Tabula Rasa (first impressions fast)
- Written by Mr AFK
- September 28th, 2007 at 12:35
- 9 comments
- Games, Review, Tabula Rasa
So, guess what -been playing the Tabula Rasa Closed Beta and now the open beta too.
I can sum it up like this -what a frightful sight, yet such a strange delight. The gameplay is sort of unique -Planetside meets WoW. Instead of just relying on the skills of the character you actually have the awesome direct control of your faith targeting and shooting your enemies with the mouse in classical 3rd person manner. Still there are some downsides with this due to the status of the servers. I’ll get back to this later. Getting new skills are dependent on your ability to find something called Logos. Logos are small fountains of knowladge which are well hidden in the world and is used to harness the very fabric of the cosmos to your advantage. You have to train yourself at trainers too to make use of the logos, and at level 5 you get to make your first choice -the traits of a soldier or specialist. Later on you’ll get to choose more specific traits like sniper or ranger (if you choose the soldier branch). That’s the mechanics in short and it’s fun. Sadly enough there is so much which destroys what could be a very immersive and fun game.
Graphics
It’s straight on an ugly mother frakker (which been commented earlier), how they managed get the art direction passed off as “so awesome and unique that we will publish it” I honestly cant imagine. Some places and parts can be really astonishingly beautiful actually, but seemlessly seldom. The view distance is painfully close even though it’s set on the furthest setting. I’ve encountered a massive amount of lag, and hopefully this is only due to bad servers (I’ll get back to this topic). I’ve got a Nvidia 8600gt 512mb, still I have to keep the graphical settings to low to for best performance. It’s frakkin sad. Because TR has only one race unlike many other MMOs you quite quickly realize that there exists about 1000 exact copies of yourself in the same instance -well, of course there’s a lot of different faces making all the avatars ‘unique’…NOT. Yes, just as old and un-fun as that old NOT-joke is, does the character creation feel when you realize that the faces are hidden behind a helmet (yes, there is no turn-off-the-helmet-visibility-option). Even if you have such an option there will still be a 50% of the avatars looking more or less like you, same male or female body, the same scale (making an avatar bigger or smaller when it is scaled equally in all directions XYZ only destroys the graphical feel even more (people abnormally big in comparesment)). And okay you can change your armor color to whatever color you wish (mint green and pigglet pink), but this does very little to the overall visual uniqueness for your character.And the little it does the more ‘over the edge’ you’ll have to go to get that original feel to your character. Imagine 2 million avatars of the same race with no apparent physical differences -it will look even dumber than what it looks now in these early stages.
Definitions and Socializations
I admit that this piece is kind of generalizing so take this nfo however you want. Perhaps it’s odd to take up the core tester population here, well I believe it’s in place. It says a lot about the future population. First off, there are two core types due to the uniqueness of gameplay. One is the MMO-player (that always refers to all MMOs as RPGs which they are not) and the BF-player (actually most of them have played Planet Side too). Classic behavior of the MMOers is the ‘grinding’ gamplay -lvl, lvl, lvl, and that’s all they care about (and they aren’t in my face all the time so I have nothing bad to say about them). The FPSers run around and constantly frakking shoot at you (not doing any harm at all) and everyone else in the cities because there are no enemies there. I hate these people. Nothing ruins the immersion of a game as much.
System specs of today
Well, I’ve been running it on an AMD 64 3500+ (2,21), Vista 64, 1gb RAM, and two different Graphic Cards (both Nvidia), a GeForce 6600GT 128mb and a GeForce 7800GT 512mb. And how does it work? With the 7800 card it gets a LITTLE smoother, but not very much. not very odd since the recommended specs are 3.5GHz, 2GB RAM and a GeForce 7800. As you notice I’m not really up to date with my computer -still I really cant imagine WHAT would need this much power in the game.
Servers
The servers really don’t work, they never have, the question is will they ever? During the closed beta the servers were down quite often, and that’s okay. But now when the open beta is kickin, the servers are having even more downtime than before. You’re allowed to game in 20 minute sessions. This, I and The Mad Hatter solved by creating two characters; one on the EU server and one on the US server. The EU server goes down and we get kicked out, we log in on the US server and play until it crashes and we log in to the EU server again. This works quite well, but it’s lame and a total shame. The system specs aren’t the real criminals in this lagging drama it’s most definitively the servers and not the system specs.
Summing things up…
It got so much potential, yet with all of the lagging this makes it impossible to play. Hitting a fleeing enemy with all of the lag is pain, a total and utter pain in the ass. With all of the new games being released this fall I believe that TR will loose a lot of gamers interest if they won’t do anything about these servers fast. The game is okay, the gameplay has a lot to offer and potential to be fun, and I’ll keep on playing for a while more to make up my mind whether or not to invest more time with it this fall.
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9 comments on "Tabula Rasa (first impressions fast)"
Henke writes
well that’s quite a write-up you got here, Mr! I shall add a second opinion I believe!
Barger writes
yeaaah this i ain’t playing… planet side meets WoW!? that description robbed me of what little wood i had for the title in the first place.
And if it’s that much of a hassle with the server I’m thinking.. no. Crappy graphics, crappy community, servers that don’t work, no mentioning of the gameplay and you give it 3/5?
well it was a first impression after all ;D
(Barger stops being a douche now? k thnx bye)
Henke writes
Actually, I have only one thing to add: Some of the music is awesome (Vangelis-inspired spacey tunes), and some of it is horrible (Teh German Tekno). There’s no middle ground here, which is kinda weird.
Mr AFK writes
that’s the general theme for the whole game -no middle ground. and a three perhaps is all too much, but at the same time a 2 is all too low and I’m feeling generous since I haven’t spent any points on halo 3 ;D
The Mad Hatter writes
Well ahem, I have a few points.
1. Charater fetisch for brown and green… come on! We’re in some kind of taskforce aren’t we? I think its a shame that they even allow people to colour their armour, where is the fucking discpline!?!?!
2. Then there’s the ruining of immersion. Its awesome that you can get the servers in instances… because well, nothing harms immersion in an MMO more than fields upon fields of newbies standing around slaughtering the local wildlife… I think the immersion is pretty good when you’re in an instance with just you, your dawg and perhaps 2-3 others. A must to enjoy the game is to turn off the serverwide chat-channel by the way.
3. View Distance.. do you mean viewing characters or terrain? Because I can see terrain.. well really, really far. Characters I dont really remember.. I play on quite low settings to avoid giving my computer a heart attack.
4.Server issues.
Here I strongly disagree with you.. uh sort of. Yes it sucks that they are down, but public betas are quite often stress tests of the servers etc etc. Better the servers go down now and they stomp out the problems before the game goes gold (which they of course won’t, generally it takes a few months to get stable servers even after release in MMOs).
I think that’s it.
The Mad Hatter writes
Oh and about ruining immersion.
I’m sorry to say it Dawg, but your ping and vomit-green colored raver doesn’t help immersion a lot either
Mr AFK writes
Though I would not call those servers to be under a great amount of stress. Plz, they were at most medium and most often only low…stress my ass. Stress test are usually made official too and not stressed 24/7… but you have a point good sir. The view distance…nature wise and person wise. Everything is a frakkin blargh of a thick green gray mist 50 feet away…not sexy, look at the pic above, is a screenshot with the highest settings, and that is not very far view distance in my opinion. And yes, I ruin the immersion with Satanic Cookie, but that’s just to make the point clear…and its my favorite army color in Warhammer 40k too. The slaughtering the local wildlife is totally gay, and is common to all mmos…why’s that, there are a number of ways making newbie missions that are more fun and immersive. And the frakking drop rate is terrible, I hate that system. But the looting system in TR is sweet. run over it and you’ve looted the corps.
Hike writes
What realy turned me down from the game was that there’s suppose to be an on-going war, and yet it didn’t feel like it. Sure, the “Bane” spawned/arrived with ships throughout the map, but they didn’t realy engage in combat unless you walked towards them. Also, and here’s the realy fun part, you have to BUY the ammo you use agianst the enemy you’re at war with.
Imagine that the US Army would do the same thing in Iraq.
“Okey, here’s two nades and 5 clips for your rifle. That’ll be $200.”
dagst writes
;D good point with the ammo n clips…but the soldiers in iraq actually buy their own armor! I like that they spawn in ships instead of just spawning in your face from nowhere.
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