Tabula Rasa's NDA is lifted!
Huzzah! Now I can complain publicly and take no flack! Woot.

Well, let's start with the obvious. It's an MMO. It's set a little ways in the future, after an alien invasion lowers real estate values on earth to the negative. The best and brightest leave, through a portal somewhere in the solar system. We're still fighting the same enemy in a war that's probably outlasted most civilizations. Quite literally, when some worlds get squished.

Kinda bleak, really. But you do get extremely fashionable superhuman powers from, well, alien artifacts. And whatever training you go for. You could have literally... Ten of powers winding from the everyman lightning bolt to cloning yourself and having him fight with you.

So, sci-fi + magic, military culture... although you're more of a special agent than anybody's raw recruit.

Quests range from fetch to find to kill... same ol, same ol'. Although setting up a sonic pest-control device to move a few house-sized herbivores off of an area your people are "mining"... cool. 'cept that there's 2 people in the mine, and one's a forman, one's a surveyor. And the mine is riddled with flying squid they understandably want eliminated. Typical MMO, really. But it's nice to see the NPC herbivores shuffle away from the danger point.

There do exist quests that are exclusive. You have choices to make once you've taken these quests. One guy is running stim powder to some friends. You do this, you get paid. And these guys with long shifts, or just plain joneses (you try getting a coffee bean extract on an alien planet) are quite appreciative. Or you hand it over to the guys commander, and the fellow's in KP for pinching medical supplies. Talk to him after, and he's quite certain the stuff went to the officer's mess.

A draft-dodging alien was another quest. I let him go. The alien who sent me on the quest wrote a nasty letter for me to take to the CO. Who said "Yeah, I'd have done the same. Good work. We're not their police, and our alliance really doesn't need the stress."

Supposedly, these will come back to haunt you later, one way or another. No way to tell as of yet. But it should keep things interesting.

That's the good. There's a good setting, and the quests are fairly interesting. One instance had a smashed research center you needed to clear out and recover the data from. Had an intro video and everything. Beautiful.

Now the not-so-good.

It's unplayable. Gameplay balance is horribly broken. You wade through tons of mook soldiers, no fear whatsoever for your health from anything normal. Then you hit some mortars. They do no more damage to you than a normal mob, but they're heavily armored. The fastest way to kill one is to walk up to it, crouch, and stick your EMP rifle down the barrel while it's filling your screen with the direct hits it's sorta plinking at you with. Fire about 30-40 times. Switch to lightning mostly to keep its armor from regenerating while your barrel cools. Then crouch and finish the job. I wish to god I was joking.

There is supposed to be some eight types of damage. You will, initially, be incapable of doing much with regards to half of them. There are grenades, and they can do whatever type of damage you need. But they're expensive, and they're not a lot better.

Everything in the game has health, and nearly everything has armor. In prior beta, the armor was complex. It had a pool of "health" that could be depleted, leaving all further damage to health. It had bleed-through, meaning it didn't stop the first few points. It had max absorbtion, indicating that if you got hit by a tank, it'd soften the blow, but you would be feeling it. I liked this system. It felt mostly realistic. Although it did make the chaingun a bit powerful, since the bleed-through and rate of fire meant armor was largely irrelevant.

Bleed-through was removed last patch. This means, this close to release, they're cutting features that will take too much time to properly implement. Unfortunately, this means you have the fast-regenerating armor pool that's about 3-10 times the health of the critter... and you have to get through ALL of it. It's a little wierd to smack a shield bot with an emp rifle... and basically blow its armor off.

But, if the mortars weren't enough of a pain to take down, there's overseers. Boss mobs by any other name. Heck, they've actually got names. And they have slightly less durability than an entrenched mortar. But they also have better guns. Ones that can wear you down a bit faster than they can be killed.

Scaling doesn't feel right with these guys. And it gets far more obvious when you stumble upon the lv 13 overseers having a party along the north edge of the first map. A 200+ point shot is... absorbed. Their armor bar takes a tiny nibble and recovers pretty quick. I was shooting at one with another fellow and together, before it was able to kill us, I think we'd gotten its armor down a quarter. Which would seriously leave it feeling vulnerable for... gosh... seconds, really.

So there's that wierd imbalance. There's others. There's a flying attack bot. "predator" class. Most effective thing against it is definitely lightning. But only from behind. Yep, positional modifiers. It's the difference between almost tying the regeneration and taking a third of its armor out. Which means they're not hard to kill if you have a teammate. But solo, they're impossible. Joy.

Combat really feels like an intense chore. And this is while paying no attention to the fact that the enemy often teleports into position whether or not they dropship animation runs beforehand or not. So, it's futile, but it's also a lot of work. Most weapons don't have a percievable effect on large nuisances. I know, MMO, "Thou Shalt Team"...but that doesn't stop those fights from being work.

There's also some severe camping issues, in spite of the instancing. Recent reset of all characters gave a fantastic example of what opening day will consist of. Past the training instance, you're sent into a cave to get one of the logos characters... imprinted or whatever. They unlock abilities, they give you backstory elements, they presumably give you hints later on... good stuff. But they can also only be used by one person at a time. Having 8 instances doesn't really fix the issue if they're all half-full of people who need to be in the same place. There's still a line.

Thankfully, the group showed marvellous skill at queuing. lined up around the corner in that tunnel, full of jokes and humor and sending the devs a screenshot or two. But then, we were on the UK server for the stress test, and I think this maaaay have indicated a problem with that stupid one-at-a-time rule on those devices. 'course, the effects also play twice. And are audible at solid volume for quite a distance. But those are bugs I know they will fix, so I don't fret much.

The world's nice, the interface is a hair rough. The profanity filter defaults to "on" but, military speech sometimes gets a bit blue. The filter works on the mission descriptions. And that level of censorship feels awfully... well, Paranoia. This amuses me, but it just means you have to turn it off to enjoy the game.

Well, as much as you can. In the long run, the devs have five weeks to take this nearly-finished game and achieve some semblance of game balance. I don't think they can.

Weapon and armor are equippable depending mostly on level. You can get another +40% power out of them by training them all the way. That sounds good, but remember, if it taks you 90 shots to drop a rhino, and you got +50% damage, it'd take you 60 shots. But with regen being what is in this thing... it could certainly take you over the threshold of ineffectiveness and take the ammo required for some beasts from infinity down all the way to a hundred. Too bad your gun will overheat.

And that's really my problem when playing this thing. I feel like all the improvement just gets you past that threshold of being able to wear down a regenerating foe. It sucks. It's amazingly painful. You hate the one critter in a playfield of most MMOs that has vast regeneration, and understandably so. Now just up that % drastically, and you'll see my displeasure.

And, really, it bugs me that this is where the game is at. The graphics are fantastic. Being in a gawdsawful line of PCs didn't induce any serious slowdown whatever hiccups are occuring with the last patch appear to be independant. The story is decent, the mission names adorable (kill the egg-laying miasma squids in the cave... "Mama Miasma!") and you can earn titles from little accomplishments. Kinda hard to see 'em tho. You actually need the subject in your sights, as this system doesn't do floaty-names that I can see.

But the gameplay. The core balances of combat... this is the area where they're down to the wire and cutting features like bleed-through, and need to tweak like hell to get something workable by release. And this is the least polished element. This worries me. Frustrates me. I don't think I will bother playing 'till they patch it again, because it's Not Fun.

Two things are key in all MMOs. Walking and combat. In that order. There are waypoints and dropships... basically functioning as the usual MMO subway systems. They're fast, but they only work if you've walked to the other one. And you have to walk to the nearest one to hop a lift to another... so while they save you some time, you walk to them, you walk from them. You walk like a mofo. You can sprint, but that's fueled by adrenaline, gained from killin'. and it's short burst only. Well, you can dump skill points in it. And improve base speed with motorized armor, and points in that to get the benefit up from 1% per gear to 5%. So, 25% speed increase for 15 skill points. Yeah. Can't wait. But it's not bad, normally. It's hostile territory, and there's not really that much terrain. It's far from claustrophobic. I ain't complainin' about this specific one, just saying walking kinda blows in pretty much all MMOs.

So, the combat is poor enough to erode the success of most of these elements. What else was there... oh, right, crafting.

Crafting sucks.

Oh, you want more, of course. Well, there's crafting skills needed to use recipes from certain fields. Medical, optics, forcefield, explosive. That's it. Anything else is an everyman item. You pick up recipes very frequently. Usually for paint colors. In case you wanted to adjust your color scheme a bit. Recipes are one-use. So, while you have a recipe to turn 250 1-credit nucleotides into 100 3-credit purine nucleotides... I have enough basic math skills to know that what I picked up is a goddamn coupon for 50 credits off of purchasing 100 of these worthless pieces of scrap. They power an ability, but it's not a common one. It's stupid, because you can buy these anywhere.

You can also get recipes to modify gear. Make that shotgun armor-piercing... however that's supposed to work. These recipes make sense to be one-shot. You put it together at the crafting table, and you pay a lot of money, and your temporary weapon ('cause who's going to keep it more than a few levels anyway?) has a permanent boost. Nearly all quest rewards have some + to something. So, really, it's like paying 1-2x the going rate for the plain vanilla version in order to get the added juice. Too bad 90% of it has almost no useful effect. But, like I said, there's no game balance yet.

Ah well. If it doesn't pick up, I just won't buy it. I figured the $5 pre-order would be a dandy price for what amounts to a game rental. :)