Richard Garriott`s Tabula Rasa was an MMORPG developed by Destination Games and published by NCsoft, designed in part by some of the creators of Ultima Online including Richard Garriott. The game was an RPG that blends certain shooter aspects into the combat system. It was officially released to retail on November 2, 2007, with customers that pre-ordered the game allowed access to the live servers from October 30, 2007. The development team released updates, called "Deployments," nearly every month since launch. The game required monthly subscription. Tabula Rasa was about humanity`s last stand against a group of aliens called "The Bane". The story takes place in the near future on two planets, Arieki and Foreas, which were in a state of constant conflict between the AFS (Allied Free Sentients) and The Bane. The term tabula rasa means scraped tablet or clean slate in Latin, referring to a fresh start, or starting over.

According to the developers, the game included the ability for players to influence the outcome of a war between the player characters and the NPCs. Tabula Rasa closed as of February 28, 2009, with servers becoming free to play on January 10, 2009. However, the developers decided to set the servers to free-play a month early, and as of December 23, free play had begun. As of this date, no Tabula Rasa servers are active, meaning that the game can no longer be played, though there are private server projects in development.

There once was an advanced alien species known as the Eloh. They freely shared the knowledge of Logos, the power to convert between matter and energy with just the mind, to less advanced races. One of these less advanced races, the Thrax, used this power to wage war against the Eloh, a war which the Eloh won but at a great cost. This led to a great divide in the Eloh. One faction wanted to keep on spreading the knowledge as they had before. The other, called the Neph, sought to control the development of "lesser races" as to ensure they, the Neph, would always be the superior species. This inner conflict led the Neph faction to leave the Eloh and seek other allies, among them the defeated Thrax, this species along with others joined to form the Bane, which now exists under the control of the Neph. As one of their first acts, they attacked the Eloh world, the surviving Eloh fled and were scattered among the worlds they had previously visited. The Bane attacked Earth sometime in our near future. Humanity was hopelessly outmatched and the majority was completely wiped out. Luckily the Eloh had left behind some of their technology that had the ability to make wormholes to other worlds. There, humans found other species doing the same thing they had, fighting against the Bane just to survive. They banded together to form the Army of the Allied Free Sentients to fight against the Bane with their lives on the line. According to information from the game`s manual, it`s been roughly 5 years since Earth was attacked. It was eventually discovered that Earth had not been destroyed as once thought, but had instead become a massive staging ground for the Bane. From there they strengthened their forces and increased attacks upon the AFS.

The combat mixes in some aspects from shooters to add some real time action elements to the game. It still is not an outright shooter and features sticky targeting and has dice rolling based on character stats underneath. Stickiness can be adjusted to fit the preference of the player. Some weapons like the shotgun don`t use the sticky targeting. In addition to a hit-miss system, Tabula Rasa adjusts the damage based on the situation. Real-time factors like weapon type, ammo type, stance, cover, and movement are taken into account. The enemies are reported to have AI that will try to take advantage of the terrain, their numbers, and will try to flank the players. All this mix of system based combat and realtime movement and physics system creates a gameplay which encourages the player to think tactically; i.e. to take cover behind a pillar to get some time to reload the weapon while the enemies are getting into position again.

Tabula Rasa had a tree character class system. Everyone started out as first "tier" (branch) Recruit and as they progress they were able to branch out. The second "tier" included the Soldier and Specialist, which in turn had two subclasses of their own each. There were a total of 4 tiers. Tabula Rasa also had a cloning function at each tier. It worked like a save function for characters at the branching point and allowed the player to try out the other branch without having to repeat the first several levels. Introduced in patch 1.4.6 were the hybrid characters. These were humans who have had their DNA blended with either Thrax, Forean or Brann DNA to produce different stats and bonuses to the character. Only full humans were available at the beginning, with the hybrid DNA becoming available via quest chains during play which in turn unlocked the ability to create hybrids on that server at the creation screen, or via cloning.