Richard Garriott’s last great effort to make the MMO of our dreams is to shut down in February 2009. It’s always particularly sad when an MMO meets its end – they don’t get to be saved from the bargain bin like other games. They’re just gone. Sniff.
The official message is here:
So it is with regret that we must announce that Tabula Rasa will end live service on February 28, 2009. Before we end the service, we’ll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009.
Free stuff! Hurray! I mean: Yes, what a shame.
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What a shame.
I’m still surprised no-one has made the code for an MMO, and then just sold that. Let the MOD community make it into a real game, and you make profit, but don’t have to host the game.
Sounds smart to me.
There’s gotta be some kind of witty comment you can make here, about Tabula Rasa and wiping the slate clean, or… something.
You could joke about finally killing Lord British, or Lord British killing Richard Garriot, maybe? WHERE ARE THE LULZ?
I was excited about Tabula Rasa for a bit, actually got into the beta when they were still running limited hours. After about 2 hours with it I was already sick of it. Kind of a bad sign when a developer is telling you, “No you can’t play this all day you have to appreciate every minute!” and my response is, “That’s fine I’m done”. I’m someone who tends to latch onto a new game and play it to excess, but TR never caught me.
I don’t remember that much about TR since I never touched it again since beta. I just remember the feeling that I really had no choices to make, no options, no customization. It barely even qualified as a roleplaying game, I could probably name two or three FPS games that give you more options, and those occur within 5 – 30 minute rounds rather than being stretched out over weeks.
Those games would be Frontline: Fuel of War, Source: Empires (mod), Alien Infestation (er whatever that awesome Unreal Tournament top-down mod was), I’m thinking of several more that I can’t really remember the names of off-hand.
Those games were also rather good action games, whereas Tabula Rasa wasn’t even half the shooter that Hellgate: London was, and HG:L was not a good shooter.
The cloning system was a nice touch, but just an admission that every character of X class was identical so you might as well just skip it the second time. The amount of skills you had and the weapon choices, compared to making a new character and taking them to max level in a typical MMORPG, aren’t even comparable. I wouldn’t be surprised if TR had, total, about 1% to 2% as many skills available as either WoW or Warhammer Online.
Tabula Rasa drastically failed to fill the requirements for either genre it fit into. I would compare it (unfavorably) to Hinterland, another hybrid game, but it doesn’t even come close. If TR had the budget of an AAA MMORPG, I have no fucking clue where it all went. Advertising, probably.
Making games is hard. TR was a bad game, but the graphics and stuff will die with it. Is like a viking burial, wen a game die, we burn the source code, models, music, etc,.. with it. Very expensive, but is how this work on gaming.
A viking burial is a brilliant analogy. When MMO’s die, they basically just put the servers in a boat, torch it and kick it out onto a lake. Nothing is left behind but the memories and the now-worthless DVD’s.
Cheers for the death of all MMO’s! Cheers for a MMO-free future!
That’s really not economically viable. Ignoring for now that NCSoft’s employees and management are part of a publicly traded company and thus legally mandated to not make facially bad economic choices, there’s probably a good deal of licensed code and artwork.
Just like it’s a bad idea to pay people to not produce a product, it’s also generally a bad idea to produce a product when people won’t pay you for it.
It is a major pity for Tabula Rasa. It wasn’t an amazing game, but it was a worthwhile one, and more than the average WoW clone. It wasn’t even popular enough to get private servers, though, so once it’s gone, it’s probably gone for good unless NCSoft decides to restart them later or start selling the code.
I didn’t say release the source, but release the binaries. All the engines and code remains closed. But this will let people host their own Tabula Rasa servers. Similar like how Counterstrike or TF2 servers work, I suppose. It’s a different case with open-sourcing Quake 1.
If the artwork isn’t free, then it can be removed. Let the community design their own artwork.
However, if the server-side app hasn’t been designed to be shareable, I suppose it will involve more work to make that happen. Which isn’t going to happen in this case…
At some point in the not too distant future some of these MMO companies are going to have to rethink their subscription models. I rather enjoyed the TR beta when I got into it. Combat can be loosely described as a sort of proto-Mass Effect system, which was good fun, and the setting was interesting. But it wasn’t enough to justify the fee in my mind. Same with WAR recently. Loved the game, but the experience boils down to repeatedly running the same battlegrounds, or assaulting identical keeps, and I’m not paying £10 a month for that privilage. Inevitably I’ve found my way back into WoW again, just in time for WOTLK.
The problem is that by and large, most MMO players are going to pick one title and pay for that monthly. Particularly in the case of MMOs in the more traditional WoW vein; you can’t compete directly with a game which has 4 years of polish and a population of 11 million subscribers. We need more EVEs and Planetsides which offer something genuinely different.
I think it is a shame that so much effort was put into this and now it’s all going to be gone – funeral pyre style, as Tei said.
However, it did amuse me to walk into PC World today and see their clearance section. Anyone want to buy a copy of Tabula Rasa for £14.99?
it’s just so sad that this game ended like this.. would be nice if they released some sort of serverpack or somethin’… cause, if they just gonna throw it away and shut everything down.. why dont just share?.. oh. well, i will miss this game.
Personally, I think its junk that te source code can’t be set out on the internet, then the game could keep going, i mean, they closing it anyway, so they wont get anything, y not let ppl keep playing, or r they that perverse?