Tabula Rasa is currently in the later stages of its closed beta and is scheduled for release in the beginning of November.
Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa (RGTR) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that takes you, the player, into lush forest planets, volcanic moons, and exotic alien civilizations. Face off against powerful alien soldiers, armored mechanoids, and vicious creatures! Use a wide range of weapons and unique alien powers to help the Allied Free Sentients (AFS) in their desperate fight against extinction. Tabula Rasa combines a vast, persistent game world and ongoing storyline with fast-paced action, resulting in a striking new approach to the design of multiplayer online games.
In a nutshell, the earth has been invaded by an ancient race and those who managed to escape are attempting to form an alliance among the alien races of the galaxy. You take on the role of a receptive, a human who is capable of interfacing with ancient technology and using it to gain "magical" abilities. The majority of the weapons in the game are firearms, so the combat has the feel of a 3rd-person shooter; the action-oriented fights do a good job of distracting you from the grind.
High Points:Capture Points: Several towns within each zone are able to be captured by enemy NPC forces. Throughout the day mobs will assault the town, attempting to destroy the forcefield protecting the entrance, and finally capturing the control point located within the base, shutting down all the shops and removing all the friendly NPCs, replacing them with enemy mobs. PCs are encouraged to defend and recapture towns from the enemy.
Staying the in the action: Tabula Rasa has no penalty for death aside from Resurrection Sickness. The emphasis is on getting back into combat and helping NPCs and PCs complete quests and assault enemy positions. Every instance (so far at least) has some form of friendly presence within it; whether it's a small village, or a strike team waiting for your assistance. This allows you to purchase supplies (most notably ammunition) and respawn within the instance when things go sour. Zones have several waypoints scattered around the map that once unlocked, allow you to travel between them.
Moderately instanced: Each zone has anywhere from 3-9 instances of itself; by default players placed into the first instance of the zones and are also dumped back into the first one when they leave instance-dungeons. When you access a waypoint you can choose to switch over to another instance of the zone, this helps quite a bit with lag sometimes, or if everybody is trying to do the same quest as you in a particular area.
Low PointsNo Economy: Aside from a trade channel, there's no real way to get access to things other than what you get in the field. This can be a little frustrating when you have an abundance of equipment your particular class cannot use.
Beta (Obviously): Currently there's some pretty bad memory leaks, and half the crafting system is not working (items can be built from scratch, but existing items can not be augmented). Also the combat-oriented classes are pretty unstoppable right now so I hope some balancing is in the works.
Honestly the game is very enjoyable but unless there's some major work being done outside of the beta I doubt the game will be ready for launch.
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