I spent a bit more time in Tabula Rasa tonight, running the various errand quests near the starting village and exploring the area a bit. The zones are pretty big, so it’s easy to wander into unfamiliar territory and get in over your head, but fortunately the destination spots for quests are marked on the map so you know exactly where you need to go, which quests will lead you into dangerous territory, etc.

I reached halfway through level 6 and picked the Specialist path as my level 5 career choice, and my eventual goal will probably be an Engineer. I’d been saving up my skill points, since I’m naturally reluctant to spend irreversible things, but I’ve started spending some of them now that I both need some of the new skills for the new armour and weapons I’m finding, and after learning that I’ll be able to reset my skills once I create a clone at the higher levels, so any choices I make now aren’t permanent after all.

One other difference from WoW is that not all enemies are static spawns or just roaming around. Quite often, enemy dropships will swoop in and offload enemies in certain areas, making it feel more like an actual war. They’re also supposed to fight for certain control points, which can be defended by NPCs and players nearby, and if the control point falls the players will no longer be able to use the facilities there and will have to fight to take it back. It’s kind of like PvP against a not-all-that-smart opposing team.

I’m a bad boy. I caved in and signed up for yet another MMORPG: Tabula Rasa. I was a huge Ultima fan back in the day and I was curious as to what Garriott’s been up to post-Ultima Online, so I figured I’d at least give it a try, even if I don’t stick with it.

Like the critics are fond of mentioning, it’s definitely very WoW-like in many ways, as are half the other MMOGs out there nowadays. Quests in particular are structured almost exactly the same way; you find a quest-giver, accept it, follow the instructions (which are a bit different in that there can be multiple steps of different types within a single quest), return, and choose your reward, all conveniently tracked in a quest log.

The differences become more apparent in combat though, which has a fairly quick pace to it and feels shooter-ish since there’s a heavy emphasis on guns, though that’s a bit of an illusion since it’s still largely based on your character’s skills, your weapon’s stats, etc. Still, you do have to worry about things like positioning for the best firing arcs — if you’re using a shotgun, you can damage multiple targets if you can get them lined up within the firing cone, for example.

Class and skill progression is also fairly different. Instead of picking a class from the start, everyone starts off as a blank slate (har har) and you specialize into different branches of a class tree as you gain levels, and each node of the tree has a set of skills associated with it that you can then buy points in. E.g., at level 5 I might decide to choose the Specialist branch, then the Sapper branch at level 15, and then Engineer at level 30 to finally set my true class. It’s not really a new idea, as DAoC did it before (I think), but it should help avoid the feeling that you might have been trapped by being forced to choose something right at character creation.

One of its other touted features is the collection of ‘Logos’ (in the Latin ‘knowledge’ sense, not the gaudy neon signs), and how they relate to skill development. It looks like it’s not really as big a deal as it’s made out to be, though; certain skills require you to have certain Logos before you can use them, making you go out and collect them, so it’s really just a form of making you explore a bit and go on quests to get certain skills, like various other games do in slightly different ways.

Nothing about it is really all that special so far, but it’s not a bad game either. It’s a fairly competently-executed WoW clone, that will probably wind up failing only because it’s not quite different enough to pull people away from WoW. I’ve only done a handful of the simple starting quests after the tutorial though, so I’ve probably still got a lot to learn about it.

Oh, and I should mention that this is what a proper Collector’s Edition (yes, I’m a sucker) should be like. It comes with a big, full-colour manual, glossy cards with maps of all the zones with landmarks, a coin and dogtag trinkets, a poster, and a behind-the-scenes DVD. I’m not sure if there are any in-game bonuses yet or not.

(It also came with a T-shirt, but not in the game box itself, so it was probably added in by Amazon as some kind of bonus. These T-shirts are the kind of thing you probably shouldn’t be caught dead wearing in public anyway…)