A focus on storytelling
“In most MMOs, missions are a thing where you get the level 1 missions take you to the level 1 XP farming fields, and after you farmed over here for XP and hit level 2, you’ll find missions that send you over to the level 2 farming fields where you continue this fairly repetitive behavior that continues throughout your play experience. Compared to, say, a solo-player game, which has culminating experiences of accomplishment, MMOs tend to be the level grind, and not much more than that as your general play pattern.

“In Tabula Rasa, we create missions where receiving a mission is in a fairly traditional way, talking with NPCs, but missions are far more sophisticated, and you actually have to pay attention to what you’re doing. You’ll often receive missions that are by multiple subfactions that run counter to each other. You can complete one, but at the cost of being able to complete the other. You have to not only pay attention to what you’re doing, but there are many ethical parables built into that, and depending on how you choose to finish those missions, they’ll affect the way people respond to you further into the game. These mission threads—these arcs—ultimately build up to climaxes that we conclude inside of instances.”

Action-oriented combat
“Unlike most MMOs, where you’re probably familiar with the highlighting an opponent and then ignoring what’s happening in the 3D world—because nothing’s really happening in the 3D world—instead, you focus on your shortcut bar, where you fireball, fireball, fireball, sword swing, healing potion in order to do your maximum damage over time and it almost becomes this turn-based whack-a-mole that you play with pretty much every encounter throughout your gameplay experience.”

“You’ll notice Tabula Rasa has much less UI on the screen than a lot of other MMOs. You’ll also notice that we’re constantly in mouse-look—there’s no mouse pointer on the screen. Your reticule is right in the center of the screen. You have the left mouse button for your weapon, the right mouse button for your abilities. Your targeting reticule sticks to the most recent thing you look at. It’s not an arcade game, it’s your attributes and equipment die-rolled against your opponents attributes and equipment, and you get targeting assistance from the game itself.”

“The voice chat in Tabula Rasa is fully integrated, it’s built in as a base feature of the game, you don’t need any other kind of utilities. Because of the pace of Tabula Rasa, the voice chat is a considerably superior way to play the game.”

“While you’re standing behind cover, the lower half of your body is standing out of view range to opponents on the far side, and that decreases substantially the probability of getting hit. If you crouch down behind cover, not only are you further covered by sandbags, but it also increases the accuracy of the bead of your weapon and you’ll do more damage. On the other hand, while you’re crouched down you’re quite immobile, and you’re quite vulnerable to hand-to-hand damage. Monsters will not only move around to get a better bead, but they’ll walk over and either rifle-butt you or kick you to the ground.”

You can clone your characters
“We believe Tabula Rasa could be the only MMO that allows you to load, save and clone your character at any point in time you want. And we’ve coupled that with an unusual class structure. If you look at most MMOs, you start the game with your first choice is what class are you going to be. And that’s a permanent decision you make, when you haven’t even seen the game yet, basically. Most people, if they get to level 50 and want to start a new class, you have to start back over again at level 1. Most people find that a fairly painful process to start all over again, so most people will only explore one, maybe two or three, of the classes the game offers, and the rest of the content is wasted on an individual player. Instead, we built a class tree, where everyone starts off as a recruit. After five levels you become a soldier or specialist, if you pick soldier, you can become a commando or ranger, etc. But since you can load and save or clone your character at any point in time along that continuum, if I have a commando and I want to explore what it’s like to be a ranger, I just have to load up the character I made just before that branch to progress through the other side. It’s a clone of your other character. It has all the same attributes as your other character, it has all the same mission plugs as the previous character, and they all have access to the same meta-inventory.”

“You can change your gender, but what has to stay the same is your last name. And the reason why we keep that is two-fold. We want your friends to be able to find you—no one can have the same last name as you—but we also don’t want you to be able to escape anonymously from anyone you’ve treated poorly. Your first name distinguishes each of the members of your family. You don’t have to create a clone; you could just start a new character if you so chose. Your whole family of characters is related by last name, a shared inventory and a shared history as it relates to other people within the game.”