Customer Reviews

Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I bought this for my son after he found & read the reviews for it and it looks good. However, THE MAKER PULLED THE PLUG ON REGISTRATIONS in Feb 2009, leaving anyone who buys this holding the bag. Can't register to complete the install, can't update, can't get to anything inside to even look at. This also explains why a fairly recent game was available on Amazon for only $4. I hope that anyone reading this does so before they buy so that the aftermarket discount sellers can keep what they hoped to pawn off to unsuspecting buyers. It's not their fault, but consumers on Amazon shouldn't have to shoulder the load for an unusable product that the manufacturer has pulled offline.

I have been playing Tabula Rasa (TR) since its launch on the 2nd November. TR is a Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO) with a science fiction setting. Earth has been destroyed and now you fight Earth's destroyers, collectively known as "The Bane", on faraway planets.

When you first enter TR you start in "The Wilderness", the starting zone. TR uses a tier system not a class system. Everyone starts in the same place as a recruit. At level five you reach your first tier and can choose to become either a Soldier or a Specialist. At level 15 you again get to choose a branch. Soldiers have the option of becoming either Commandos or Rangers. Specialists choose either a Sapper or a Bio-technician. When you hit level 30 you get to make your final choice. Each time you gain a level you get points which you can allocate to whichever skills you have, making them more powerful. You can also neglect skills altogether if you like, giving you more points to allocate in your favourite skills. You don't learn knew skills every time you level. The only time you learn new skills is when you reach a tier.

The world itself looks good, though it does seem rather depressing and desolate. Being in a perpetual state of war there are wreckages lying around and burnt out areas. Nothing particularly beautiful about the graphics but they are good. There are no big cities such as Ironforge in World of Warcraft or Qeynos in Everquest 2. Instead there are bases scattered throughout the land. You can travel to bases you have already visited using waypoints and dropships. You access other planets through wormholes.

You level your character by doing missions which you collect from NPCs. You can in fact solo all of the missions with the exception of the instanced dungeons, where you will need to enter as a squad. You can have six players in a squad.

The UI is easy to learn. You can have five weapons and five skills (think spells). The magic in this game is called Logos and that gives you attacks and buffs etc. Combat in TR is fast and furious, particularly in squads and the instances. As usual you are at the mercy of squads, some are good and others are bad.

Graphics: Graphics are nice but the world itself isn't beautiful so you won't be awestruck by sunsets or large cities. It looks like a warzone.

AI: The AI in the game is good with enemies trying to flank you and enemy dropships arriving randomly to drop off reinforcements.

Combat: Hectic and fun for the most part. A bit of strategy is required. Crouching improves the speed with which your target reticle locks on and also increases damage. Crouching behind sandbags, rocks, and other cover reduces the amount of damage you take.

Instances (dungeons): Are a mixed bag. Instances (meaning each squad has its own dungeon) have missions and are more difficult, requiring a squad. The only problem with an instance is that once you have completed the instance and the missions, there is no reason to ever go there again. Like any game, doing and instance with a terrible group can leave you frustrated and angry, and I think I've had more bad groups then good ones. At this stage I'll put that down to the newness of the game and it's players, with players not having tried other classes and knowing what's expected of them.

Classes: I personally like the tier system, though the gap between level 15 and level 30 is a long one. The classes are unique to each other and all classes can solo. The final tier classes fall into the classic Tank Healer DPS variety, but they are different enough from other games to feel new. All classes use weapons unique to them such as grenade launchers, laser rifles, leech guns and so on. There are different damage types and certain enemies are vulnerable to different types, so switching between weapons is a necessary part of the game.

Overall: Had I written this review in the first week of release I would have rated it highly. The game looks great and the early worlds were polished and refined. From my experience any faults are picked up quickly and the developers are working hard to release patches to fix issues. Currently there is a patch due out which makes the Specialist line, particularly Medic, more viable and fun to play.

The game does get repetitive quickly. As I mentioned earlier, the gap between tier three and four, levels 15 to 30, is a long one. Waiting 15 levels before you get to try new weapons and skills is a long time. Player controlled vehicles are set to be introduced in the first expansion but whether people can wait that long is another thing.

Tabula Rasa is a fun game to play, and it caters nicely to the casual gamer. It's easy to log in and do a mission, or fight for a control point. At the current shelf price and the standard 30 day included play it's good value and I recommend buying it.

An update to my previous review.

Well ive run the game up to lvl 32, gotten my final class( Sniper and i have a Spy clone ).

My previous review I was in the early stages of the game. I've spent quite a few more hours playing and my enthusiasm has waned quite a bit. I've accually canceled my subscription and will be moving on to something else( probly Age of Conan when it comes out ).

I'll explain - 1 BUGS - Once i got past the 1st few zones you start to see lots of bugs, zone bugs, chat bugs, quest bugs and interface bugs. The game at this stage feels like I'm in an early beta. They should have waited another year before releasing this game. 2 no mail or auction system, although an auction system should be out very soon in an update. 3 when i hit 30 and started playing as a sniper, the game lost all its fun and im not the type of person who will reroll even with a cloned 30spy and run the same quests over agian. Theres no alternate zones to bring up new caracters, you have to run the same zones. ( I realize this is a personal choice some ppl will have no problem at all with this. 4 There's no way to reset your skill points as you grow and learn more about your caracter, you can clone them if you have a clone credit but getting those is quite an ordeal. 5 The Tabula Rasa website has no official forum which makes me think these developers have no interest in there community.

All that being said, the game still has a fantastic combat system but i feel this game has been doomed because someone ( developers or corporation? ) Didn't want to take the time to get things working smoothly before the release.

end of update.


I've been playing since launch day( i didn't play the beta ). My impressions of the game are mixed but im overall enjoying the game.

In my opinion the best part of the game is its revolutionary targeting system, no more auto aim here. you acually have to aim yourself. each target has a circular reticulator that provides you with information on the damage youll be producing, the closer to the center the higher the damage output. It also provides you with info on how vulnerable you are and how much of a damage reduction you'll see if your hit. Being partially hidden reduces the damage you take under fire. So the feature is nothing short of brilliant and fresh in the MMO world. I only hope i see more of this in future games.

Another great aspect of the game is the pace, much faster pace than any other MMO i've experienced. My next favorite thing are the instances. I'm only lvl18 so we'll see what higher levels present, again very fast paced, but the best part is the intelligence and realism of the fight huge mobs come charging at you from great distances, they dodge and sidestep and flank like no other. The experience is not unlike a rollercoater at an amusment park you cant stop riding.

The graphics are good, especially you toon models.

Now, what i don't like!

1st i miss loot based instances like in WoW. These are all quest based, you do get your rewards but mostly from quests. The quest based instances actually work for this type of game. But i always liked that feeling after downing a hard boss and someone getting a good roll and a good reward. It's a fun part of the game.

2nd the chat system in TR annoys me it needs to be much more extensive and capable in providing info about other players and what the wearing and using etc...

that's it, overall i would reccomend this to anyone who enjoys MMO's and might be looking for something new.

Well I've played this game and my character is now a level 50. Which is as high as you can go, so I feel I can review this game now.
Good things about this game: It is fast paced and not to hard to make it to level 50 in a month, with moderate amount of play. I didnt play them all but didnt hear much complaining about the characters being really unbalanced or sucking to bad, the medic may be the acception. Didnt have to grind more then about 4 or 5 of the levels, the rest where completed with quest. By the time you hit 25 level you will hate the bane and want them dead on sight as much as everyone else. stories I found to be interesting enough. Also great looking instances, that can all be soloed or run with a group. Found most people on the game to be really friendly, or at least helpful.
Bad things about the game: The Auction house seems a bit broken, almost impossible to make money on it, this may change with time but for the moment most stuff sells for just over vender. Money in the game is pretty much used for buying bullets at the moment, since stuff is pretty easy to get from quest, and items sell so cheap, i have 13 million right now and no real purpose for it. Once you hit level 50 there isnt any end content on this game at the time of writing this, really only thing to do is, try and find some PvP but after fighting as allies with your fellow players against the bane for 50 levels, just seems wrong to go around killing them for no reason, no if we started to get ranks, money, weapons, something for it, then would be much more fun. Everyone can color there armor to set them apart from one another, but in the end everyone looks similar with different paint jobs. As of writing this, the crafting system is very broke. For example, there is only one level 50 purple grade sword in game ive seen, you can put 4 buffs on purple items, but the sword comes with 4 on it, there is no way to remove these worthless buff to put your own on it, in fact 90% of all the level 50 stuff cant be modified in any way, and lets say you get a blue item with only two buffs on it, and want to add one more, being blue can only have 3 added to them, your chances at full skill level is 12% chance of adding a buff, and 25% off distroying your item. At least for me, I found that after getting one character up to level 50, it wasnt that interesting to level another one to that level. Becuase the first one you level seems just fine and powerful enough that theres no reason to start another one. Almost for got, even over a month after release, I would say close to 10% of the quest are still very buggy, meaning you cant finish them or may have to do them more then once to finish them because of a small mistake. example would be like dieing in the middle of a bombing run, and the quest says failed, and the guy that gave it to you vanishes, later found out you need to kill everything first then run the bomb in. This is the last part of a 5 part quest, and starting over waste 2 hours. conclusion: Game is fun and graphics are good, but seems like they have about a years worth of work to make the game fun enough to play for more then two months. but at a cost of 25 dollars as of right now, may be worth buying and playing for a month, get a good character. They hold on to your characters after you stop you acount, so in like 6 months check back in and maybe start it back up :). Hope this helps someone decide.

There are no active servers for this game anymore. All you are buying is an instruction booklet. The game WILL NOT WORK!

This servers to this game officially closed in February 2009.

To the best of my knowledge you are buying a non-playable shell.

TR was a dismal failure upon release, and they are shuttering it in a couple of weeks. Purchasing it now is a waste, unless you want to spend [...] on a coaster.

It really wasn't that bad of a game, either. If they'd kept developing it, it would've eventually been decent. But these games never recover from release failures.

Tabula Rasa brings some new style to the MMORPG - a genre that has gotten a bit stale over the last few years. Rather than the usual TAB-target, hit buttons 1, 2, 3, 4 to excecute abilities, TR combines FPS gameplay with an RPG world, appealing to a wider variety of gamers.

Gameplay: Character movement and control are very good; the UI and controls are highly customizable to your own preferences. If you're an FPS player, the gameplay will be very familiar. If you're an MMORPG player, it is easy to adapt to. Monster AI is more intelligent than the typical "it runs at you and hits you until you kill it" type that many of us are used to, and the game has a good variety of different things to kill that all attack in different ways.

Graphics & Performance : If you put TR on the highest graphic settings, its beautiful. But even on 'normal' to low settings it looks as good as anything else out there. There is sometimes a bit of slowdown at 'control points' when there are hundreds of things assaulting a base, but you have a lot of control over your graphics settings so usually this can be dealt with. It also is worth mentioning that since release, the servers have had very little to no downtime, no serious crashes, no rollbacks, no crisis of any sort - basically to say, it had an incredibly smooth launch.

Functionality - There's still a bit that's broken, though its very quickly being ironed out in patches. GMs respond quickly to deal with any issues involving broken quests/etc. But the number of these issues is still 'low' for a game of this magnitude this soon after its release.

Uniqueness - The storyline and the world of TR is something that really hasn't been seen before in an MMORPG. You have the whole 'military' aspect, pushing back an invasion of hostile aliens, yet at the same time you have the mysterious technology of an ancient civilization card being played. Its an interesting Mix, and often times quests will make you choose one path or another, and it -does- make a difference. There's a combination of open world and instancing, but even the 'open' zones have a few (large-scale) instances which helps reduce lag / camping of quest mobs / etc. Some bases are control points that are periodically attacked/invaded and you can earn rewards assaulting / defending these control points.

So essentially, you have more to do than simply kill things and level up. There's a fairly involving progressive storyline in quests, optional quests that open up a bit more lore, there's good old fashioned "burn fight kill" with a combat system that gives bonuses for continual kills, and then there's assault/defense of bases in each zone.

Soloability & Skill: I would say 90% of the content can be done solo. Not necessarily efficiently, but it can be done. The different classes are unique enough that each brings something to a group, and the instance quests are going to be considerably easier in a group, but one thing that sets TR apart from most games is that the skill of the player, rather than a system of complex mathematics, determines what you can/can't do. You know the routine : Monster hits you for X points because its stats vs. your stats determined this. But with the FPS style of play (manual evasive action!) you have a lot more freedom to excel.

You also have stat points as well as skill points that you may freely distribute without restriction, which is also a happy, fresh memory of older-style MMORPGs, where you could actually have a 'build' instead of being exactly like everyone else.

Eye Candy : Weapons make satisfying glowy effects, there's a full array of armor paint to customize your look as well as styles, movies upon entering several instances, and the different zones/planets are breathtaking.


Overall / Value : TR has the typical MMORPG price structure. Buy the box & pay 15$/month. If you're the kind of person that plays subscription games, this one's better than most of those that are out there now simply because of its larger scope of activities, & customization. I say its easily worth the price.

PVP : PVP is by duel or clan war ONLY. A lot of people are upset about this, but casual gamers will rejoice to know that they are not going to have their questing and experiencing of the game spoiled by some bored kid who decides to kill them just because he can. Its a nice change. Though it is possible that at some point a PVP server will be opened if there is enough demand. If you play these games to kill other players, then you can skip this one, at least for now.

When it comes to online gaming, typical MMORPGs become somewhat indistinguishable. Richard Garriott, the creator of Tabula Rasa, was the mind behind the first online graphic RPG, Ultima Online. The folks at EverQuest were the ones who mada online RPG's truly massive and Blizzard polished the concept to a mass market appeal with World of Warcraft. But throughout that evolution, the general feel and mechanics behind gameplay barely changed. In the development of Tabula Rasa, Garriott aimed to create something new. The idea was to find a middle ground behind the grind-level treadmill of an MMORPG and the twitch-gaming slaughterfest of a shooter like Unreal Tournament. In a lot of ways, Tabula Rasa succeeds at this marvelously. Whether or not it will find enough mass market appeal to keep a profitable audience remains to be seen. Having played in the beta and now for a week following launch, I can definitely make comparisons between TR and its MMO predecessors. Tabula Rasa is different on a number of levels. The game mechanic requires targeting and careful choice of weapons. You can't blindly use the same tactics in fight after fight and you certainly can't face in the general direction of your target and just punch buttons. The class distinctions will definitely force the player to adapt playstyle to the best capabilities of the character type. But more than any other MMO I've played, Tabula Rasa really comes alive when you form a group of in-game players. Group tactics rely heavily on synergies in weapon choices, player class, and chosen skills. While a single player working solo can have a lot of fun and success, working in tandem with other players with distinct skills and tactics is much more rewarding than the traditional MMO archetype of tank-healer-DPS. The artificial intelligence in Tabula Rasa is the best I've seen in MMOs. Groups of enemies routinely disperse to attempt to flank players. Remote outposts occasionally face determined assualts from waves of enemy soldiers and those assaults often succeed, forcing players to mount a counterattack to take back the bases. This dynamic landscape and creative use of AI definitely set TR apart from WoW, Star Wars Galaxies and all their predecessors. If you're getting tired of set-piece raids of EQ2 or WoW content and are looking for challenges that are faster paced and more unpredictable, Tabula Rasa may be exactly what you seek.

I have played quite a few different MMOs in my time (EQ, DAOC, UO, WoW, E&B, CoH/V). So, when I saw there was a new tech based MMO out there, I decided to give it a shot. I was not an early adopter, having started some 6 months or more after TR's release.
First, the good.
The graphics are actually quite good. Not stellar, to be sure, but some of the details and customization options are interesting, and the graphics work well with the play style.
The game play itself was actually quite fun. I enjoy FPS games, which TR was VERY similar to.
Essentially all the classes are solo-able to a greater or lesser degree. In fact, I found some of the most solo-able classes to not be the more pure damage dealer types (the tank-ish classes), but rather the more support types. The simple reason for this being self-sufficiency.
I very much enjoyed the crafting system, which functioned not as a build your own weapon/armor system, but as a way to add-on to or enhance items that you purchased or found.
I also liked the leveling. It was reasonably quick. The skill-up and attribute-up method made me feel I was always improving my characters the way I wanted to (or at least planning to improve in a specific way, for more costly improvements).
The middle.
The storyline, while interesting, was a trifle shallow, and lacked any significant end game content.
The bad.
Overall, the game felt far more like a first person shooter, in fact a SINGLE person, than an MMO. The chat system was atrocious, and had absolutely no feasible way to search for people to group with (unless you already knew someone's name, you couldn't search for them). As an MMO that alone would be nearly fatal. Being able to group up with people is one of the main reasons to play an MMO (and pay a monthly subscription fee), if that doesn't work well, there is a big problem. Oh, btw, I was also specifically choosing the higher populated servers to play on in order to increase my chances of finding people. Didn't help.
Bugs. I personally experienced several bugs which seriously altered the game play and appearance; I will mention two here. One was that even at low graphics settings (and the automatic detection TR used said that my system could handle very high settings) my characters would frequently freeze in position. Frame rates were low (never got them more than 30 or so and 20 was more common, which is very low for my system in most games), but I do not believe the issue was related to that. Even at 20 frames I would expect choppy movement at worst, not frozen. I could still act and move, but I couldn't see anything happening, which made game play a little less interesting, and at time a bit more challenging (am I firing? did I crouch yet?). The other most significant bug was that at times my characters would be launched into the air, more or less at random. This meant that I couldn't move or interact with the world, thus making that specific character unplayable until the system somehow corrected itself and "put me down". This was often fatal, since it sometimes (not always) made me 'fall' from the height I was supposedly at. This second bug was acknowledged by a couple of the support folks I spoke to, but never resolved in two months of play (yes, I gave the game two months).
A couple good ideas the designers had were very poorly implemented. For example, one of the aiming mechanics for many guns was called beading. In this, you had to actually hold your aim point on a target for a period of time in order to do full damage. That's fine, but you also had to crouch and remain still to get the full effect. Which works not at all in a game where there are many mobs trying to attack you at one time, many of which can run up and do heinous damage in melee. Another example is the cover idea. Great idea, you crouch or even stand behind (remember beading) something and you take less damage from incoming attacks. Problem one, as mentioned above, multiple mobs, often from multiple directions, are coming after you, so while you might have cover from one thing, you won't from others. Problem two, cover, again, makes you stationary. Problem three (and the biggest), the LOS calculations were not readily apparent, and at times even with my view zoomed all the way (looking out of the eyes of my character, so to speak) with my gun clearly visible OVER the barrier in front of me, I found myself doing no damage because I was shooting the barrier (even with a bead) not the target. And of course, I was being shot for heavy damage by the same mob at the same time. So, you could never tell if you were going to actually get cover, how effective it was going to be, how much cover the mobs had, and if you were even going to be able to shoot past whatever unapparent barriers were in your way.

So, ultimately, this game, to me, was simply not worth the time and money expenditure. While I like MMOs and FPS games, this was too close to the latter, lacking depth and the social element. If you want another FPS, try half-life 2 or one of the other ones out these days. A decent effort, but not up to snuff.