Tabula Rasa Previews

Three more previews of NCsoft’s Tabula Rasa have been posted to the ‘net, all of which are based on a demonstration given by Richard Garriott at this year’s GDC. The first is at Game Informer:

(We’ve created a game that has a much stronger sense of ebb and flow to the way things unfold on even the persistent spaces. For example, on this particular planet, which is four kilometers by four kilometers there’s a few dozen of these such maps as battlefields we have a main human base and a main Bane base, but there’s a lot of other outlying outposts that are high-value areas to own. And the Bane and the humans, even without any players involved, have strategies they deploy in order to move across the battlefield and try to take these spaces. If you lose a control point, a number of things happen. First of all, the hospital for respawn goes offline. The waypoint system, which is our rapid-transit system around the world, goes offline. Shops go offline. The NPCs that give missions or respond to the conclusion of missions go offline. Probably most importantly, all the automated defense systems in this area switch faction. So the force fields switch to the opposite side, the turrets go to the opposite side and the respawns that give support to the base depending on who owns it switch as well.)

The second is at Warcry:

The new game also alters the dynamic of level progression with a neat twist on the regular dynamic. They have a tree-based advancement system where players can branch and become more specialized at regular intervals. Yet, to get rid of the annoyance of starting over whenever a player wants to try something new, Garriott added “cloning” options at each stage. This gives the player a chance to copy their character’s skills into a new character at any point. Kind of like saving along the way, this option allows players to go back to a previous branch, rather than starting over completely.

And the third is at FiringSquad:

The GDC demo presentation was certainly action packed as our character fought off the bane, either via foot soldiers or when the enemies are beamed in through what looked like bio-mechanical drop ships. At one point we took on a massive boss that looked like a cross between a mech and a giant bug that required more than a couple of laser blasts. The game will have full voice chat intergrated into the game and at this stage the visuals are certainly on a par with the best looking MMOs our there today.