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005 - Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa

posted: 2026/08/19

In honor of Michael Klamerus' birthday request, I'm going to take some time to discuss the weirdest MMO I've ever played: Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa. This was in the explosion of weird and wonderful MMO ideas released in the wake of World of Warcraft's explosive debut. Where as WoW copied much of it's play mechanics from Everquest, which in turn took inspiration from previous MUDs and CRPGs, Tabula Rasa sought to take it's gameplay inspiration from the FPS world.

TR was far from unique in this venture, attempting to follow in the seemingly unsurmountable shoes of Planetside. Planetside was a massive planet scale warfare MMO that played like the LAN party favorite Battlefield 1942, but pushed the player cap from 64 all the way up into the thousands. That lineage relied on very clean network code to maintain a fast paced twitch based play experience popular in single player first person shooters. This was always a difficult task for online games let alone massively multiplayer games. Some ideas worked well! Others not so well.

So what set Tabula Rasa apart? It focused less on large scale player vs player warfare with various vehicles and equipment to act as leverage, instead choosing to take it's lessons from games like World of Warcraft and it's ilk with a much slower paced gameplay, using simplified shooting logic with a greater focus on story telling and mission design. Players acted on behalf of mankind as player forces struggled to compete with alien forces for dominion.

The thing is, the game was kinda fun and definitely an interesting take on the formulas present. That being said, you can start to imagine why this might not have quite won over the fanbases of either massive FPS warfare fans or MMO RPG fans. The game tried to do both and tended to favor the more tedious aspects of them while foregoing the traits that appealed to their players. I bought my copy with a small group of friends who loved MMOs and within a week most had just gotten tired and moved back to WoW.

Now, it's not unusual to see WoW players try a different game for a couple of weeks before losing interest and returning to their drug of choice, but NCSoft had already released City of Heroes by this time. CoH might have never taken WoW's mantle as these player's primary game, but it never stopped them from spending the time to delve into a game entirely. Tabula Rasa just didn't hold their attention like some of the others. Most never kept their accounts active past the customary "first month free".

I'm glad this genre of MMO FPS/MMO action arcade games didn't die with TR. I think Warframe has successfully become an infinite money printing machine for it's company, so a PvE FPS MMO definitely works as a business model. Given Richard Garriott's attachment to the project also makes me wonder where he would have taken the story and world had the playerbase been more stable. Sadly Lord British was removed from the project after about a year and without that legend to defend it, support was abandoned due to the low player pop.

This post might seem like a very brief detailing of sorts, but partly that's because as I said, my friends only played the game for about a week or two around my birthday back in 2007. Nearly 20 years later my memories of this experience are less about details and more about the dreams of what might have been and the sadness of never getting to see that.

So I leave this here as my own personal memorial to what could have been.