Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa

Source: Wikipedia, "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_Rasa_(video_game)," available under the CC-BY-SA License.

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 is an RPG that blends certain shooter aspects into the combat system. 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 took 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, which refers 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 on February 28, 2009, with servers slated to become free to play on January 10, 2009, but were set as three weeks earlier by the developers.

Background:

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 is controlled by 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 to survive. They banded together to form the Army of the Allied Free Sentients to fight against the Bane.

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.