Clones, Crafting and an Immersive Battlefield
All new characters start in the same area and normally this is a big problem for MMOs. Creating multiple characters is standard operating procedure for these games so forcing players to wade through the same low-level content over and over is frowned upon. Tabula Rasa has a fix for this that also ties into their class system or lack-there-of. Rather than making new players pick a class and play-style before they've even set foot in the game, Tabula Rasa starts all players as Recruits. The game uses a class tree that descends into specialized careers, which open up new abilities and better weapons.
At level five players choose to further their career as Soldiers, who specialize in direct damage to enemies, or Specialists, who can buff and heal party members. At level 15, Soldiers choose from Commando or Ranger while Specialists choose between Sapper and Biotechnician. By the time you hit level 30, your options are Grenadier, Guardian, Sniper, Spy, Demolitionist, Engineer, Medic or Exobioligist, depending on how you've traversed the class tree. When you pick a new specialty you pick up all skills and abilities of the new class while also retaining everything from previous classes.
What's interesting about Tabula Rasa is that the game allows you to clone your character before you choose a new career. For example, once you hit level five you can clone your character before choosing between Soldier and Specialist. That way you can pick Soldier on one character and Specialist on the clone without having to level from one to five again. Cloning takes you back to the character-creation screen where you basically create a new character that retains all the experience points and abilities of the one being cloned. Tabula Rasa also features foot lockers where you can store items that are then available to any of your characters. Since there aren't any items that bind to characters you can pass hand-me-down weapons and armor to clones and new characters when your main character out grows them.
Something that Tabula Rasa does very well is make you feel like you are on a battlefield where a war is going on. Groups of Bane infantry are constantly being delivered to the battlefield by drop ships and some bases that act as quest hubs will come under periodic attack from Bane forces. These forces will go so far as to take over the base and hold it until a group of players recaptures it. When these control points are in friendly hands they'll have armor and weapon vendors, quests initiators and hospitals. It's common to finish a quest and be on your way to turn it in only to find that the base where you got it has been taken over. Even outside the bases large fights will break out between the Bane and NPC AFS troops. This constant peripheral combat keeps the world feeling dangerous and preserves the wartime immersion.
A player battles a Bane Stalker.
Tabula Rasa takes a few strides into new - or at least different - territory but much of the game will be instantly familiar to veterans of other MMOs. While it has a new setting you'll experience a profound sense of déjà vu. This isn't orcs, elves, swords and magic, but it's aliens, monsters, guns, and... magic. Tabula Rasa has a sci-fi setting but when you get down to it, it's a different paint job on the same kind of game. It's just a matter of what skins you want.
The basic elements of the game are right in line with World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online; you collect quests from quest hubs to get experience and better gear to level up so you can do more quests and get better gear. The quests themselves rarely deviate from the standard kill-x-number-of-enemies, collect-x-number-of-body-parts and escort-ally-from-here-to-there quests. There are a few exceptions where quests have multiple methods of success usually stemming from a moral choice but those moral choices don't accumulate to anything in the end. Tabula Rasa also features instanced dungeons and a great deal of running - mainstays in our current crop of MMOs.
Like other MMOs, Tabula Rasa has a crafting component but one that may seem a tad complicated at first and limited with extended use. Crafting is not covered anywhere in the manual included with the game or the tutorial so it will either take some supplemental reading from Internet sites or trial and error to figure it out. What may frustrate you about the crafting is that you can't actually make any weapons or armor. What you can make are consumables like paint, ammo and health packs and modifications to enhance weapons and armor.
The rub is that in order to do any crafting at all you'll have to spend the skill points that you get at each level on the crafting skills. These points are used to upgrade the "pump" level of skills, which increases the performance of items tied to that skill. This means that if you put points in Firearms, then you do more damage with pistols and rifles. As you increase your skill levels they get more and more expensive to upgrade; going from rank I to II will only cost a single point, but in order to get a skill all the way to rank V, you'll end up spending 15 points.
Considering you only get two points to spend per level - with bonuses at levels five, 15, 30 and 50 - those points start to look pretty scarce. The problem with crafting is that you have to use these same points to upgrade the crafting skills. In other words if you want to do a lot of crafting early in the game you're going to sacrifice combat ability. Here's where the cloning helps by allowing you to create characters that will specialize in crafting.
Join our discussion on this topic
