Thinking of buying Tabula Rasa? Read This!

About 8 months ago I quit WoW after a few years of playing. Maxed my guy out, did the PVP thing for a while...then finally just decided to quit. After WoW I swore up and down I'd never play an MMO again. They all just felt the same...click a bunch of the same buttons over and over again...rinse and repeat for 70 levels. At level 30, it got old...but by level 50 it became mind-numbing. THAT'S why I left.

But then I discovered Tabala Rasa. And thus,after that little history lesson...I start my review.

Graphically, this game is great. Not incredible, but it still looks great and builds a lot of atmosphere. However, I feel a bit more optimizing needs to be done to the engine (I'm sure this will happen in the next few patches)...for a game that isn't as massively graphics intensive as some...it really should be less of a system hog. But it's a minor complaint that is likely already being looked into.

The gameplay is where it's at for this game...and it's the reason I'm getting back into MMO's. Unlike in all the other mmo's I've played in the past...this isn't a grindy, clicky fest. The action is much faster, much more hands on and diverse. Imagine fighting a group of Thrax with your laser-based rifle and then a lightbender shows up...they are immune to energy weapons, so you'll need to either kill off the thrax fast, or pull out your bullet-based rifle to take out the lightbender and thrax both. Keep in mind all enemies and players have armor/shield...so you can spend extra time trying to take down that shield with your normal weapons or wipe it out fast with a few quick EMP shots from one of your other rifles so you can damage their health.

(btw if you encounter androids during a firefight and kill one...loot it's control trip RIGHT away...even if it's in the middle of combat...they get back up and are almost fully charged when they do otherwise)

There are also literally hundreds of different logos to find through out the game world, which in finding also gives you great XP. Logos are sort of like magic or runes you collect that unlock abilities, crafting options, etc.. Basically each logos provides a different purpose, some defensive, some offensive and some non-combat related. (I haven't done any crafting yet, so can't comment on it) There are many great items/abilities you can't use until you find the correct required logos.

One more thing I REALLY liked about TR. The skill trees. There are a lot of different directions you can take...lots of different trees and all of them seem very balanced and interesting. Sniper, spy, demo, engineer, medic, you name it...it's all fun. The big upside is that you can make a 2nd character without having to level them from scratch. There is an option called cloning that you can do at any point. The clone will be the same level and have all the same skills of your main character at the point you cloned him. So you can do multiple skill trees without having to start from scratch each time.

On a side note...the community is a lot of fun and typically very friendly. I was invited to two clans already! But I'll see what one you join first.

Tabula Rasa has rekindled my faith in MMO's...just when I thought they were all going down the same mind-numbing, simplistic route and cloning each other...this game comes along and changes all that for me.

(side note: PVP is limited right now. But is currently being worked on...the Devs know what they are doing and I'm sure we'll see it soon. Though I'm not much for pvp. Also, if you're hardcore, you may want to wait 4 months until more high level content can be created...but for casuals like me...by the time we get to higher levels, there will be plenty to do)

The one thing I don't like about TR and the one reason I wont buy it:

lack of everything except combat.

If you really want a deep scifi MMO, get EVE.

The one thing I don't like about TR and the one reason I wont buy it:

lack of everything except combat.

If you really want a deep scifi MMO, get EVE.

RK-Mara

Eve is a great game. But it's extremely time consuming...and just not accessable to anyone except the truely hardcore or those that only want to play one game...and that's it.

And really...aside from Eve, combat is pretty much the core of every other MMO out there...so it's vitally important combat is done well. (which was a big reason I left wow...it did a lot right...but really failed in combat)

Thanks for sharing with us. ;)

This game does look cool. Perhaps I'll check it out eventually, but I need to finish Guild Wars first.

I thought this was gonna be a bash the game topic. Glad it sounds good I just ordered that game yesturday for 19.99.

[QUOTE="RK-Mara"]

The one thing I don't like about TR and the one reason I wont buy it:

lack of everything except combat.

If you really want a deep scifi MMO, get EVE.

GhostPoet

Eve is a great game. But it's extremely time consuming...and just not accessable to anyone except the truely hardcore or those that only want to play one game...and that's it.

And really...aside from Eve, combat is pretty much the core of every other MMO out there...so it's vitally important combat is done well. (which was a big reason I left wow...it did a lot right...but really failed in combat)

I disagree, you just have to be patient.. After all your character is leveling even when your logged off..

[QUOTE="RK-Mara"]

The one thing I don't like about TR and the one reason I wont buy it:

lack of everything except combat.

If you really want a deep scifi MMO, get EVE.

GhostPoet

Eve is a great game. But it's extremely time consuming...and just not accessable to anyone except the truely hardcore or those that only want to play one game...and that's it.

And really...aside from Eve, combat is pretty much the core of every other MMO out there...so it's vitally important combat is done well. (which was a big reason I left wow...it did a lot right...but really failed in combat)

Don't forget UO :) But I agree that combat is the core of almost every MMO. There still should be something else to do too. Games need more than just the core.

Tabula Rasa will not ask you to do something foreign and unrelated to the main gameplay in order to progress. So I would recommend it to anyone. You like it...do more of that to advance. You dislike it, move on.

A few MMOs will ask you to farm minerals, raw components, to PvP, to raid, to tradeskills, to progress offline, to make diplomacy, play card games...or something else completely unrelated to the main gameplay which you like. If you don't do that completely random and unrelated side gameplay, you won't progress or will progress less in these foreign MMOs. In that sense, Tabula Rasa is a very good game as it won't make you do things you don't want to...unlike some MMOs.

What you see is what you get. You want to be a better hunter with this riffle of yours? Then hunt! That is gold in my book! If you do anything that isn't related to hunting with your riffle, assuming you even progress, it won't be as good as if you where hunting with this riffleof yours (actually the choice is yours, any weapon would be as good for progression, so the choice is real and not utopic as in some MMOs, and choices are good)! So again, Tabula Rasa is a gem and a game I would recommend.

Well said, Anofalye! You have a lot of freedom to do what you want...you're not force to grind for things you need....where as in some games they really do force you to do stuff you don't want to do in order to progress.

On another note...the Control Point battles are a freaking blast. Most fun i've had in an MMO in a long time.

As for Eve...heck, if I could play it I would...3 trials later I still can't get anything done in the time I spend in it...just not enough time to play that and other games too. :)

I would say this is one of the better MMORPGs, and has the following plus and minus points:

Plus points:

- A good carefully designed world which doesn't contradict itself - WoW had much the same world until they added the burning crusade when they suddenly went wham! spaceships / aliens.
- Well designed instanced missions - one of the positive draws, some of the instance missions in the first zone are particuarly good
- Good general player interaction
- The idea of logos is a good one and makes the magic side interesting

However, to be fair and not enthralled the game has the following minus points:

- The normal missions are standard fair, go to this and get that types, and you often have to run a long way
-The crafting system could be better, its uneccesarily complicated with too many compound types.
- While the game world is nice, some of the pathing / destinations to routes could be explained better. While you can often work out the direction of a place you can often find mountains blocking what seems to be the direct route.

I would give the game 8/10 in the general scheme of things, it isn't the best but it does alot of things well, and has the potential to develop into an interesting game when the quirks /bugs have been worked out.

For all interested...here's a chat transcript of what you can expect in the near future.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?GAMEID=150&SETVIEW=features&LOADFEATURE=1629&bhcp=1

From reading that...i'm even more excited. They really seem to be working hard and caring about their game. I like the fact they are not nickel and diming everyone with expansion packs and instead adding tons and TONS of new content via patches. The Control Point pvp sounds awesome.

Hmmm. I have to disagree.

What really got me was that you said TR is not a "clicky fest", when it is exactly that. Here's generally how things will go in TR for the majority of the game: Yuu get the weapon of your choice, find some monsters, sticky tartget them, hold down MOUSE1, and wait until they drop. After that, you move on to the next mob and repeat. You MAY use a skill once every 30 seconds, but that's about it.

And people assume that because it's sci-fi and has guns and crosshairs and pew-pew lasers that it's a brilliant innovation. Wrong. These are just models and animations, and in the end the gameplay is more or less like a stripped down MMO. Target, click, loot, and move on. You can't dodge bullets, nor can you take cover from them. They home in on you and pass through walls to get to you. Just like a projectile from any other MMO.

And then there's the virtually non-existent extra content. All you really can do in the game is grind mobs for exp and credits, with nothing to do for a break or some quick fun. i mean yes grinding is fine in my book, but with absolutely nothing else to do, it becomes tedious very quickly.

And yes it is a system hog. I have 4gb or RAM right now, and on maximum settings the game was using 73% of that RAM. That is rediculous seeing as the game is not even a minor graphical feat. Very poorly optimised, and I shudder to think how people with lower-end computers would run this.

The game has no style either. I mean, what could you possibly do that's exciting with a gun? You can perform amazing combos with a sword, axe etc etc, but with a gun you either shoot slow or shoot fast, and that's about the gist of it.

Lastly, the logos system failed miserably. It had potential, and I had high hopes for it pre-release. I thought that you'd be able to create your own skills by combining these logos words in whatever way you wanted, adding alot of variety to the game. However, I was disappointed to see that they were just an excuse to had a few hundred more *find X item* quests into the game. All in all you'll only end up using probably 5% of the logos you find. They're more of a pre-req for your job's skills than anything.

Conclusion: The game is a rather dull clickfest that involves pretty much no skill on the player's part. The game aims for you, and moving around in combat doesn't help you at all seeing as projectiles follow you through walls. The quests are repetitive and there are thousands of them (which isn't really a good thing). The game is hyped up to be way more than it is. This MMO in my eyes is pretty much standard. I'd give it a 6/10. I made it to level 15 and got bored out of my mind.

EDIT: I don't play WoW by the way, so i'm not comparing TR to it.

Night stalker you just said you never played Wow which any real MMO fan would of played that game. Maybe you just hated TR because your not much of a fan of MMo's?

Night stalker you just said you never played Wow which any real MMO fan would of played that game. Maybe you just hated TR because your not much of a fan of MMo's?

Sleepyz

A real MMO fan doesn't need to play WoW. I know many MMO players who have been around since Ultima Online and they haven't played WoW. I can well see why. It doesn't offer anything what older MMO's do, except for the Warcraft world. WoW follows the same basic recipe like every MMO has since EQ.

Night stalker you just said you never played Wow which any real MMO fan would of played that game. Maybe you just hated TR because your not much of a fan of MMo's?

Sleepyz

I've played WoW before, what I meant is i'm not an addicted WoW fanboy, that's all. I've also played FFXI, Darkages (It's on older P2P MMO), RFO, and Maplestory (ick). And I hated TR because it was repetitive and not much fun. MMOs are probably my favourite genre aside from JRPGs.

I don't mean to bash the game, I'm just making sure people know the truth about the game before buying it. Of course, this is all my opinion, so you don't have to take my word for it. I'll admit I had fun with the game till about level 15, at which point i had max quests in my quest log (all of them were "find x logos" or "kill x amount of mobs"), plus there were still NPCs everywhere that wanted to give me quests. A quest should be something fun, challenging, and innovative. If you've ever gotten even somewhat far in FFXI you'd know what I mean.

And for the record I don't play FFXI anymore either, because vista didn't like it so much :P

I played TR during the beta, but not since live. From what I saw there is nothing revolutionary about this MMO. Nightstalker is dead on: its the same click, click, click, loot, rinse and repeat. Now clearly there are a ton of people who enjoy that type of gameplay enough to pay a monthly fee for it. TR is not dramatically worse than any other, but it is definately not the revolution to the MMO genre "Lord British" claims it is.

My guess is, once the OP has put the same hours into TR he put into WoW, he'll be just as bored with TR.

Don't bother buying this game its just not worth it. Those who got in the beta have fewer problems. Those that bought the retail box have a 1 in 3 chance of the game not even launching to be able to play the game. Problem being in the creation of the master account and then the problem of the 20 digit code not being accepted.

After trying for a month and working with NCSoft tech support, they simply said they could not solve the problem and said sorry your just out of luck and they were not going to try to fix it. Thus I have bought a game that I could never play.

Never mind about MMO experience. Generally, you either love it or hate it. Me, I hate MMO. The problem is that MMO have limited issues which makes the game get boring fast. In the end, you just do not fill the thrill of the game like it was new.

Thus now I make sure that I get games that have a single player section because honestly, great games will always be great and its always nice to play by oneself to improve skills. Think of all the great games like Halo 1, HalfLife 2, Cysis and Call of Duty 2 and 4 are ones that come to mind quickly.

But honestly, TR is not worth the chance to buy only to find out that you can not play the game.