Tabula Rasa First Impressions

After work on Friday and went a picked up a copy of Tabula Rasa. I was excited about the new direction Richard “Lord British” Garriot was taking with this MMOFPS and since I wasn’t playing any MMO at the time, I figured why not. I wish I was writing this with a little more play time in the game, but my computer had a melt down Saturday morning and I didn’t get it back up until Sunday evening, so I’ve only managed 3 hrs 35 mins of game play. It’s a long story, so I’ll just give you the ultra short version. New power supply, new graphics card (upgrading). Broke clip on heat-sink (don’t ask why I was playing with this), had major problems getting it back on without overheating issues, eventually go it. Also lost 1 GB of memory which still needs to be replaced. If anyone’s really interested, just comment and I’ll write out the full explanation of my comps melt down.

Onward to the actual game. The game starts out as any other game, giving you a very nice CG movie of the back story, which is always entertaining. You than customize your character, enough options to ensure uniqueness, but not enough to waste hrs on, which is good. Basically when you start out in the game, everyone is the same. You have the same skills, same weapons, same armor and as you progress and level you get skill and stat points. Its exactly what you think these points are for, so no need to explain. You start out at an outpost where a tutorial teaches you the basic movements and once your done with that you get to kill a few baddies. The game is pretty interesting, your in the middle of a War and there’s basically enemy units all over the place reeking havoc. They don’t just stand there hanging out in the middle of the map waiting to be attacked, they attack outposts and NPCs, drop ships come in and drop more enemy units, this gives the game a chaotic feel which is exactly what a war should feel like.

As a trainee, my character isn’t on the front-lines yet. I’m doing gathering missions at this point which isn’t much fun, but I’m learning a lot. Most of these missions are to visit ancient shrines to learn new LOGO ability’s. These are abilities that grant you new skills in the game. Combat is pretty fun, after playing LOTRO I’m used to just standing during combat and clicking buttons, but this is a MMOFPS so moving and attacking is vital. As far as complexity, the game is a little confusing, as is any MMORPG when you first login, but it’s nothing that you can’t pick up within a short time frame. Not as easy as WOW, but much easier than Eve Online. Having been released only since Friday I did expect the lag to be pretty bad, it was at least today, all servers seemed to be pretty full when I logged in and my character froze at least a dozen times during the 2 hrs I played. However I’m sure this will only get better once server loads are balanced out. Other games have had much worse lag issues on launch weekend, so this wasn’t that bad.

As I said I’m a little over 3 hrs at this point so I haven’t gotten very far or seen very much. I will be doing a follow up review of the game in 2 weeks after I put in some solid game time. But from what I have seen of the game thus far, I’m very excited to get past the beginner missions and really get into the game.