Tabula Rasa: История Последнего Рубежа Человечества

Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa was a MMORPG developed by Destination Games and published by NCsoft, designed in part by Richard Garriott. The game is a role playing video game that blends certain shooter aspects into the combat system. It was officially released to retail on November 2, 2007, with customers that pre ordered the game allowed access to the live servers from October 30, 2007. The development team released updates, called "Deployments," nearly every month following launch. The game required a monthly subscription. Tabula Rasa is about humanity's last stand against a group of aliens called the Bane. The story takes place in the near future on two planets, Arieki and Foreas, which were in a state of constant conflict between the AFS (Allied Free Sentients) and the Bane. The term tabula rasa means "clean slate" in Latin, which refers to a fresh start, or starting over. According to the developers, the game included the ability for players to influence the outcome of a war between the player characters and the NPCs. Tabula Rasa became free to play on January 10, 2009, and closed on February 28, 2009.

According to the fictional background story in Tabula Rasa, there once was an advanced alien species known as the Eloh. They freely shared their knowledge of how to convert between matter and energy with just the mind, called Logos, to other less advanced races. One of these less advanced races, the Thrax, used this power to wage war against the Eloh, a war which the Eloh won but at a great cost. This led to a great divide in the Eloh. One faction wanted to keep on spreading the knowledge as they had before. The other, called the Neph, sought to control the development of "lesser races" to ensure they, the Neph, would always be the superior species. This inner conflict led the Neph faction to leave the Eloh and seek other allies, among them the defeated Thrax; this species along with others joined to form the Bane, which is controlled by the Neph. As one of their first acts, they attacked the Eloh world; the surviving Eloh fled and were scattered among the worlds they had previously visited. The Bane attacked Earth sometime in our near future. Humanity was hopelessly outmatched and the majority was completely wiped out. Luckily, the Eloh had left behind some of their technology that had the ability to make wormholes to other worlds. There, humans found other species doing the same thing they had, fighting against the Bane to survive. They banded together to form the Army of the Allied Free Sentients to fight against the Bane. In addition to a hit miss system, Tabula Rasa adjusted the damage based on the situation. Real time factors like weapon type, ammo type, stance, cover, and movement were taken into account. The enemies were reported to have AI that would try to take advantage of the terrain, their numbers, and would try to flank the players. The mix of system based combat and real time movement and physics systems created a gameplay meant to encourage the player to think tactically}; e. g. to take cover behind a pillar to get some time to reload the weapon while the enemies were getting into position again.

Missions will be given out by NPCs but will not be static. What missions are available and even the access to the NPCs themselves are subject to how the battlefield is going. Some may be specific to control points that the player will need to reclaim from the Bane to gain access again. Missions are also to have multiple options to take. One example is destroying a dam to stop Bane forces that will also demolish a local village. A player can choose to just destroy or try to warn the village beforehand risking further advances by the Bane. Referred to as "ethical parables" they are to make up about 20% of all missions. The missions the player chooses to do and the choices made during them will change the way certain NPCs treat the player's character. Some missions will deliver the player's character to private instanced spaces. One design goal of the game is to use instanced spaces to create in depth storytelling, with puzzles, traps, and NPCs, that would be more difficult in shared spaces. Some missions will be ethically challenging. The players will have to choose from different points of view and it can alter their future progress. "Ethical and moral dilemmas are something we definitely wanted to incorporate into the design of Tabula Rasa from the very start. The entire goal is to give you pause and allow you to think about the choices that they make in order to accomplish a mission."

Logos is a pictographic language left behind by the Eloh to be understood by other races. As players go through the game, they will gain Logos symbols to add to their Logos tablet, a blank slate, and begin to learn the language found throughout the game and gain special powers. Logos can be considered the equivalent of magic for Tabula Rasa, inasmuch as magic allows for incredible, otherwise unexplained acts; however, the logos are shown to be an extension of a scientific process developed by the Eloh. Players can improve these abilities and the upgraded versions can add new tactical uses. Some are universal while others are class specific. Some examples range from lightning bolt attacks, sprinting, reinforcements, and poison type powers. These are very hard to find, being hidden throughout Tabula Rasa.

Tabula Rasa had a tree character class system. Everyone started out as first "tier" (branch) Recruit and as they progress they were able to branch out. The second "tier" included the Soldier and Specialist, which in turn had two subclasses of their own each. There were a total of 4 tiers. Tabula Rasa also had a cloning function at each tier. It worked like a save function for characters at the branching point and allowed the player to try out the other branch without having to repeat the first several levels. Players were able to help NPC assaults to take over bases or defend ones under attack. Control of these points was meant to change back and forth commonly even without player involvement, although the current implementation rarely let the Bane muster enough forces to invade a control point during peak player times. The Control Point System was one of the main gameplay features. Players that are fighting to defend or capture a CP (control point) got Prestige points which they could trade in for item upgrades, experience boosters, a reset of either their attributes or their learned abilities or the purchase of superior or rare equipment at grey market vendors. Prestige could also be earned by defeating bosses, looting rare items, getting the max XP multiplier and by completing special missions. Later in the game, Control points became more and more important to the players, as they were necessary to be either in Bane or AFS hands to accept or complete certain missions and they become the centerpoint of most of the later maps.

PvP (Player versus player) in Tabula Rasa was voluntary. As it stands, there were two main modes of PvP combat. Wargame duels, commonly known as duels. These were initiated by challenging a player by targeting and using the radial menu. The challenged player must then consent. The wargame is over when one player dies, or when the two players are too far from each other, or one leaves the zone. These impromptu duels could be held between two players, two squads (groups), or a player against a squad. Wargame feuds, commonly known as clan wars. These could only be fought by clans who have chosen to be a PvP clan (done during clan creation). Only a clan's leader could initiate or cancel a clan feud, and the request must be accepted by the challenged clan's leader. A clan war lasts 7 real time days, during which players can fight each other without requesting consent first. During the war, kills are tallied and displayed in the players' wargame trackers. The clan with the most kills at the end of the war wins the feud. Kills are only counted if the players are within 5 levels of each other, though players of any level can fight each other. Wargame maps, Edmund Range was the only implemented map that featured large scale team PvP. Using two sets of local teleporters, players could choose between the blue team or the red team. The map could be accessed via the cellar area and was only accessible to players level 45 and above. The map consisted of several Control Points which each team had to capture. At the beginning of each match there were Epic Bane inside of the Control Points to prevent rushers capturing them all, giving a team an unfair advantage at the beginning. In later patches, "Personal Armour Units" were introduced which allowed players to fight in giant robots exclusively in Edmund Range. At the end of each match the losing team were teleported back to the main entrance and the winning team were teleported to the upper floor of the staging area. On the upper floor were unique armour sets vendors that were available to buy using prestige. Portable way points were disabled in the staging area to prevent players from cheating to the upper floor.