Tabula Rasa

Since I used MMORPG.com extensively when trying to figure out what game I wanted to try after DDO, I thought I would share my $0.02 with the wider MMO community about Tabula Rasa.  I've been playing since pre-release (didn't have time for beta) with my tightly knit guild.  And I've been playing MMORPG's since Asheron's Call and think I have a reasonable level of experience and expectations from games in this genre.  Of course, this is just one guy's opinion -- make of it what you will.

First, some caveats.  I had enormous expectations for TR.  This was the game I was really jazzed about since I heard about some of the features.  It's almost never a good thing to start with such high expectations, as the games that have met or exceeded all my expectations can be counted on one hand.  Having said that, TR is the Game That Could Have Been.

The Good

The concept behind TR is excellent.

Combat can be exciting, especially in the beginning, as you learn to love the shotgun.

The graphics are consistently good -- the enemy mobs are often extremely well done.  The grotesque mobs are appropriate grotesque; the dangerous ones radiate danger from their sheer size alone.  The first time you encounter a Stalker is... memorable.

The FPS approach is neither good nor bad -- it is simply what it is.  Fans of FPS games will find it laughable, because it really isn't a twitch game in that sense.  There's skill involved, but not that much at the end of the day, as you really can't miss as long as your reticle is somewhere in the vicinity of your target.  There's no such thing as a headshot (except as a skill you train in one of the tech trees), or real circle strafing (though you can do it vs. some slow mobs), or any such thing.  Cover is important, but you'll quickly realize that it is extremely limited.

At the same time, it is no worse and no better than most of the MMORPG combat systems I've experienced -- I personally think DDO has better implementation of melee combat, but... to each his own.

The Bad

In a sense, what is "bad" about TR is closely related to your expectations of the game.  Because I expected certain things, these two really stood out for me as negatives.  If you do not expect these things, then they won't matter to you.

The two things that I looked forward to most turned out to be mere dreams: Logos, and Control Points.

When I read the description of Logos, and how Garriott had invented a whole language, I honestly thought that NCSoft had made some sort of a technological breakthrough in dealing with "magic".

What I was hoping to see is 'customer-created magic'. That's one thing that no game has ever managed to do, at least to my knowledge.  I thought/hoped that you would be able to combine various Logos to create spells. For example, maybe "Power" adds Strength, but if you combine "Power" with "Kill", you add +50% to your crit rate.  Perhaps combining "Teleport" with "Summon" and "Friends" would create the ability to conjure up a wormhole for your party.  Or some such thing.

Importantly, this would take experimentation to figure out what combination of Logos would do what.  Failure could have been disastrous -- maybe "Power" and "Kill" doesn't add +50% to your crit rate; maybe it permanently drains your Power meter by 50% (!). 

I wanted to see a "Logos creator" interface that would allow us to combine Logos in different ways to create custom powers/effects, with the chance of success/effect being tied somehow to your Mind/Spirit whatever.  Eventually, the community might have figured out all of the various combinations -- but by leaving it open-ended, the developers could always introduce new combinations, or even combinations of combinations, allowing for an extremely rich environment for "magic" -- one that would actually reward diligent research and study.

Instead, Logos in TR is just a "pre-req" you have to collect in order to activate pre-set skills that can't be modified.  The skills themselves tell you what Logos you need.  So all you end up doing is running around and collecting Logos (but really, you only need the ones your skills are tied to) so you can activate the skill once you reach the appropriate level and have invested skill points into the skill.  Talk about a disappointment.

For all of the hype surrounding Logos, that Garriott created a functioning language, with rules, grammar, etc. -- Logos is just a set of collection quests.

Control Points

This was the biggest disappointment. CP was the reason why I wanted to play TR in the first place.

The fundamental weakness of MMO's is that PvE becomes an endless grind, with no accomplishment, no goals.  Your party goes to kill Dragon XYZ, and loot Sword of Whatever -- but next hour, the dungeon respawns, and the next group goes and does it.  There is very little sense of "accomplishment" in the MMO world.  I had thought that CP would be something grander, and more meaningful in gameplay terms, providing exactly that sense of accomplishment.

Basically, I thought CP's would establish the notion of "enemy lines". It makes natural sense.

If anyone's ever played StarCraft, you know about the Creep (for Zerg) and energy fields (Pylons). If CP's worked that way, and some changes were made, that would have been amazing.

For example, instead of CP just being a static base with portals, assault/defend missions, and a hospital, imagine how it would have been if players/clans were allowed to build portals, build bunkers, build factories/mines/etc. but ONLY IN CONQUERED TERRITORY. Imagine how it would have been if within CONQUERED TERRITORY, you don't run into random pods of Bane -- only natural beasts. Imagine how cool it would have been if you can't run certain quests/missions until you pushed the enemy line far enough to have access to the quests/missions.

With the idea of battle lines, you create a natural "no man's land" area where the enemy would be thick and numerous. Behind enemy lines, you have your own problems, but that would have allowed for things like missions to do surprise drops behind enemy lines to take over a CP and establish a firebase behind enemy lines. Or to go cut enemy supplies behind enemy lines. Some missions could be server-wide (via radio) to go extend the lines by conquering CP's Alpha through Delta.

The CP concept would have imbued all the PvE with meaning, and created the idea of a battlefront with all the chaos.  Plus, the enemy can push back -- meaning that all of your gains (your clan's fortress, your guildhall, your personal Tower, whatever) could be wiped out unless the CP's are defended.  That would require cooperation, a large organized clan, or alliances between smaller clans, and a fluid situation where if you've got nothing else planned, you can just go help push a battle line forward, or push back on defense.

Instead... CP's are just static places in the map.  There is no real reward for clearing a CP -- you get access to a portal, to a hospital, and some Assault/Defend missions that involved killing mobs and collecting tokens (which you turn in for a small reward).  Since you can't build anything anywhere, there is no notion of "controlled space" and "uncontrolled space".

Furthermore, the CP's get attacked randomly -- bunch of dropships materialize and drop waves of mobs off.  This means, of course, that you and your five friends CAN'T plan for it.  It isn't as if you can say, "Hey guys -- this Friday night, let's get together and try to clear CP Beta".  It's all random. 

CP battles are too easy to boot.  Some of the fights, granted, can be entertaining and hectic and chaotic -- but there really is no sense of accomplishment from clearing a CP or defending one.  Three reasonably-well equipped people can clear most of the CP's of their level (or lower) or defend one from dozens upon dozens of mobs.  There is very little strategy, very little tactics -- just a "run out there and shoot".  There aren't any "officers" to take out (if you're, say, a Sniper or a Spy) that make a difference; no flanking fire, no real artillery support, no air battles -- just a swarm of ground troops going against some PC ground troops.  Mass damage rules all, and healers might as well not bother.

But worst of all, whether you take a CP or not, the game itself is just not affected that much.  Eventually, you get tired of the meaninglessness of all the fighting, and stop bothering with CP defense or assault completely.

The Ugly:

But to be fair, both of the "Bad" are directly related to my personal expectations of what I had hoped TR would be.  If you didn't have such expectations, then neither of them are bad.  They are just what they are.

The things I note in The Ugly, however, are problems without justification.  These are basic things that any MMORPG released in 2007 should have.  These are things that TR does so badly that I just can't comprehend how the game got released at all.  It's as if NCSoft and Garriot and the whole team has never played an MMO. This is a FIFTH GENERATION MMO. The mistakes they're making are things that the first four generations (Gen1: UO, Gen2: EQ/AC, Gen3: AO/COH/DAOC, Gen4: DDO/LOTRO, Gen5: TR/AOC/etc.) got right.  To blow these things is to completely miss the mark for any MMORPG.

Let me give some examples.

1. No Loot.

How is this even possible? Loot is one of TWO primary motivating forces in any RPG, nevermind an MMO. We're talking Diablo days here. For TR to have no real loot is just mindboggling. It isn't as if they replaced loot with some other motivating force (rank in the army? regular salaries?). They just plain ole eliminated one of the two most important motivating forces in a MMO.

There is ONE unique weapon (at least that I've found/know of) which is a machinegun -- and therefore, not usable by 50% of the character classes.  It gets so quickly outgrown that the uniqueness is hardly worth the effort.

You are inundated with items (grey/green/blue/purple) but the difference between them is negligible.  Even with the recent patch that made rarer weapons do more damage, I never really felt like they made much of a difference.  Case in point: when you clone, you end up with a character that has no gear at all.  I take credits, go to the merchant, and buy all grey-level items.  Go out and perform exactly as well as I did with purples and blues.  The purple items do not let me take on mobs that I could not with greys; nor do the greys make it extremely difficult to do quests.

After a while, you realize that you can just simply sell everything you loot and do fine.  And since credits are not hard to come by, it ends up removing one of the key motivators of playing a MMO -- improving your equipment.  Some might LIKE this; I do not, for the simple reason that it removes yet another reason to play.

2. Impossible to Team With Friends

How is this even possible? By now, every single game company in this space should know that clans are a major part of any online game. So given that... how does TR decide to make it so very hard for a clan to team up and do quests together?

What is the deal with all of the pre-reqs for major quests? It isn't even as if you can repeat quests. There is no incentive whatsoever to repeat a quest, which means that people have to sacrifice to help others, and the others knowing that don't want to be a burden.

This game encourages random teaming, because that's all you'll get given the structure of quests. And with XP so heavily weighted in favor of doing quests, doing quests continually is the most effective way to gain XP.  Result: clans become more or less meaningless.

I entered this game with eight people from DDO -- we're all close friends, good gamers, who know how to work with each other, etc.  But we have differing schedules, differing commitments, etc.  Like any clan (except perhaps the hardest of the hardcore).  We simply could NOT get on the same page for major quests.  We had people coming back to help others get through a quest, getting next to nothing out of the time spent (no xp, no loot, nothing).

A typical conversation went like this:

- Hey, you guys want to do XYZ?

- Oh, can you share it?

- Says you're not eliible.

- Damn.  What's the pre-req?

- I don't know.  Doesn't say.  I think I got the pre-req from Base ABC, but can't remember from whom.

- Well, guess I can't do that one.

This lack of attention is simply unforgivable.  Plus, any quest worth doing with friends has so many pre-reqs (for those who played TR, think Temple of Raging Patriarch) that it is nearly impossible to get your clan together on the same page -- unless people hold off at one stage and wait for others to get caught up in the quest chain.

Even in instances, some people would have a quest that others did not -- and couldn't share the objectives because of pre-reqs.  Insane, really.

3. Travel

After four generations of MMO's have proven that people love the ability to get around quickly, all that TR gives us is a set of waypoints. 

Anarchy Online had flying vehicles six years ago. WOW -- the world's most popular game -- has mounts.

How does this game not have any travel beyond waypoints?

The Bane has dropships coming out of the wazoo -- and your side also has dropships that will drop off NPC's in the middle of combat zones.  But you, the PC, must leg it out everywhere?  (And believe me when I say that running is not all that fast, even with full ranks in Motor Assist armor).

A sci-fi game that has NO air travel, resulting in frustrating attempts to get around a box canyon, is really an asinine attempt to hide the fact that each zone is tiny.  I could have accepted air defense as a way to curb people flying all over the place -- fly over that, and you'll get shot down, losing your 5 million credit personal airship -- but the way that TR implemented its zones and travel is positively backwards.

Summary

TR could have been a great game.  It could have changed the whole paradigm of what makes an MMORPG fun by implementing CP's the right way.  It could have revolutionized the way that MMORPG's go about handling "magic".  Instead, it is a deeply flawed game lacking in some of the most basic elements of satisfying gameplay for a multiplayer game.

If you enjoy mostly solo play with the opportunity to group with random groups of people on occasion, then TR may not prove as frustrating for you as it did for me.  If you have a clan, or a regular gaming group, or friends you like to run with... then you will quickly understand all of the enormous flaws in this game.

/gren

A very extensive .02 cents. Your constructive outlook is most informative which is so much better to see than a bunch of game bashing. I went into the game with no expectations except for a fun time and thats what I got. They say in the future they will be implementing some kind of travel other than the teleporter. I find traveling in game isn't a problem for me, but thats just MHO. I personally have had a blast with the game. I was hoping for a little different pvp but I am still really enjoying the control point aspect. The end game will be the clenching factor for me. I am taking my time and at least getting my money's worth out of it and having a great time but the end game is what gives mmo's staying  power because I'm not one to just reroll a chir to re accomplish everything again for the sake of continued game play.

I really liked your review of TR Grenfell. I do have to admit that I only played the beta and had enjoyed it however there was something shallow about TR that I could not put my finger on exactly what and I believe you covered most of it well.

I had no problem with the logo system because honestly I did not pre-read into the game very deep before play, so I had found it as just a simple fresh idea.

Building bases like in Starcraft would be wonderful and new to MMO's but adding stuff like that would keep this game on the table for much longer and I'm sure MMO's will someday implement that, and to expect that would just be wishful thinking at this time.

I can't stand quest with pre-reqs. and most all games have them, I'm back to WoW for now because of  friends learning MMO's and I find it hard to just quest with them, If we don't see each other on in a few days were all over the place with getting on the same page. Pre-quest  is why I droped LOTRO it was all about pre-quest and I could not make a single friend because of it. Most quest had 5 to 10 parts to it !

One thing I would like to add to your review is about cloning.  I really believe this will have a long term impact on keeping players because you don't have to re-roll your character from the beginning. There is just no reason to play after you hit max level and TR will loose most of its community.

Anyway thanks for your review Grenfell and I agree with most everything, and I also liked D&D Online it's a good game that got a bad rap at release. 

Originally posted by Grenfell

TR could have been a great game.  It could have changed the whole paradigm of what makes an MMORPG fun by implementing CP's the right way.  It could have revolutionized the way that MMORPG's go about handling "magic".  Instead, it is a deeply flawed game lacking in some of the most basic elements of satisfying gameplay for a multiplayer game.

Spot on.. very nice review.

Exactly the same problems I've found with the game, as well as the same things I like about it. I'd add to your review that in Sci Fi game I want more Sci Fi elements - interstellar travel (beyond just 2 planets), spaceship battles, or at the very least the chance to run around in cool futuristic vehicles. If freaking Quake Wars and Halo 3 have cool vehicles, why can't Tabula Rasa have skimmers or mechs or futuristic tanks?

Remember it's a new game and one of the articles they have out says there planning on implementing more in game  once the percentage of end game players rises.

Originally posted by Hunterbaine

Remember it's a new game and one of the articles they have out says there planning on implementing more in game  once the percentage of end game players rises.

 

LOL, that's just crazy...

You cannot expect people to buy into a game based on future promises that may not ever happen.

If I find a piece of crap on my floor I'm going to get rid of it instead of hoping it starts to smell better...