Tabula Rasa

The Disappointing End

Many players would point their fingers instantly at one glaring oversight - the crippling lack of endgame content. In simple terms, at its launch (and ever since, in fact) there has been essentially nothing to do in Tabula Rasa once you hit level 50. You could, of course, create a clone and play with the other class options available to you. Since a recent patch, you could also create an alien-human hybrid clone - which is less interesting than it sounds, sadly, as it doesn't change your relationship with the alien races, open up new quest lines, or really do much to alter the game experience.

This lack of a real endgame seems like a vast oversight. All there is to do at the end of the ladder in Tabula Rasa is fairly limited player-versus-player combat, the uninspired nature of which is all the more disappointing given how well the active combat system should scale to PVP play. To their credit, the developers do appear to be working on this - in the near future we'll see new arenas appearing in the game for mano-a-mano combat, along with the ability for guilds to take over control points.

For many players, however, this is too little, too late. Where are the raids, the endgame encounters, the open-world PVP options? Although this complaint started out being relevant only to a small, hugely vocal but largely unrepresentative minority of gamers - the power-gamers who rush through the content in the race to hit the level cap as quickly as possible - their dissatisfaction with the game has spilled over into forums, comment threads, blogs and simple word of mouth. Even if you're not a power-gamer, and are more like the average MMO player who takes a few months (at least) to reach the endgame, chances are you've still heard that TR shipped with nothing to do for level 50 players - and wonder why you'd bother playing it, then.

So there's the first cause for TR's failure. This is a game which was aimed squarely at less hardcore players - at people who like action games and FPS titles, who would appreciate the run-and-gun mechanics of the combat and the science fiction aesthetic of the world.

Yet it failed to reach those players. It was sold as a massively multiplayer game (by the guy who made Ultima! Roll up, roll up, hardcore RPG fans!) to an audience of massively multiplayer gamers, and seems to have made remarkably little impact with the sci fi shooter audience who could have loved it. Instead, it's filled with refugees from other MMORPGs, recovering World of Warcraft addicts, and disgruntled WOW refuseniks. Unsurprisingly, that includes an audience of power-gamers and high-level raiding fanatics to whom the game simply doesn't cater. To them, it's a huge disappointment - and the developers should have seen that coming.

The Final Cut

The end-game content isn't the only thing that's broken or absent in Tabula Rasa. The player economy, too, is something that feels like an ill-considered afterthought - indeed, while the crafting aspects have been present (and rubbish) since day one, the auction house only appeared in a patch.

These don't feel like integral parts of the game in any way. Crafting, bizarrely, requires that you allocate skill points from the same pool that provides your combat abilities - essentially meaning that if your character can craft well, it can't fight well, and vice versa. The presence of crafting and player economy elements in Tabula Rasa feels somewhat forced - as though this wasn't part of the original design, but was added because of a sense of obligation to the genre defaults.