Tabula Rasa

From the mind of Richard Garriot, TR puts you into a futuristic MMO that supposedly adds ingenuity where other games offer repetition. It supposedly began with ‘wiping the slate clean’ of gaming ideas, and throwing in new ideas. That is what Tabula Rasa means, after all. Instead, it is a game based around every overdone idea with a few tidbits of innovation thrown in.

The first of these tidbits is the character creation system. Each player creates one character, and one character only. As that character grows and chooses it’s path, you create ‘clones’ at the turning points, which allow you to come back and start from the turning point, rather then completely from the beginning. It works very well, and I found it incredibly useful.

A very un-useful tidbit, however, is the user interface. Since the designers were working from a ‘blank slate’ they apparently didn’t realize that the MMO user interface has been refined over time. Instead, they created a radial menu accessible entirely by the mouse. Good, in theory, but when the menu is open, the menu is the only thing you can interact with. Don’t try attacking, don’t try turning around or changing direction - it won’t let you. This means in the middle of battle you shouldn’t access the menu to use an item or to level up. Again, the blank slate has forgotten that people do these things all the time.

Graphically, the game is quite pretty. And while every character looks quite identical, you’ll find the world itself to be quite well detailed and the ’spells’ to be impressive. But graphics only go so far, and the one place the game did not start from a ‘blank slate’ is the gameplay. Filled with fetch quests and kill quests, you’ll find yourself having flashbacks of World of Warcraft, DAOC, and any other game that has a brutal level grind. And here is where innovation would have made the largest difference - rather then simply putting a new coat of paint on the overused MMO formula, they could have started from ‘Tabula Rasa’ and given us something worthy of the title.