Tabula Rasa: Hands-On, 12 Hours In

After many years in development hell, Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa is finally approaching its release date. With the game currently available in a closed beta, we've been spending time learning the ropes and exploring a number of the game's alien zones. The 12-hour journey took us to all corners of the first zone of the Concordia continent, the imaginatively named Wilderness, and off into the next zone, Divide.

Throughout the first 12 hours we have gone up 11 levels and completed a wide range of quests, ranging from the ethically dubious, such as running drugs--we elected not to turn the dealer over to his base commander, as we really needed the money--to the bog-standard MMO fare of collecting a batch of boar tusks. Also during this time (we've been playing the beta over the course of a few weeks), the game has undergone a series of improvements related to player feedback, so expect the game to change a lot more between now and release.

After completing the in-game tutorial you are whisked by dropship to a forward base that is bustling with activity and attached to a friendly alien complex. Here you get your first simple quests and head out into the wilderness, armed with nothing but a rifle and the ability to throw lightning gained in the tutorial. The fundamental mechanic will be familiar to anyone who has played an MMORPG. You go out into the wilderness, kill things, and therefore gain experience, money (credits), and items.

The combat system is incredibly simple and will be a relief to anyone scared by the massed action bars and cluttered interfaces that games such as World of Warcraft can present you with. In fact, it feels much more like that of a first-person shooter than an RPG. Pressing numbers one to five changes your selected weapon, six to 10 your selected ability--and you can reorder them by simply dragging and dropping, either within the selection tray or your inventory.

Attacking enemies is then just a mouse click away: left for your weapon, right for ability. Hover your cursor over an enemy to acquire them and an information bar pops up displaying their health, shield levels, and other useful information; either fire manually or press tab to lock on, then open fire with either your weapons or an offensive ability. The target information window also includes a precise range indicator which incorporates graphical representation of the optimum range for your selected weapon.

There is an impressive and somewhat confusing array of weapons and weapon classes that present themselves to you fairly quickly, and soon it becomes something of a challenge sorting out which five you wish to have easy access to. We generally opted for a pair of shotguns to deal with massed enemies--one of which took out shields and damaged robotic attackers, the other of which caused conventional damage--and a pair of chainguns for more heavily armoured single targets, with the final slot being taken up by a long-range rifle.

Economy is also something that comes into play--it's possible to mow down all comers with your shiny new laser chaingun, and then find yourself completely broke and unable to buy more ammo without first switching to a slightly lower-maintenance weapon for a spot of more profitable killing and questing. As your character progresses, you get to use a wider range of weapons that vary by class. Higher-level weapons such as rocket launchers, polarity weapons, and netguns can all find their way into your arsenal later on.

The secondary skills follow a similar pattern. All characters have both the ability to sprint and a long-range lightning attack, but you gather more as you specialise and level up. Our main character is a soldier class--we will look at the specialist in more detail in a later preview--and so also has an area-of-effect ability called shrapnel to call upon. The secondary ability tray is also where you can keep items useful in the heat of battle, such as grenades and medical kits, so once again you need to think carefully about what to place in there before you head into action.

These secondary abilities are enabled through the collection of Logos powers, and form the game's one obvious nod to the world of fantasy and spellcasting. Logos elements have a vast lore of their own and are core to the higher-level game and spread throughout the world--both in group-requiring instanced areas and hard-to-reach areas of the world at large. While we haven't yet seen much of the power promised by the Logos abilities, they are one of the things that we're most looking forward to investigating as we level up.

Over the first 12 hours the game seems grind-free. We got comfortably to level 11 going from quest to quest across the zone, and left many undone in the initial zone before moving onto the next. Also, the quests send you from hub to hub, so you are very rarely left with no choices or nothing to do. The sheer volume of quests on offer means that it's possible to avoid quest types you don't like without resorting to grinding, and it's also possible to play through, at least initially, without being forced into teaming up with other people to progress.

We were also impressed with how alive the world feels. Dynamic NPC battles, the relentless Bane assault some areas suffer, and the much-vaunted ability to lose control of your bases lend the game a very different to feel to many recent MMOs.

Tabula Rasa is set to launch this fall, so expect to see more coverage of the higher-level content, class specialisations, and customisation options between now and the game's currently predicted fourth-quarter release.