Tabula Rasa Previews

RPG Land and The MMO Gamer have both whipped up new hands-on previews of Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa. An excerpt from the article at RPG Land:

Combat in Tabula Rasa is designed to be a much more frenetic and fast paced when compared to the more traditional MMO-style combat. Players will fire their weapon manually while the majority of aiming is done automatically. While in combat players can move around making it harder for them to be hit, while simultaneously lowering their accuracy. Different variables are taken into account that can affect your damage, accuracy or ability to dodge. One thing players will be keen to remember is to always try and take cover when in a firefight and to keep their target in the optimal range of their weapon of choice. All of this leads to a rewarding feeling, as you do your best to constantly keep yourself and your squad in optimum strategic position, but not so much as to make Tabula Rasa feel like a frantic shoot-em-up.

And an excerpt from the article at The MMO Gamer:

One of the features touted in TR is the fact that it is indeed supposed to be a war you’re in the middle of, and right in the tutorial one of the first things you do is retake a base that had been captured by the Bane (which consists of using the large and not-so-strategically placed glowing obelisk directly in front of the main gate for 30 seconds without getting shot). Yet, out in the world itself, every time I see the Bane actually capture a base, the ally AI captures it back in five minutes or less.

A war is not particularly exciting if the NPCs are fighting it for you.