Tabula Rasa

I know this isn't WoW news, but, I managed to get in contact with the Closed Beta. That's right... CLOSED, which means I'm special! NYAH-NYAH! All of that aside though I figured I'd give you folks a brief run through of my experience.

Basic Idea:
So... you like RPGs, right? So you like them MMOs, right? What about them there FPSs? You like them too? Excellent, well, Tabula Rasa is something I'd like to consider an MMOFPSRPG, which is by far my new favorite acronym for anything. You run around and shoot stuff up, and you lock onto targets, so you can hop around and such like you probably have been doing in World of Warcraft trying to dodge frostbolts.

Character Design:
Since this game is by NCSoft, the same folks who brought you City of Heroes, you would expect a ton of options. Well... they're not there! Here's the run down. You are given about... 30 - 40 faces to choose from, which is decent except it's the entire face, you don't have options for eyes or anything so it could be 8 faces with different eye colors and the same everything else. You have about 12 hair styles and accessories/beards to choose from as well.

From there, you have the option to change your clothing they have 7 matching sets or you can mix and match. You can pick gloves, pants, chest, and shoes, that's about it. But, here's the catch with that... it's only your newbie outfit, you actually replace all this stuff as soon as you exit the newbie area, where you are given access to other matching outfits Guild Wars style, along with armor dyes and other things. Also, the bodies scale with height, so you can't make any anorexic barbie girls/emo kids or over-muscled super hulks. The one bright side to everything is that you have a giant color hue/wheel to decide what color things are going to be, which is sort of nice, except I absolutely could not find ANY black on the wheel at all, which means you also can't make goths either!

Graphics:
I wish I had something to say here, but I don't. Unfortunately the computer I played on was hardcore lagging and basically met the minimum requirements, we had to crank EVERYTHING to low, so... it was a bit of a pain but I'm not going to count it against the game. The opening cinematic and the animations on character models still seemed very fluid and nice as well as the environments.

Audio:
Guns sounded like guns, and lasers sounded like lasers. I don't even remember if there was much music playing during this game, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, the music could've honestly fitted in so well with the game that it all just blended in nicely, which I believe was the case since I don't believe I was complaining at the time. Also, the intro text to a lot of the quests are voice acted, so you don't even have to read unless you really want the nitty gritty details of things.

Gameplay:
This is the important part, right? Well, unfortunately I only had a brief period of time to play because they were having constant server restarts due to log in issues and such. It works exactly like any RPG you've ever played, EXP, Equipment, etc. Here are some of the major highlights:

• Fast-paced battles with enemies with various resistances to certain types of weapons or magic.
  
  
• You can equip 5 weapons and 5 spells at once for hot-key usage, you use Q to cycle through the weapons and E to cycle through the spell. Left-click for firing, right-click for casting, it was very very smooth.
  
  
• You get 'Logos' which help unlock abilities further along the way, which is an interesting idea. I assume it's like 'finding' spells like you would in Guild Wars.
  
  
• Everyone starts the game as the same class, the Recruit, from there you branch off into two options basically at some later level I assume "I like to shoot shit." or "I like to use my spells." and then those 2 branches break into 2 other branches, which then break into ANOTHER 2 branches. There were medics, spies, snipers, biotechnologist, demolitionist, grenadier, soldiers, etc.
  
  
• Experience is based off of damage done to a target, so even if you didn't tag the mob, you'll still get experience for it if you put a dent into it. I didn't spend much time looting dead things, but, I imagine you can loot random items you can trade in for gear, like in Guild Wars, as well as recipes and other such things.
  
  
• Most important of all though, there was a message stating if you had any problems with the game to please contact 'GM_rofl', yes, that's correct, rofl the GM. Who doesn't want to subscribe to a game with a GM named rofl on it's staff? Seriously.

That about wraps it up for right now honestly. I wish there was more to say, but right now there isn't, it's a game that as a lot of ideas and a lot of potential. In many ways this game reminds me of Auto Assault, which is a game that recently closed due to lack of subscribers, and the only reason I can see why such a thing happened was due to bad marketing and the big kid in town (World of Warcraft) was just hitting his peak and so many people ignored this innovative idea. I hope the same won't occur to Tabula Rasa, because it seems VERY promising.