Randy: I didn't go shooting around much last night, but yeah, my rifle did seem to overheat rather quickly. I guess that's where swapping out a rack of five different weapons comes in handy. I still wish I could see my entire toolbar at the bottom, though. For a game that's not necessarily twitch-based, it gets a little hectic for me going from lightning bolt, to med kit, to sprint, and back again while trying to keep my sights poised, trigger pulled, and bullets hitting the dancing-around bad guys. I'm a little lazy when trying to pull off that kind of manual dexterity. I know they're going for a 'minimalist' look on the HUD wherever they can, but I don't have those hotkeys memorized yet.
Chuck: Seems like they also increased the cost of ammo a bit, but nothing major. I was kind of surprised that I didn't have to download a ton of stuff last night.
Have you tried using the lock-on feature with the tab button? Helps mitigate some of it, although it doesn't seem like you can tab from enemy to enemy, which is kind of annoying. Hopefully that will get fixed, too.
[End of correspondence.]
It speaks highly of Tabula Rasa that the only thing Chuck and I could muster complaints about were gameplay technicalities -- all of which are rather forgiven at this point, since the game is still in beta (and "beta" is the Latin word for "bugs").
And we walked away, marginally impressed by the combat-centric setting; though don't think for a minute that this is for shooter fans. At its root, this is still very much an RPG, much less so an FPS.
I'm a certifiable explorer when it comes to MMOs, and I was pleased that so much of the landscape is unlocked and easy to travel over. There's plenty of terrain to bound around, and the addition of a healthy, seemingly low-grav jump button helps in the getting up-and-over obstacles part. And while Tabula Rasa is sci-fi, a fantasy fiction feeling coats the entire planet. Looking into the night sky, a gigantic moon, still reeling from volcanic forces, pushes aside the evening. Tropical palms share root space with deciduous trees. And air and light is thick and palpable, while the surround-sound battle adds an aurally-painted layer of atmosphere, even when there's nothing directly exploding onscreen. The Bane -- and their perhaps/perhaps-not brethren, the Eloh -- fondly carve Mount Rushmore-sized heads inside of caverns and overlooking cliff sides, making Easter Island look like a collection of Easter Eggs in size comparisons.
In Tabula Rasa, the standard "earn mission, kill monster, grab reward" formula is intact. This is, after all, the expected rise and denouement of storytelling for everything from Beowulf to Harry Potter. However, the ability to lose and recover strategic points on the map throws in a now-popular RTS convention; cloning your character -- thus saving your game -- is a long-overdue idea for all-or-nothing online games' character creation; and introducing so-called "ethical parables" into the mission structure proactively routes you down one branch of the storyline, while cutting off another. Sure, one can choose to skip certain missions in your average MMO, but it's rarer, as it is in Tabula Rasa, to present various possibilities with conflicting interests.
These "ethical parables" sometimes beat you over the head with their ideologies, but it's a beating one should learn to take. It only richens the gaming experience to hear an NPC wax philosophical on how "Once you start to understand something, it becomes much less terrifying." Even reading Murphy's Rules of Combat off a data terminal is a blast with pearls like "Friendly fire -- isn't," "A sucking chest wound is nature's way of telling you to slow down," and "If your attack is going really well, it's an ambush." Anybody that's served in the U.S. military has had these rules forwarded to their email inbox at some point, which makes them all the more perfectly suited here, in the combat-stricken world of Tabula Rasa.
The gag order for talking about Tabula Rasa has relaxed somewhat, but overly-technical specifics about the gameplay (and anything but official screenshots) are still under wraps as the dev team deploys their bug exterminators, and generally continues to implement changes here and there through the beta period.
We’ll follow-up in a few weeks with some updated impressions of the game based on newer builds of the game.
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