Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11573 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: NCsoft
• Released on: 2007-11-02
• Platform: Windows XP

Manufacturer's Description
From the ashes of an ancient conflict, a cosmic war threatens all life with death or enslavement. As the alien Bane amass their forces for the final battle, the galaxy’s last free sentient beings are the thin line between life and death, between good and evil.

Explore lush forest planets, volcanic moons, and exotic alien civilizations. Face off against powerful alien soldiers, armored mechanoids, and vicious predators. Use a wide range of exotic 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.

Customer Reviews

Servers Closed, Game does not exist anymore
Sadly this game closed down a little while ago, probably due to low subscriber numbers, either way there isnt any point in buying this game because you won't be able to use the product.

Dashed Hopes
I really wanted to like Tabula Rasa. I bought the game, loaded it up, and uninstalled it three days into my trial subscription.

The key problem with Tabula Rasa is that it's not really an MMO. There's very little interaction between players, and most of the players I encountered were immature and not much fun to be around. Because the game has a military basis, there's very little distinction between players - everyone is wearing some form of battle armour, and it's impossible to tell if someone is of a higher level than you from their appearance, just as it's virtually impossible for you to stand out as a better player in that way. Given that the basis of most MMOs is, to some extent, a loot-and-show-off one, Tabula Rasa doesn't really fit with them.

The combat system has been well-reviewed, but after a few days, it starts to grate. Most characters seem to play in a very similar way, and combat revolves around repeatedly clicking on enemies. There's more to it, of course - you need to crouch to steady your aim, and fire from behind cover to reduce damage - but in my three days as a soldier I never once had to use any tactic other than crouching in front of a group of enemy soldiers with a chaingun and holding down my left mouse button until they were dead. There's no sense of challenge in the game, and since combat boils down to repeatedly clicking on enemies with less AI than a carrot, it gets old quickly. The reasoning behind the combat system was, clearly, to escape from the usual MMO mechanic of click-the-attack-button-and-watch-your-character-do-it, but it fails because it somehow manages to be more dull and less involved than that system.

What else ... right, equipment and crafting. The crafting system is a joke, revolving essentially around producing upgrades for weapons and armour that nobody will know you have and that you don't really need. The game also expects you to invest ability points gained at level-up to improve your crafting skills at the expense of your combat ones, which is ludicrous - the only way to be a very good crafter is to set up a dedicated crafting character, but having invested every ability point in crafting at each level-up, the game would become incredibly difficult as your combat skills would be weak.

Technically, the game is laggy and a resource hog - I have a dedicated gaming system that hasn't struggled to run anything released in the last year, including other MMOs with vastly superior graphics, and I experienced regular stuttering and lag. There's also only one European server, which is generally somewhat crowded and thus has additional lag. This is the first MMO I've played that expected me to wait in line for a place on the only server the developer could be arsed to set up.

Finally, the community. In my experience over the last week, Tabula Rasa doesn't really have a community. The general chat channel was full, every day, of fanboys arguing the relative merits of the XBOX 360 and the Playstation 3. I have no idea why. The one or two people I met to group with were friendly, but there's no general community and no real meeting places for players. Coming to Tabula Rasa after another MMO with well-implemented community functions - Eve, World of Warcraft, and Lord of the Rings Online all come to mind - highlights dramatically just how isolating Tabula Rasa is. In the above games, I felt like part of a community of gamers even when playing solo, and would occasionally run into another player on the same quest as me and form an adhoc group. Tabula Rasa? Hardly ever met another player, none of them spoke to me when I did, and the only groups I managed to come up with were from a looking for group message in amongst the Great PS3 Debate.

I'm sure that Tabula Rasa could have been rewarding if I'd stuck with it for a few months, levelled up my character some more, and waited for the game to be improved, tweaked, refined, and generally turned into a decent title. Frankly, though, why should I - or anyone reading this - waste their money and time in the hopes that sometime in the future, this will be a decent game?

What a disappointment
This game looks good, feels good, and IS good. Nice GUI, interesting story line, no real feel of grinding through the layers, you need to think about what you are doing... it is all wonderful until it goes wrong.

I have a decent gaming PC, top end last summer. It should run this without problem. But:

The game locks. Or the game runs too fast. The game stops letting you use some commands. The server claims to be unavailable, even though it is there. I have had to uninstall and reinstall 3 times. That means repatching too. Forum searches imply that others have had the same troubles, but noone has the answer. Account support is more complex than the ingame puzzles (up to level 10 at least) and I'd rather play a game that works.

A sad waste of time. It is the first game I have ever sent back for refund. I accept it if a game is not to my taste. This game really is to my taste, but the uninviting support and in game problems are too much. I might come back in a year and see if it is fixed.