Tabula Rasa

Richard Garriott's newest online creation has its problems, but it's still a good amount of fun.

"The Tabula Rasa team now believes that they've taken another blank canvas and taken the genre they helped create to the next level. Whether that's true, of course, remains to be seen."

"...as players gain in level, they'll have the opportunity to "save" their character in time. So if a player wished they had gone in a different direction, they'll be able to go back in time and use that saved character to try a different path. There will only be a few of these saves, but they can be overwritten and these new characters can be moved to one of the character slots. These characters can then be freely switched between."

Tabula Rasa probably isn’t the best MMO to cut your teeth on, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game. It’s rather frustrating by yourself, though, unless you’re the Rambo type who wants to grind until they can solo instances meant for a full squad. Even just traveling around the worlds can be perilous alone, so it’d be better to go in with some friends on board from the get-go, if you can. While not a completely revolutionary game, Tabula Rasa does add features such as the cloning system and dynamic battlefield that perhaps start building the bridge to that next evolution of MMO. The original sci-fi story also helps distinguish it from others of the genre, but rather than obliterating the old dirt road and starting entirely from scratch, Tabula Rasa takes what has been laid out and travels a little further.