WarCry Network : Tabula Rasa: WarCry's Review

Tabula Rasa: WarCry's Review

by JR Sutich, 20 Dec 2007 21:47

destination games, mmo, ncsoft, review, sci-fi, tabula rasa

Crafting

Crafting, as far as I can tell, exists in Tabula Rasa so that it can be said that Tabula Rasa has crafting. There's really no need at all for it. Players cannot make anything useful outside of ammunition and materials needed for logos skills. In order to modify armor and weapons, players need to destroy armor and weapons to get the components to make the modifications. That's right, Tabula Rasa has a sci-fi version of WoW's Enchanting. Let's say I have a purple Blade of Bane Ass Kicking. I want to add a critical hit modifier to it. It currently already has four enhancements on it, three of which are awesome and one that I could do without. If I add that critical hit modifier to it, I am playing Russian Roulette with my sword, since the game will arbitrarily replace one of the modifications at random with the one I'm trying to add. This was not a well designed system at all. Until players can make useful items there isn't much to be gained from wasting skill points on crafting. Even if it's on a clone you made just to put skill points in crafting.

Economy

Tabula Rasa is going to have problems with its economy. Recently an auction house was added but there isn't anything on it worth buying. See the above part about Crafting. Since only about three things in Tabula Rasa are Bind on Pickup/Equip, there are multiple copies of quest rewards listed for sale. Ammunition is being sold for cheaper than the vendors, which is great. The problem is that it's much easier to just buy it from an NPC than travel to the auction house to save credits. There are a couple of classes that are going to be far richer than the designers really want. Spies and Guardians don't need to spend the same credits that all other classes need to on ammunition. This will ensure a healthy amount of inflation as right now, most players are Spies and are sitting on millions of credits that they have nothing to buy with. The first sign of this problem was made noticeable when a skill was taken from a character class that allowed the creation of wormholes for travel. The replacement was a consumable item purchasable from vendors. There were quite a number of high priced vendor items added but the game still needs help bleeding off credits from players.

Overall

Tabula Rasa is fun, but frustrating. The game was launched far too early and it shows. With fundamental changes being made after launch, broken missions and mechanics, and a crafting system that seemed to be tacked on as an afterthought, you can see where having another 4-6 months to make the game a more enjoyable experience would have benefited everyone. If you're an experienced MMO player that is used to dealing with bugs and sweeping changes from patch to patch you're the right person to be playing Tabula Rasa right now.