is a pile of smoldering poo, but that assessment would not be entirely fair. Destination Games is to be commended for the turnaround they pulled during the last month of beta. I was ready to condemn Tabula Rasa as a massive failure after my first day of the early Beta, but the development team worked really hard to fix the obvious shortcomings, and at launch it was a whole different experience. Still nowhere near perfect or even properly polished, but you could call it a game. Further patches since launch have continued to fix the outstanding bugs and balance issues, and the pace has been impressive. Just like Lord of the Rings Online, Tabula Rasa sure ain't World of Warcraft, but it's not a horrible MMO. Many of the fundamentals are in good order and the development team seems to care about fixing the outstanding problems, so if you are actively seeking a new MMO fix, Tabula Rasa is definitely worth a try - just don't expect massive depth or any revolutionary concepts, and make sure your rig is up to date. Summary of YouGamers Hardware TestingThe publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:
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AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+
