Tabula Rasa Review
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Another major attraction of Tabula Rasa is the changes to character creation. During character generation of TR, you get choose the character's size, hair color and facial details and that's about it. Garriott wants you to enter his world as soon as possible, and he and NC Soft are anxious to get you playing. You choose your character's class as you play.
Cool at first glance, this system is really not much different from any other MMO once you get started. You level rapidly in the early levels and are forced at level five to decide if you will be a soldier or specialist, effectively limiting your final class options to four for each choice. Specialists can become demolitionists, medic, bio-technicians or engineers. Soldiers can be grenadiers, guardians, spies or snipers. We'd prefer more time to play and adventure as the wet from behind your ears has hardly dried by the time you are 5th level. You then have to wait 10 more levels to make your next choice and something about this proportion seems off. If we're to be blank slates, give us a bit more time to decide, we're haven't even killed like 20 Tree Lurkers yet!
Tabula Rasa does do something very new in the MMO genre with the cloning feature. As you progress in levels, you are given the opportunity to clone your character so you don't have to re-roll your character. In other words, you clone a level 15 or 25 or whatever so you can try two different classes. No starting completely over. When you clone is all up to the player so choose wisely. Like much of Tabula Rasa, the cloning encourages the player to have fun and to try different things. You aren't stuck at level 30 with a character you're already bored with. You have options, man! Use them.
Keeping the players playing is the main focus of Tabula Rasa, and while gold mining and weed collecting sounds like fun to some, we prefer spells, guns, numbers in red and things dying. Tabula Rasa sheds a fair amount of the MMO ornament you find in other titles. The action is constant and danger is all around you. Adding to this sense is a free targeting system, which is to say you do not lock on one target. You have to follow them with you gun or else you miss. The targeting might require a minute or two to familiarize your self with. There's No tabbing, just get your crosshairs lined up and shoot away. Oh, if you do nail a Bane soldier good and see a red skull above their heads, make sure to run up to them and press F or right click for do a logos. This will initiate a special finishing move and double your XP!
