So, when I haven’t been working on my research, planning my warhammer army, role-playing, reading, eating, or sleeping, I’ve been playing a bit of Tabula Rasa. For those who missed my post over at Geeky Bastards, I tried Tabula Rasa out a few months back to see check out another non-WoW MMO and really see a bit more of what MMOs had to offer. With Tabula Rasa, I was quite impressed. Here’s a quick rundown of why I think I truly enjoyed this game.

First and foremost, Tabula Rasa is a sci-fi MMO – not fantasy. While this may not seem like a huge difference, for me, it makes all the difference in the world. While I enjoy fantasy games (Two Worlds, Titan Quest, Diablo I and II) and even some fantasy MMOs (Guild Wars); fantasy games really don’t immerse for me as well as they used to. That’s not to say I can’t get immersed into a fantasy game, only to say that I can get more immersed into a sci-fi game; the setting seems more real to me and it is easier for me to relate to the characters and situations.

With the help of my own psyche, Tabula Rasa brought characters and situations that were very easy for me to relate to, they had motives that were not straightforward and didn’t necessarily tell you everything about the situation they were asking you to do something about. Because of this, the outcome of the situation was difficult to predict and complex; sometimes a puzzle in it’s own right. What’s more, the moral or tactical decisions made during a quest would influence the outcome of that quest, which made for very rich gameplay.

There was one final detail that really raised Tabula Rasa as being a game above and beyond most others – the Logos elements and the Eloh pillars. In the game, your character picks up Logos elements which power certain special abilities and serve as the locks to certain doors. However, the logos elements also form a pictographic language which is slowly revealed over the course of the game. While at first blush, this might seem a bit primitive, there are close to 400 Logos elements representing ideas from items and quantities to ethics and body/mind dichotomies. Furthermore, scattered throughout the world, there are pillars with strings of Logos elements containing bits of wisdom. Some are quest related, but many can be found simply by exploring the world. For me, it was always very exciting and fulfilling to run across one of these pillars and wonder (or figure out) what it said, and what little bit of wisdom was being passed on.

When I think of all this, I’m saddened that the servers for Tabula Rasa will be turned off at the end of February. I feel like there are some things I’m going to miss out on because I never got the chance to explore it – like a book that I never finished reading.