While not without its flaws, Richard Garriott's new sci-fi MMO offers a fun time for the starship trooper in all of us.
There's a small elevated ridge above the Concordia Divide Hydro Plant that overlooks the western side of the facility. The position is perfect for a sniper with a long-range rifle to take out targets with impunity. I discovered this place during one of the frequent Bane assaults on the facility when I found myself crouched on the ridge blasting Bane as quickly as possible yelling at my computer screen. There wasn't any thought of experience points or fulfilling quests. For a brief instant, one of the few I've ever experienced in an MMO, I was really in the moment, sucked into an alternate reality in a way usually only possible in first-person shooters. Welcome to Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa and while it's not without its problems, adrenaline junkies finally have their MMO.
Tabula Rasa takes place in a not-too-distant future in which the Earth is overrun by a malevolent conglomeration of alien races called the Bane. While our homeworld couldn't be saved, discovered alien technology allows Earth's leaders to evacuate enough people to continue the fight out among the stars. There humanity hopes to find like-minded alien races as allies and strike back. The game initially ships with two worlds to explore, Foreas and Arieki. The Foreans are ecologically-minded aliens who want the humans' help against the Bane but aren't willing to destroy their world in order to save it. Arieki is a prison colony inhabited by the criminals and misfits of the Brann race. The goal there is for the humans to convince a planet of exiles, lone wolves and misanthropes, to join a battle for the common good. Both worlds have fun and interesting storylines with well developed quests and plotlines for those players who are into that sort of thing.
The key feature of Tabula Rasa is the game's combat system. The NCSoft design team set out to redefine MMO combat and in this, at least, they've really succeeded. While the game still does traditional stat-rolling under the frenetic on-screen action, the factors that go into each roll include the players' movement, stance, cover and range. That variety turns fighting in Tabula Rasa into an incredibly fun mix of movement, positioning and moment-to-moment weapon selection. It has the immediacy and kinetic quality of a third-person action game without sacrificing the deeper strategy of a standard RPG fighting system.
To take advantage of this system, Tabula Rasa's world design team has done a masterful job crafting a sort of "living" battlefield. Enemies in Tabula Rasa don't just stand around waiting to be killed, there's always something going on whether its Thrax soldiers on patrol, a battle between Bane and AFS NPCs, native animals hunting each other or continual assaults on the player's bases. The latter event is a continual highlight of playing the game, a joyously chaotic affair filled with dozens of enemies and players shooting at each other to defend the base. Should the Bane win, this means that a whole group of quests are not completable until the base is recaptured. That's a whole different sort of fun as an ad-hoc group of player-soldiers try to coordinate an assault on a very well-defended emplacement in order to reclaim access to quest-givers and merchants.
One of the main dangers of this sort of system would be repetitiveness. Tabula Rasa avoids this through a great system of itemization. Firearms, for example, come in a variety of flavors ranging from rifles to shotguns to rocket launchers to electric netguns and fire different sorts of ammunition -- lasers, shells, electric bolts, sonic waves and others. Since the many different types of enemies in the game fight using different combat tactics and with their own array of special powers, this means that there's no one piece of "uber-gear," different kinds of weapons, armor or powers will useful in different situations. A Ranger may begin a battle by calling in a carpet-bombing air strike and then use a net gun to immobilize a few of the more dangerous opponents, switch to a rifle to take out one particular Thrax PFC, go to a shotgun to knock back opponents who have gotten too close and then switch to a laser pistol to eliminate that one annoying close-range amoeboid that just won't go away.
Other MMOs could learn a few things from Tabula Rasa's class structure. All players begin as undifferentiated "Recruits" with a few basic skills. As they level, players make choices about the types of gameplay they enjoy and move into more specialized classes. At level five they can become combat-oriented "Soldiers" or move toward the "Specialist" support classes. At level 15 these classes are further defined, eventually culminating in a fourth tier of specialized classes that slot pretty cleanly into classic MMO archetypes like "tank," "healer" or "ranged DPS." Not only do the game's classes offer plenty of variety for different kinds of players, it makes leveling up a continual adventure as the battle situations players find themselves in start requiring more sophisticated responses. The well-designed instances are built around this by offering timed objectives or widely spaced targets that force players into fire teams and put a premium on cooperation.
The real brilliance of the character system is that every player gets the opportunity to create clones of their avatar at important branch points. These clones have all the experience of the original but have all their skill and ability points refunded. It's a brilliant solution to the problem of players making a wrong choice because they can always try out the alternative. "Alt-aholics" who enjoy playing multiple characters can cut out the boring low-level portion of the game when they want to pursue a different career via a new character. Since every character shares the same inventory (items and money can be transferred between alts through the AFS footlockers in every base) it merely formalizes the way most players play MMOs and eliminates the useless "bank alt."
The bad news is that not every idea on display in Tabula Rasa comes off perfectly. Crafting is a bit of a mess, although the idea is sound enough. Crafting is designed to augment the itemization system by letting players create mods that can be attached to weapons and armor to give them various effects (lowering an opponent's armor, for example, or reducing resistances to certain types of damage). In practice the system is confusing, not very well explained in-game and gives rewards that are simply not worth the effort it takes to get them. Worse still, it sucks up precious ability points that players need for combat abilities, virtually guaranteeing that the traditional MMO "bank alt" will be replaced by an equally useless "crafting alt."
Another idea not carried off as well as it should have been is "morality quests." Much the way Garriott's legendary RPG Ultima IV challenged a player's morality, certain quests in Tabula Rasa require a player to make ethical decisions. In theory this is a great idea and the quests themselves are entertaining as far as they go. One quest line, for example, starts with a Bane Thrax prisoner of war. The player has to retrieve food for the prisoner and then decide whether or not to drug it in order to get information from them. Either choice triggers a slightly different quest chain in which the player gets in touch with an underground movement among the Thrax and the AFS that hopes to end the war.
The problem is that the main difference between the two choices is flavor text. There are no real long-term consequences to the player's actions. If there was ever a reason to have a reputation system in an MMO, this is it. It would be great if these choices would have real consequences, perhaps opening and closing major quest lines, areas of the map or offering different instances based on a player's faction standings. As it stands now they're just a mild novelty in a pretty standard MMO quest structure.
The preceding problems, though, pale in comparison to the game's puzzling lack of an auction house and an "inspect" feature. A central clearing house to trade crafting recipes and components would make the crafting system (as confusing as it is) at least a viable part of the gameplay. The other missing element is the ability to inspect another player's inventory. Not only does this provide the "Where did you get that?" moments that act as social lubricant, it would also facilitate teammate equipment coordination and make trading for those rare crafting materials infinitely easier. This is the same mistake that NCSoft's own Auto Assault made a few years ago. Fortunately Tabula Rasa is a much stronger game at launch than Auto Assault ever was and, according to an NCSoft rep, an auction house is the dev team's top priority.
NCSoft has been in the MMO business for a while and its experience shows with a launch that been remarkably smooth from a technological standpoint. The game launched with four servers and hasn't had anything but scheduled downtime in the two weeks since it went live. There have been complaints about a memory leak and slowdown from the community, though that hasn't been a problem on the (admittedly beefy) rigs we ran the game on at GameSpy. There are also scattered minor gameplay bugs, mostly quests that won't give the player credit for completing them and occasional triggers that only go off for only a few members in a party, forcing players to run missions multiple times.
Despite the problems, Tabula Rasa is off to a great start and its future potential is very promising. While the lack of an auction house hurts the game, the awesome combat, intense battlefield action, fun missions and interesting character progression is more than enough to keep players coming back for a good long while. A well-realized science fiction setting in a genre overflowing with elves and orcs doesn't hurt either. A big salute to "General British" for letting us all indulge our inner starship trooper.
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