Tabula Rasa

E3 Impressions

by Shiina “Kir” Liao

I’m going to start this off by saying that I’ve never played Tabula Rasa before, or seen it played. My grand total of experience with this is having scoured the net for bits of info on it here and there, and watching a few trailers and checking out some screenshots. Basically, it’s a sci-fi themed MMOG offering from NCsoft with First Person Shooter action-oriented influences that focuses around a massive on-going conflict and war between humans and aliens. But here I am, walking with Tony “RadarX” Jones, my partner on this trip, heading toward the NCsoft booth in the south hall of the Los Angeles Convention Center and looking to get my actual first game play impression.

Shina tries out Tabula Rasa

The large Tabula Rasa banner was the first thing I noticed, with its distinctive sci-fi art style and as soon as I walked up I was immediately asked whether I wanted to give out the boot camp tutorial a try, or run out for a guided tour. Feeling adventurous, I decided take the guided tour looking to jump into the action and meat of Tabula Rasa quicker. I pulled up a seat at the station, and was handed a nice heavy duty headset and instructed on how to use voice communications. It was feeling like a tour already, and so it begins.

Lesson 1: WASD! The standard keys used for movement in any First Person Shooter or keyboard-based movement game in recent years. Since I already know this, I am now instructed to try out the mouse to look around, and told about a few keys to change weapons or fire and aim. Wow, I’m being walked through step by step on these basics. Feels like I’m really a totally new recruit in this world, but the slow pace was about to end soon.

The tour suddenly sped up and I was instructed to rush along accepting quests and following an “NCsoft AMELIA” healer class into various perils in this odd world. Is this what it’s like to be a low ranking subordinate in the military? As I follow along with the orders, I barely get the chance to read over all the quests, but it seems like I’m doing things that amount to minor errands. At least I get an impressive arsenal of a rocket launcher, RPG, chain gun, flamethrower, and a melee defense stick. And I get highly destructive special skills too such as a long range lighting strike and a point blank area of effect explosion with a long wind-up time. The enemies were easy and dispatched with no trouble. It felt like I was just steamrolling over inferior enemies. I understand that it’s a tour of sorts, but there needs to be more sense of danger or challenge. That’s where the entertainment and excitement is! Surprisingly, the twitch factor was very low as the targeting system was homing/lock-on of sorts; it had a sticky feel to it when mousing over enemies. But, I did not get to experience any challenges! Where was the excitement, or surprise?

“War is not what it was made out to be.” This was the thought lingering in my mind at the moment in this situation. Not to mention that things were getting a bit grim as the pace slowed down again and my tour guide became lost. I’m being led by the blind! At this point I asked if we should be headed toward the golden guide arrow on my radar, and it was acknowledged as a good idea. The guide got lost due to being unfamiliar with the many recent changes that Tabula Rasa has had! Was this an attempt to spin a mistake into a promotion of the progress of development? I guess it worked because I feel happy enough that changes were being made and the interface was pretty slick. I particularly liked the mouse context menu in radial form centered on the screen, and the intuitive overlays marking quest NPCs of importance. Back to the story...

We finally got to where we needed to go and began an escort mission. Hey, we ended up losing our escort by ditching him and failed the mission. Now onto the next mission, we finally rushed into an area of chaos! Enemy fire was raining down all over the place, dropships were bringing reinforcements in, and a mass of allies were assisting in the fight. Suddenly in the thick of battle I got the surprise that I was looking for, but it wasn’t quite the type of surprise that I was hoping for. It was a crash! It was the first one of that kind they’ve seen so far, they said. Guess it’s the end of the tour for now.

This experience was certainly amusing. But I’m just telling it like how it was, and I’m not really giving it as hard of a time as it might seem like I am. I just think it’s a fun story about something that I didn’t quite expect, and thought readers might appreciate a bit of humor. I actually enjoyed it and aside from a few mishaps, the game felt solid and has a good degree of polish in it. The feel of the movement and combat was smooth, and felt as if it were full of potential. This is more than I can say about a lot of other games. I’m quite picky and yet my interest is caught, and I’m keeping my eye on this one. After all, this preview is not representative of the final product yet. Don’t go yet, that’s not all in this article.