E3 07: Tabula Rasa
Richard Garriott has always been an intriguing personality, sometimes taking my breath away with worlds like the legendary Ultima series and sometimes raising my eyebrow with his grand geekery and dedication to wearing costumes. But it wasn’t more than a few seconds into his demonstration of Tabula Rasa that I got it: his enthusiasm and commitment to his game, his job, and even to speaking to six people in the last demonstration of a grueling three days made me slightly ashamed I’d ever doubted the man whose games I’d loved as a youngster. (If anyone else took secret notes in class using Ultima’s version of the Futhark runic alphabet, give a fellow lingui-dork a holla!)
Standing there proudly in his General British uniform (his own unique player character, of course!), Garriott led us through some of the features of his epic sci-fi MMORPG. Out of an ancient conflict comes a cosmic war that threatens all life in the galaxy with death or enslavement, the alien Bane descend for the final battle for control over the universe; the remaining sentient species band together and, in Garriott’s signature ethics-oriented way, walk a fine line between good and evil.
Many missions are contradictory to others, so you’ll have to make moral decisions with real impact on the story, which is also told more deeply than those of other MMOs via story-driven instances (the game is evenly split between public and private spaces).
One cool example we were shown was an entire valley complex protected by an advanced alien force field. Beyond the shimmering blue curtain (the graphics looked crisp, smooth, and beautiful) the neigh-unstoppable Bane waited for a moments weakness – should the field collapse, the Bane would swarm the safe area and decimate the population. But in order to power the shield, the sacrifice of a living being is required. Just who takes that spot is up to you: many of these ethical parables will be tied into quests and missions, and no choice will be easy. If it works as well as it sounds, it should be quite the awesome feature.
Make the jump to read why you'll never have to replay low-level grinding zones again!
Thanks to the character cloning system, you can explore different class paths without having to start from scratch. Pull back out of the game into the character creation/selection menu, copy and rename your duplicate, and you’ll be able to return to that character later and evolve along a different class path. This works because there are no base classes: everyone starts as a recruit, and five levels later you make your first choice whether to be a specialist or a soldier; later that specialist will choose to be a biotechncian or a sapper, and that sapper may decide to be an engineer or a demolitionist.
In other words, you’ll never have to repeat the early level grind – at any point you can branch off a character to return to in order to make a different choice, vastly reducing the amount of content you’ll have to repeat just to enjoy other roles and abilities.
Fast-paced combat helped along by a very minimal UI and a sticky-targeting system that avoids FPS-style shooting while keeping the action fast and dependent upon the player. Crouching down, for instance, will increase damage but immobilize the player for a while, making you more vulnerable. Risk-taking is encouraged by a bonus multiplier that increases the longer you fight uninterrupted. While you’re not healing, you’re risking death to reap larger rewards, which adds an unprecedented incentive dynamic to MMORPG combat.
Returning again to linguistics, Tabula Rasa contains a pictographic language that’s both easy and fun to learn, and is tied into a minigame within the game: you learn them one at a time at special reliquaries, and since they are pictographic, will read the same in any language. The world is populated with written inscriptions left by a mysterious benevolent race that, while gone, has left humanity tremendous wisdom and technology such as wormhole travel. That language component excited me, obviously, but it won’t intrude upon the gameplay for those MMO players who find such things tedious.
Expect Tabua Rasa this fall: at the very least, it won’t be another generically disappointing MMORPG. The active combat, ethical parables, and world-building mystery will either suck you in or, at worst, disappoint you in new and interesting ways. We received closed beta keys in our swag bags, so when I get back to NYC after Comic Con, I’ll fire it up on my PC and return with a more validly opinionated take!
tiny dancer
Posted to E3, Hot Stuff, Video Games on 14 July 2007
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: e3, ncsoft, richard garriott, tabula rasa
ooooh nice article on teh tabula raza! meh want I'am deffinatly gettin new pc for this game cus i love sci-fi fantasy!! but am not gona abondone ffxi cus my tarutaru accupies a lilbit of my heart stilll lol :)
Excellent article, just be careful about reporting from the beta. As far as I know it's still closed beta with NDA in full effect :(. As much as I'd love to hear more heh...
I'm really pulling for this game, it's sounded genuinely unique from it's inception. Here's to hope for something better to do with my gaming time than Wow!