The MMORPG market is crowded with fantasy-themed games. You'd think that there would be a greater variety of settings to choose from, especially since it is a common complaint of MMORPG fans that the games all feel more similar than they do different. And yet MMORPGs with different settings all seem to fail one after another, which inevitably persuades developers to stick with the fantasy theme. Still, whenever a new MMORPG is released that doesn't have an elf in sight the very novelty of its setting is enough to generate a certain amount of curiosity in gamers such as myself who have killed untold thousands of spiders and goblins in their time online. This brings us to Tabula Rasa which is worth a look just because of its Sci-Fi themed setting, but there's a bit more behind it that makes it particularly interesting. Richard Garriott, aka Lord British, best known for his long-running Ultima RPG series of games is the driving force behind Tabula Rasa. With this sort of fantasy game pedigree, perhaps Tabula Rasa can bridge the gulf between fantasy MMORPGs and what can easily be labeled "everything else". Let's see if it has what it takes to tear people away from World of Warcraft and EverQuest.

Tabula Rasa takes place in a future in which mankind loses the Earth to an alliance of aggressive alien races collectively known as the Bane. Although humans lost their home in the struggle, they were able to commandeer enough alien technology to leave the Earth and continue the fight on other worlds. Rather than go it alone, mankind decides to work to form its own alliance of races to face the Bane. This is where the game begins, and you will be taking part in the effort on the first two worlds to appear in the game, Foreas and Arieki. Foreas is the opening world for new characters and is a forested world occupied by a sentient race of aliens which is very much in touch with its environment. The Foreans need humans to help repel the Bane invasion, but are reluctant to see any harm come to their world as a result of its defense. Arieki is an alien penal colony occupied by self-serving exiled aliens who must be convinced or coerced to band together to fight their common enemy. While there is plenty of gameplay to be found within these two worlds, it's a pretty safe bet that new worlds will be added as expansions as the game evolves.

When you first create your character for Tabula Rasa you'll notice that there's something different about this game. Creating a character involves selecting his or her look and picking a unique name, but there are no character classes in sight. Rather than locking you into a character and its associated style of play before you even have a chance to try out the game, Tabula Rasa starts everyone out as a simple raw recruit. At certain level milestones you make choices about which talent tree you'd like to pursue. At first these choices are pretty high level, such as your first one at level five when you must decide whether to be a soldier or a specialist. As you reach each milestone you'll make further decisions that will further specialize your character. You may be thinking that this eliminates the problem of selecting the wrong class for your style of play at the beginning in exchange for potentially making the same sort of mistake further down the line, but that's not the case here thanks to the game's cloning system. At any point in your character's development you can create a duplicate cloned version of the character. The cloned character will retain the experience and level of the original, but all of the skill points will be refunded. You can continue to play your original character, your cloned character, or alternate between the two of them. If at some point you find that you'd much rather play as a tank than a healer, you can switch to one of your clones without having to start from scratch and grind your way through the opening missions of the game all over again. It's a great system that makes "alt" management far more practical for players and hopefully we'll see it become standard in future MMORPGs.

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