Tabula Rasa: The Best New MMORPG You're Not Playing

Tabula Rasa is number two on my slowly evolving 'games of the year' list. (Hey, this gal has to work for a living, too, you know, and this doesn't pay the bills.)

Richard Garriott probably ought to be the most famous name in mmorpg gaming. He was the founder of one of the first serious gaming companies, Origin Systems, and he was also the creator of the Ultima series of online role playing games, which were the real groundbreakers of the genre. If you want to find a really good quick and dirty write up on Richard and his career, you'll find one here at Moby Games, which offers an extensive developer's bio on him.

Richard's biggest problem probably stems from the fact that most gamers today do zip in terms of research and studying history (probably sounds way too much like homework) and likely have no clue that every mmorpg on the market owes some serious homage to this man. Simply put, he started it all. You can fault the game industry moguls of today for this lack of appreciation as well. The definitive History of Computer Gaming has not be written and the related web site that ought to offer little playable bits of each of the greatest games in history has not been created. (Now, THAT would be fun to do...hmmm) Both would require lengthy entries on Richard.

So, practically by default, when a gaming company realizes it has a chance to produce Richard Garriott's Next Big Game, it kind of has to roll those dice, and kudos to NCsoft for doing it with Tabula Rasa (hint, hint: NCsoft also produces #3 on my list: City of Heroes and City of Villains: The Best MMORPG You're Not Playing Enough).

First, to give you a sense of what Tabula Rasa is, here's a link to the game trailer on Gametrailers.com (Forgive the obligatory 16 second 'Wow' he's cool cuz he's wearing that great new anti-perspirant!' commercial...Don't be naive people, the Internet is NOT free).

So how is the game play? Let me put it this way. We (Roy and I) allow ourselves two active MMORPG accounts, and Tabula Rasa has become our second game. The heroine in the trailer and on the game box even has red hair. Like I wasn't going to notice that?? For the pc gamers out there who are sooo tired of being dissed by Microsoft on the Halo franchise (they finally come out with Halo 2 for the pc, and make it Vista operating system only. I swear these people would steal the candles off a child's birthday cake), they can now cast Halo and the Master Chief to the bit rot bin of gaming history. Tabula Rasa is just like playing Halo, but not alongside 16 other players or even 32 players. It's an mmorpg, so you are playing alongside hundreds of other players at a time. The aliens, known as the Bane, are every bit as exciting to play against as the Covenant, and they appear to regard us humans with equivalent disdain.

The premise of the story is that earth has been invaded, and very possibly wiped out, but our governments had apparently known about the threat for years. The handpicked survivors of the human race have been transported to another world, where the fight against these maurading aliens has been going on for eons.  The weaponry far exceeds anything available on any fps. The characterization tree offers a wide range of options. Even better are the so-called Logos powers, left behind by a benign race known as the Eloh, which are accessed through the discovery of various shrines hidden all over the game play area.

In case you hadn't noticed, the game has a lot of respectful nods to the science fiction of the recent and distant past. The Bane were also alien villains in a British science fiction television series called The Sarah Jane Adventures, and the Eloh name is almost a match for the Eloi, the naive, peaceful surface dwellers raised for slaughter by the Morlocks in H.G. Wells' classic, The Time Machine.

In fact, this game manages to do what another yet to be released game (Huxley) promised us, but never finished. It could arguably be called the first Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter. Like Huxley was supposed to, it offers clan-based teaming for missions and instances, but Tabula Rasa beat them to the punch. YES, there is also a thriving PVP component as well.

The missions are fun, but Roy and I are usually pretty fragged after work, so we like to keep our gaming fairly simple. We have a riotous fun time just defending the various bases from coordinated Bane attacks. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, and what happens is the acting out of spontaneous tactics by a bunch of strangers who suddenly find themselves having to work together to fight off an assault.

Travel is on foot, (but at least the guys and gals actually RUN, not that insipidly stupid slow jog thing you find on World of Warcraft). The one thing that seems lacking is a range of assault vehicles, transports, earthbound or aerial, that WE as players can drive.

In all honesty, there are some flaws. Little things that a careful programmer like me finds annoying, like my feet sunk a few inches down below the surface when what I am standing on is supposed to be solid rock. The personal footlocker storage areas can be glitchy. You have to try the next one down the row of bunks in the barracks when that happens. 

But there are also some groundbreaking innovations, such as Clones. You level up a series of trees where, as you might imagine, specialty abilities branch off. Normally, to find out what the other branches are like, you start over with a new player at level one. Not in Tabula Rasa. If the next branch is at level 30, you can make a clone who is ALSO level 30 (pretty goddam neat, that) without having to do the low level grunt work again. We have used the clones as character respecializations, correcting mistakes we made with our original toons.

One of the coolest things about this game, as a girl geek gamer, is that it seemlessly blends the sexes in a way no other game has yet for me. There is NO girls' wardrobe, so to speak. Nothing glamorous here. Even the gal hair styles are what you would expect for fighting a war, as in all of them are short cuts and out of the goddam way for when you have to shoot. EVERYTHING in terms of the uniforms is unisex and virtually identical to what the guys have, except for the fact that us gals get to bare our six packs with bare bellies! Makes absolutely NO sense whatsoever as, personally, I want my entrails as well protected as every other part of my body, but they had to make SOME nod to sex appeal for the guy players, I suppose. But the overall result is still a game that is relatively free of the obligatory awful fumbling pickup lines by male gamer geeks who have never been on a real date before.

One other thing of note. This is not like any other MMORPG in that there are few places where you character is NOT under constant threat of attack. If something  isn't dropping out of the trees to ambush you, it's likely sneaking up behind you. This is, after all, supposed to be a war zone, against an alien race dedicated to your extermination, and they have done a very good job of creating that atmosphere. You can't run ANYWHERE in the countryside without something coming after you. All but the largest human bases are under constant threat of being overrun, and often are and have to be retaken. This all makes it VERY DIFFICULT to stop and type in the midst of the game. So, our conversations with others have mostly be limited to lulls between assaults or those large base areas. If there was EVER a game that could use a better embedded voice chat, Tabula Rasa is it. Again, that is NOT a complaint, I would imagine there is very little time for small talk in most real active war zones, but yelling out warnings would be important.

Roy and I play on the Cassiopeia server, one of four currently available, under the name STALLWORTH. If you see us, between major Bane assaults, we'd be more than happy to talk to you.