In the realm of MMORPGs, there hasn't been really any significant additions that exist outside the realm of the sword and sorcery fantasy, as Tolkien's influence has seemed to be a driving force in seemingly every one out there, though there has been the exception here and there. Another exception to the rule that is set to storm onto PCs is Tabula Rasa, an upcoming MMORPG that throws to the wayside sword and sorcery for aliens and gun fights wrapped in a sci-fi setting.

The future is here, and as humanity you have found yourself almost completely wiped out by an alien menace known as The Bane. However, you've teamed up with some other aliens and learned the way of the Logos, imbuing yourself with mystical powers to help combat this alien horde who seek to destroy you and take the planets for themselves, gathering the resources they need and leaving it barren and worthless once they are done.

One thing that was clear from the closed door preview of Tabula Rasa we got to see at GDC is just how much battling and action will be on the screen at any given time. In most MMORPGs you might run across a scattering of enemies to do battle with, but for the most part it feels more like individual battles than a complete, full frontal war raging on with you only being a piece of the puzzle, not the entire puzzle. With Tabula Rasa, however, you will feel small in that the action is epically grand and makes you feel more like a combatant than the only star of the game.

The action of Tabula Rasa is split into two main sections: battlefields and instant spaces. The battlefields sounded as if they will be the areas typically known to MMORPGers, where you run around, find enemies, do battle with them, get experience, items, and then repeat for as long as you desire. The instant spaces, however, seemed to be the major focus of the preview and the thing that ultimately left us drooling for more. The instant spaces are where you'll run across puzzles, story focused missions that advance the full narrative of the game, and is where the epic battles seemed to be happening.

To get an accurate idea of what to expect from these instant spaces, imagine World of Warcraft meets Halo. As you are running around the environments, alien drop ships are depositing enemies, who are coming at you from all sides, and you're running side to side, releasing your gunfire and your special abilities, hiding behind cover, and generally having to behave rationally and intelligently to survive. As Richard Garriott explained to us during the preview, these story wars have a natural ebb and flow that happens from beginning to end, meaning that things will continue to play out even without you being the center of attention. For example, though we saw a character team up with some other players (which should be easy to do in the final game since fully integrated voice chat will be implemented) and NPCs early on in the fight when the ships were dropping down, the action was never centered squarely on this partying team. As the team climbed up a large hill, the camera was positioned in such a way to look down on the valley where we had just come from, and there was another drop ship landing and more action going on down there, and we didn't have to be down there for it to happen – the game played itself.

Though the game favors guns over melee, do not assume the controls handle like a regular FPS, where you'll need to be strafing left and right to avoid fire. Actually, Tabula Rasa handles like other MMORPGs, where once you click on an enemy you are doing battle with them, so don't go thinking crazy zigzagging will save your butt in the heat of combat, because you'll be permanently locked onto them until they are dead or you change your target up. Commands and actions seemed to be easily pulled off as well, as the left clicks of a mouse button used your weapon while the right button used the abilities the player has at hand. The game also implores a sense of tactics, as squatting down will help make you a smaller target (ducking behind a sand bag wall, for example, will reduce your damage since you'll be getting hit less since not as much as your body is visible) and you'll be able to reload your weapon even quicker during battle.

Enemies seemed pretty varied during the story mission we got to see, featuring several types of on-foot grunts, with various intelligences, as well as things like robotic helpers who probably had some of the most interesting AI of the preview, as there was one enemy called the shield drone that produced a bubble dome force field around everything in the immediate area, and it was impenetrable to all attacks; the only way to accurately combat this enemy would be to have one of your party actually get close enough to go inside the dome so you had a straight, uninterrupted shot at the enemy, taking them down and bringing down the force field with it.

Outside of these main story point missions, the rest of the battles sounded quite interesting as well, as it always seems like you are one step from extinction and that you must continue to work with others to make sure the planet you are on isn't wiped out and taken over. Now, some games having your city taken over is purely a "I'm better than you" mentality where it is mostly for show and to prove how one group is better than the other, but in Tabula Rasa losing your city will have drastic repercussions, such as losing the good factories for the better weapons and items and losing some system transportation as well, and the only way to get these back into your use is to take the city back under your control.

The character creation system seemed pretty nice as well, allowing you to make both male and female characters, fixing them up like you want both clothing and style wise, but also physical appearances. The physical appearances didn't seem as robust in some games, but there seemed to still be a ton of options so you won't be running across your doppelganger every few minutes while in the game. All characters in the game also start off the same as a recruit, so really in the beginning all you have to focus on is appearance and not what type of class and abilities you'd like to have. You'll next choose your next role at level 5 and then another one at level 15 and then so on and so on. Tabula Rasa also seems as if re-rolling characters shouldn't be hard at all, as you'll be able to load, save, and clone characters at anytime. So, you won't have to worry about losing all your work on one character just to experiment, because you'll be able to clone them, fool around with the newly cloned character, and if you don't like them go back to the one you had without missing a beat.

The game also features a couple of other things worth mentioning, such as the waypoint system, where if you've visited a place once before, you can instantly transport there at your will whenever you want, which should eliminate much of the needless trekking needed to get to some place and the half an hour or hour it sometimes takes for friends and partiers in a MMORPG to finally get together just to start a task. Also, the game will have a fully created alien language, where if you read up and study, you'll be able to fully read all the writing and glyphs you run across. Is the fully developed alien language a minor thing? Yes, but you know what they say, the devil is in the detail, and that one little factor instantly shows the developers are putting their love into this game. Tabula Rasa was flying under our radar before GDC, but now it is a brilliant blinding light we can't help but marvel over and eagerly wait to be released.