Hands On: Tabula Rasa First Impressions

By Steven Crews | September 16, 2007 | | Filed under: Features

Steve takes a hard look at the beta version of Tabula Rasa for us, and doesn’t like what he sees. Read his opinions on Richard Garriott putting his name on the box, women with pink hair, and his experiences being an interplanetary accountant after the jump.

Before we get started, a few words of disclaimer:

Tabula Rasa is still in beta. Everything you read here today may be completely different by this time tomorrow. Granted, release is only a month away, but, until then, anything is subject to change.

As such…

This is not a review. We will not make any final judgment calls about the game until the retail box is in our hands.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I’d like to start out by describing my newbie experiences with a little something that should be familiar to anyone who took middle school algebra…

Johnny wants to kill Bane.

Each Bane requires five shots from Johnny’s AccuMax Shotgun to kill.

Each shot consumes three Standard Grade Cartridges.

Each Standard Grade Cartridge costs two credits.

If Johnny has one hundred credits, how many Bane can Johnny kill before having to farm for more money?

Welcome to the first ten levels of Tabula Rasa. The only game I have ever played that can take something as exciting and dramatic as an interstellar war for the very survival of the human race and turn you into an accountant.

Soon after the game begins, you will find yourself immersed in a sort of running mathematics exercise, constantly fretting over how much money you have coming in, versus how much money you’re expending by firing your weapon, and trying to stay ahead of the curve to cover repairs, crafting, or anything else you should need to buy.

But, of course, I didn’t know that when I first started.

It was the heady days of last week, and I had just finished installing the client, fresh-faced and eager to slaughter every living thing that moved. Upon reaching level 5, I picked Soldier as my second tier profession (the tier system is something we’ll go over in the proper review of the game), dropped some training points into Machine Guns and purchased one from the vendor, as I’ve always been a fan of them in FPS games past.

Laying eyes on my new acquisition, a friend of mine, who had been playing the game longer than I had, asked, bluntly, “Why did you buy that thing?”

“They looked like fun.”

“You shouldn’t have specced machine guns,” they scolded me.

I couldn’t see how dispensing hot lead more expediently in a game that revolved around killing things could be a bad thing, and asked for clarification, “Why not?”

“It’s two credits per shot. You’ll go broke trying to keep it reloaded.”

“Are you trying to tell me that I can’t afford to have fun?”

“Pretty much.”

So it went. Although my money problems finally began to recede by around level 15, the early levels are precisely when you’re supposed to be sucking players into your game, not turning them off by forcing them to pinch every penny.

Aside from which, I have a sneaking suspicion that the money crunch may return again once you have to move from Standard Grade ammunition to Improved Grade, with the accompanying increase in price that goes along with it.

And, just from a storytelling and logic standpoint… We’re soldiers, fighting a war for the very survival of the human race, yet we have to pay the military for our ammunition?

But, that’s enough of me griping about the economy. The money issue is just a matter of balance, which they have another month to get ironed out. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, more likely an overreaction from an earlier state of beta when people were making too much money.

What about the rest of the game?

Combat

First of all, do not believe anyone who tells you that TR is an “MMOFPS” (aside from the fact that it’s played from a third person over the shoulder perspective), or even an FPS derivative.

It’s your standard-issue MMO masquerading as a shooter through the use of UI trickery, locking your target to the mouse, and using left click as your default action key.

All you have to do is get your reticule in the vicinity of a target (two feet to the left or right still seems to register a hit), and the dice under the hood takes it from there.

When I first began playing, I was stuck in the old FPS mindset. Fresh off of beating BioShock a few weeks ago, I was running and gunning, aiming for the head, moving behind cover to reload, and circle strafing to avoid incoming fire.

I stopped after a few hours, when it didn’t seem to be having much of an effect.

The next day, I just stood in front of the mobs, aiming in their general direction, holding down the shoot button until they were dead. There was no appreciable difference in either the time it took to kill them or my HP lost in the process.

Don’t get me wrong, giving an alien a face full of buckshot is certainly a refreshing change of pace from casting Frostbolt III on rats all day long, but that doesn’t change the fact that TR is not a true shooter by any stretch of the imagination.

In other words, the combat owes much more to EverQuest than it does to Planetside.

Gameplay

Get quest. Complete quest. Return to quest giver for reward. Rinse, repeat. If you’ve ever played an MMO before, you will not be taken aback by anything groundbreaking in TR’s gameplay.

Two areas I would have liked to have experienced prior to writing this would have been PvP, which at the moment is apparently limited to Clan vs. Clan, and taking over a base in hostile territory.

One of the features touted in TR is the fact that it is indeed supposed to be a war you’re in the middle of, and right in the tutorial one of the first things you do is retake a base that had been captured by the Bane (which consists of using the large and not-so-strategically placed glowing obelisk directly in front of the main gate for 30 seconds without getting shot). Yet, out in the world itself, every time I see the Bane actually capture a base, the ally AI captures it back in five minutes or less.

A war is not particularly exciting if the NPCs are fighting it for you.

Graphics

While the graphics are generally up to date, in terms of style the game can’t seem to make up its mind on whether it wants to be hard science fiction, or Barsoomian swords and sorcery. A good example of this is female characters running around in OD green armored flak jackets… with inexplicably bare midriffs, and pink hair.

And, not unlike another NCSoft title, City of Heroes, where every other level was either an office or a warehouse, there seemed to be a great deal of repetition in both the outdoor areas and the three instances I played through in the starter zone.

The only area I saw in the first fifteen levels of the game which was visually distinctive was the Pravus Research Facility instance, where you get your first inkling of some of the atmosphere and alien design elements that really make you feel as though you’re standing in the midst of another planet, as opposed to Randomly Generated Forest #5.

Now… I don’t want to seem like a complete nitpick who can find nothing but fault in the game, so allow me to mention something I actually enjoyed:

Setting

Has the “aliens from outer space are up to no good and it’s up to you to blow the ever-loving shit out of each and every last one of them” plot device been done to death? Yes. Do I care? No.

It’s a sad time to be a Sci-Fi fan in the MMO genre, and the more games that get released which don’t revolve around tall pale guys with pointy ears, the better. I am willing to forgive a lot just to get my character’s hands on a decent laser or assault rifle… I even played AO at launch for six months.

Overall

When all is said and done, after over a week of playing and getting two characters to level 15, I tried very, very hard to like the game, but came up short.

The overall feeling I got was that TR is severely lacking in meat on its bones. It strikes me as the type of game that will be worth playing a year down the line, after it gets an expansion and a dozen patches under its belt, but one that isn’t going to have enough content at launch to last all but the most “one-hour-a-night casual” players longer than a month.

Will the casual market be enough to keep the game afloat for a year? City of Heroes still seems to be chugging along just fine, so, I suppose we will have to wait and see.

We will of course be taking a much more in-depth look at the game in our official review, coming shortly after launch.

One More Thing…

Lastly, I will leave with one final quibble, this one directed to Richard Garriott himself, should he ever stumble upon our humble site and lay eyes upon my work.

When I first heard of your game, years ago, it was called Tabula Rasa. When I played the demo the last two years at E3, it was Tabula Rasa. When I signed up for beta, it was Tabula Rasa.

Yet, some time recently, your name had mysteriously become attached to the front of the title. I don’t know the true reasons for this, whether the legal department found Tabula Rasa already copyrighted and you had to change it so as to not get sued, or you just thought that your reputation would precede you and more copies would be sold, but I have to say…

Mister Garriott, I’m sorry, but there is only one man on this Earth who can get away with putting his name on the box: Sid Meier.

In the future, I would strongly advise you to learn from the lessons of a former employee of yours, and ask John Romero how JOHN ROMERO’S DAIKATANA is working out for him.