I did it. I bought Tabula Rasa. I’ve been playing it for about a week now, so I thought I’d give it a mini review of sorts, and give my opinion on the good stuff and the bad stuff in the game.

First things first… DUUUUUUDE, THIS IS SUCH A SWEET GAME! And I say that from the bottom of my geeky little heart. In essence, Tabula Rasa is a top quality game and it’s obvious that immense thought and planning has gone into this game. It’s also a sci-fi MMO, a rare breed amongst all the fantasy/medievil MMO’s that exist these days.

Tabula Rasa brings back a lot of memories from my Star Wars Galaxies days. I suppose a lot of that has to do with the setting, but also the way the controls are handled, and the combat system is more comparable to SWG than any other MMO I’ve played. It feels very fast paced and action packed without being a ‘twitch’ game like a true shooter. However, after playing a few days with the ‘FPS’ style controls, I switched to the ‘MMO’ control scheme and felt instantly more at home. As with most things, it’s personal preference, but the game seems to utilise both control schemes well.

The setting reminds me a lot of the movie Starship Troopers, with a military sort of feel and big ugly insect-like aliens running around everywhere. The landscapes are fun to explore and to just take in the views. After the tutorial part at the very beginning, I found myself some high ground and just observed my surroundings for a while. It’s fun watching people scuttle around like busy little cockroaches, something I found myself also participating in later on in the game, because…

…the quests are actually not a chore to do! At least, not like WoW and EQ2 quests were. Not only that, but you get a monstrous amount of experience points per quest that you complete - something I hope they don’t nerf in the future. Quests also don’t seem mandatory, eliminating the senseless level grind. If mindless killing is your cup of tea, you can level up as easily by doing that. If you kill lots of enemies fast enough, you’ll get bonuses to your experience gain, potentially making it just as fast to level up that way. Though I think a healthy balance of questing and random killing is the best way to go. Get bored of questing and you can hang around at a control point and wait for a Bane attack. I do hope they up the frequency of the attacks at control points, though. Sometimes there is a fair bit of waiting involved.

Something I think is important to mention is the way the game runs on my system. I have a E6600 CPU with a 7900GT video card - not too shabby, but no longer the best by today’s standards. The game easily detects the right settings for your system, and the first time I fired it up it ran smooth as silk. I run it at ‘normal’ video setting, at 1440×900 resolution. I haven’t tested it with Fraps to find my frame rate, but can easily tell it’s averaging over 30fps, probably more nearing 40fps, because of the sheer amount of responsiveness. If I run the game at a higher video quality setting, the frame rate drops as I feel it getting a lot more sluggish, with minimal improvements to the graphics. However, what this means is that the game looks great and runs great which equals a happy gamer. Ironic, considering Everquest 2 runs far poorer on the same spec’d system, and it’s been out for a few years longer.

I can honestly say that there’s nothing I hate about this game. There are many improvements to be made, however - there’s a few bugs that pop up now and again, and I hope they make a few changes to the quest tracking system at some point, but overall there’s nothing blindingly obvious that I’ve encountered so far. But considering the retail version of the game has only been out for a couple of weeks, it’s guaranteed that many changes will be made for the better, as is always the case for new MMO’s. Some people have said Tabula Rasa wasn’t ready for release. To these people I say “WTF?!” … It’s definitely in a better state than other MMO’s I’ve played during their early months of existence.

Tabula Rasa has a lot of roleplaying potential, but I haven’t encountered any RP as yet. There are enough emotes to get you by, but no sitting action which is slightly annoying as you can’t sit down on chairs in the tavern, etc (another improvement I hope they make at some point). You’re also able to buy and craft armour paint which allows you to colour any piece of your armour and accessories in a vast range of colours. Character customisation is very good; much better than WoW, but not as good as something like Oblivion, with its multiple facial adjustment sliders. In Tabula Rasa, you can choose from about 10 or 12 unique faces and about 4 unique face shapes, for a total of 40-something different faces. There’s also about 10 or so different hair styles, and you can also adjust height, skin tone, hair colour, and different armour pieces and their colours, including accessories like goggles and neck chokers. Overall, the character creation system is much better than I was expecting.

Tabula Rasa makes a nice change from fighting with swords and shields. It’s a breath of fresh air in a genre of games that all seem the same. However, don’t think it’s too dissimilar from its MMO brothers and sisters - in truth, the “fresh start” and “clean slate” stuff they threw at us regarding how the game was something new and different, was all just propaganda. Tabula Rasa is an MMO that follows the same tried and true MMO formula. Start out as a noob, rise the ranks, choose your class, do quests, kill stuff, level up, eventually reach endgame content. I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it definitely isn’t anything different than we’ve already seen. The actual difference comes from the game not feeling like a monotonous grind by allowing you to level up how you want. It’s also more casual in nature, as you can just login and kill stuff for 15 minutes, if that’s all the time you have. After discovering all the waypoints on a particular continent, you can also hop between them via the teleporter, making it easy and quick to get where you want to be. That’s a big plus for an MMO in my opinion. Not everyone has loads of time to dedicate to playing games. We wish we did, but sadly we don’t. :)

Overall, I’m so glad I started playing Tabula Rasa (thanks Jon!) and I’m having loads of fun so far with my level 15 Sapper with uber Mech armour. I hope the game continues to grow and evolve over the next few months. The introduction of vehicles (rumoured to be mechs) well be awesome. I hope it’s not too far away.