Richard Garriot has a brand new bag. Inside it, he keeps a silver-seamed beret and a pair of cowboy boots, complete with spurs. Lord British is dead; General British welcomes you to try Tabula Rasa.

The NCSoft-published MMO has been a long time coming, but it's in private beta now to prepare for an imminent launch. Unlike the bulk of the NCSoft product line, Tabula Rasa isn't a fantasy game, but is instead set in the "near future," albeit a near future with laser guns, spaceships, and interplanetary travel.

The default play mode seems to be third-person. While you might mistake the gameplay for pure action, the reticle actually serves as a sort of aim assist, allowing you to select mobs just by mousing over them, while stats and figures still do the heavy lifting of alien murder behind the scenes. It actually looks like a pretty fun way to play.

The art direction is a mish-mash of influences and lacks any cohesion.
The future warriors look futurey. The alien enemies look insectoid.
For all the freedom a blank slate affords a company, they certainly
are playing the art direction conservatively. It doesn't help that the
animations seemed jerky, which may be the fault of the engine itself
or simply an underpowered demo machine.

Garriot advised us that Tabula Rasa is one of the titles under
consideration for porting to the Playstation 3 as part of the new
union between NCSoft and Sony, but no promises yet. One of NCSoft's
executives suggested we should hear about new IP and existing titles
on Sony's machines by the end of the year.

An entire pictographic language has been created for Tabula
Rasa, the primatives of which form a key part of the game's
special skills system. Once you reach a certain level of experience on
Tabula Rasa's branching career path, new potential combinations
of pictographs will become available to you. You might discover you've
learned the ability "Teleport," which will be unlocked once you
discover the pictographs for "Friends," "Summon," and "Here." Several
dozen pictographs are already in the game, adorning buildings and
signs throughout.

In an effort to encourage players to sample many—or all—of
the professions available in the game, players will be able to make
"clones" of characters at any point, saving their experience and
skills up to a point, making it possible to sample a new career path,
then move back to a "saved" state to try out something else. The
clones can even been renamed and reskinned, so they don't have to look
exactly the same.

Tabula Rasa may end up being a turd, but they're trying to do
something different, and to my mind it'll be worth at least a shot. –Joel Johnson

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