The big deal here is the way in which the game allows thousands of players to shoot at each other (and the Bane) in real time. To achieve this fast-paced goal, Destination Games has designed a system that calculates all sorts of factors (are you standing behind cover, is your gun modded with a Logos, what armor does the enemy have, at what speed are they moving, etc.) in a split second to decide if your shot goes wide, their misses, or any sort of status effect occurs when the gun is fired. From what we've seen, this system works fairly well – and we cannot thank them enough for that targeting reticule.
As for the engine, Destination Games has gone its own way and crafted a 3D engine from the ground up. But what do you expect from a studio that's trying to "re-invent" MMOs? Early on, as we mentioned before, the game underwent a redesign to clean up the mishmash that was Tabula Rasa several years ago in its development cycle. This caused 75% of the code to be rewritten to give Tabula Rasa it's neon-futuristic glows and rounded graphical styling. We wish we could say more, but until the game goes live, all we can say is whatever they've done seems to work pretty damn well.
If nothing else, Tabula Rasa looks fantastic – with a GeForce 8600 GT video card, that is (256 MG minimum). The game also requires 1 GB of ram – 2 GBs for Vista users – or it will eat your hard drive alive while trying to load the alien landscapes and fast-moving combat graphics. We really don't recommend playing this game on a laptop or a desktop that's been recently upgraded to Windows Vista. XP should suffice for everyone else – but so far the game looks awfully choppy even on a high-end machine (it's still Beta, though, so nothing is definite).
Promises