Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa was Richard Garriotts big sci-fi swing after Ultima Online, and it had this wild premise about humanity scattered across the galaxy fighting an alien empire called the Bane. You picked a class, leveled up through hybrid shooter-RPG combat, and unlocked a branching tree of specializations as you went. The setting was genuinely cool, with these alien worlds and dropships and power armor, and there was a real sense that something big was being built. Unfortunately the launch in 2007 was rough, the systems felt unfinished, and NCsoft pulled the plug less than two years later in February 2009. Garriott himself ended up in a legal fight with NCsoft over how it all went down. People remember it as one of those games that had a really great idea trapped inside a game that needed another year in the oven.