Tabula Rasa - GDC Previews

With Tabula Rasa having been in development for some time and completely redesigned at one point, this GDC presents a good opportunity to get a grip on how it is turning out.  Here's the current list:

• IGN
• Shacknews
• Gamemusketeer

...and a snip from Shack:

"It's still an RPG," Garriot said overtop the cracks of laser blasts and sounds of marching soldiers. Garriott's team had wasted no time, dropping its saved spaceman straight into an instanced scenario. The basic premise of Tabula Rasa is fairly straightforward: a world-destroying alien race called the Bane has invaded, and players--each representing survivors of their home world--must unite to bring them down. Anyone who has ever read a comic book can probably skip that portion of the instruction manual.

Yet while some games focus on over-arcing stories, the emphasis in this case seems is placed on smaller-scale encounters. Garriott described a method that involves presenting the player with moral choices, reminiscent of a game like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and indeed the instance portion of Tabula Rasa felt very much like a rich single-player experience. Garriott likes to refer to these situations as "ethical parables," and the particular parable that he was sharing with us apparently involved a lot of alien ass-kicking. An isolated Bane research facility is turning dead soldiers into human-killing monstrosities, and the player is tasked with infiltrating the premises and "ethically" blowing it up.