By Jim Rossignol on November 22nd, 2008 at 1:41 pm.
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.
Awww.
I’m sad now. I always had a soft spot for this game.
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What a shame.
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It’s fun, just not MMOey enough to keep people playing. The content runs out and there’s not even anything to grind for, no end game or anything.
I’d recommend people try it when it’s free. The early levels are really good.
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What a shame, indeed.
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What a shame, Last time I buy a CE edition for an MMO
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What a shame.
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Oh my God, Tabby!
What a shame.
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That was quick.
It is sad and all, but that was rapid.
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I quite liked this when I played the free trial thing.
If they had found a way to make the pricing follow the same convention as Guild Wars, I’d be still playing this now.
I have this real problem with monthly subscription games, though.
What a shame.
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What killed the game for me: nerf #1: a instakill weapon, nerf#2: making wildlife a real challegenge.
Message to others MMORPG devs: DON’T NERF players.
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When did what a shame become a catchphrase?
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You didn’t get that memo?
What a shame.
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Since, this is one of the few times google doesn’t make it a stupid question:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=5DAPXMZk2iw&fmt=18
What a shame
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It is too bad that when MMOs die the developers can’t/don’t offer up a way to keep playing. Such as a way to host smaller servers or even convert the server side of the game to run on the desktop essentially making it a single player game. Admittedly a very large, difficult, desolate and tedious single player game.
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What a sham.
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What a shame.
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When I first played it, I was very impressed by the class design philosophy which seemed to be “make every spec of every type of character over-powered”. I had gotten sick of dying when I pulled two mobs instead of one in WoW. In Tabula Rasa your character is meant to be a special ‘Receptive’ and they followed through mechanic-wise, you’re a one-man platoon at any level and against almost anything within ten levels.
Then, unspeakably, they started ill-concieved nerfs. They did this while some serious bug and UI issues were still a problem. Unforgivable. But this doesn’t mean it was easy. The sheer number of enemies that could spawn at capture points was immense plus for the first time in MMO history there were mobs that required actual tactics as opposed to rehearsed button presses: the Predator, with it’s near instant-kill death ray and near invulnerable frontal armour, but dies of three EMP rifle hits from the rear.
It’s actually the only PvE MMO I’ve really really liked. I left though due to the nerf and on-going issues with the Injector Pistol which fired in fits and starts: two darts, then one, none for five seconds, then one, none for five seconds, two darts, etc regardless of heat status.
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When MMOs die, I just feel bad for those who subscribed. The game plus monthly fees all for nought. At least Hellgate had a single player component (although I don’t think I’d put myself through that tedious grind again). What a shame that neither of these games worked out.
Perhaps this is proof that the MMO market already is saturated. Or maybe its just proof that publishers set their expected profits too high. Game doesn’t have 1.5million players = failure. I’d like to see what’d happen if a big publisher/developer managed to make an MMO that would be considered a success with just 50k players.
What a shame.
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Curse the lack of an edit button.
As an aside, how long until the next ‘big’ MMO is to be closed? And which one?
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WoW closes: Blizzard realises their subscribers are annoying.
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.emahs a tahW
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WoW closes: Blizzard realises their subscribers are annoying.
Congratulations, you have just won a thousand internets!
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Rei.
LoTR? or Age of Conan (that will be a real shame)
I always feel sorry for people who enjoyed the game and played it since release. They had great adventures, made friends as well as enemies and now it is going to die. A sad thing…
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I have really poor taste in MMOs, this was the one I bought when Ryzom went bankrupt for the second time…
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Sony actually has a smart model for its mmo’s. Sub one sub them all.
It’s a smart enough model to keep planetside going, wretched thing that it is.
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Planetside was awesome.
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No matter how sad it is when an MMO closes, it’ll never be as sad as when Disney closed Virtual Magic Kingdom. Irrepressible sadface reading that story in PCG.
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Jim I’ll note that you said “was” and i’ll agree. Getting together over teamspeak and organising bombing runs over major battles. I was a flight controller and a tail gunner.
I can’t wait til an mmofps capitalises on that potential.
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@Helio & Jim: Here here! Whoever can do Planetside for the current/future MMO generation will be a hero.
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Planetside WAS awesome.
I quit TR two weeks into the months worth of sub that came with the box. Switch625 made an interesting point – why can’t they use a Guild Wars model for pricing? Well, the obvious answer is that GW was designed to run 99% on the client machine so they don’t need massive content servers. THe MMO aspects are really just chatrooms. The rest is more like Diablo 2. The real question is why more new MMO makers don’t factor this into their calculations so at least its an option.
Age of Conan, spawns new instances of a map after about three people turn up (it felt like that anyway.) but they also charge a sub. Never made any sense to me. I never ran across more than four or five people at a time on AoC. Funcom aren’t stupid and must have been turning a profit from AO somehow for the last many years so I doubt they’ll have to close AoC unless there are recurring licensing costs which make it uneconomic. I’d like to go back and play an AoC that wasn’t a soulless suckfest after level twenty.
I hope LOTR doesn’t close down. I bought the lifetime sub for that. Haven’t played it since about a month after launch but I intended to go back. Too much like WOW though and I’m done with that.
WAR was great. Loved it. Then they wanted me to pay and I couldn’t be bothered.
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Oh, meant to say. Tabula Rasa models a war on an alien planet but you can only play one side. Huh?
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Bugger, I got scooped on the what a sham.
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Speaking of PlanetSide, which one of you RPS fellows teased us with news about a big update or something? WAS IT YOU, JIM!?
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It’s a shame that online games are allowed to disappear completely. In my not at all humble opinion the public should be given access to the source code once the publisher deems the game not financially viable. The subscribers has more than paid for it.
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It’s definitely an Or Something. It’ll be announced in the new year. It’s not New Game exciting, just something fun.
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Hi there! I just stumbled across this opportunity where you can make $130 for each person you sign up, $10 for each person that person signs up for you, and $5 for every person that person signs up for you!!! Take advantage of this great opportunity while you can! Make money online now: http://www.lwsfreedom.com/id/greentitan
Merry Christmas!!!
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The world has one fewer WoW clone. And nothing of value was lost.
NOT A SHAME.
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On the point about MMOs not staying in the bargain bin… I still regularly see copies of Auto Assault on the shelves of Gamestation, HMV et al. So you never know, TR might now fit into the uber-niche that collectors of unplayable games are just waiting to fill.
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That sounds like an exciting deal, g! I could use that money to pay for my Tabula Rasa subscripti…oh.
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This is sad, but I really have no sympathy for greedy MMO publishers who charge $10+/month for their game. Firstly, there really isn’t room in the market for a dozen expensive MMOs. Secondly, most MMOs aren’t worth $10+/month. Publishers that realize this have had much success with smaller and cheaper MMOs.
If this game had launched with, or at least switched to a free ad-supported model, or moved the price down to $5/month, then they probably wouldn’t be here. At least I can say that I would have paid for at least one month in that situation.
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What a shame.
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Oh my god, Lord British!
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What the developers should do is release the binaries for the server app, and its setting files. That way, some people out there can build/host their own Tabula Rasa servers. Maybe some people even mod them to create a more interesting gameplay/tweaks…
Even better, if the world editor is included. This could be the first MMO mod ever.
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This.
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I’d be willing to bet that if TR’s source was released, someone else could actually make it financially viable. $1/month sub to keep the user’s server up (and a hardy community updating the game) could lead to an interesting situation. The gamers controlling the game.
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Well… 15€/month (and i have full price to start)to play a game, or buy a game i can play for free as long as i want? Easy choice.
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Guru Meditation
Well i think you get my point.
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I was talking with a friend about this last night: Why do developers keep trying to create new MMORPGs? It seems like a ridiculously risky prospect. How many of these things are actually successful? How many teams put years of effort into creating their game, only for it to end in failure and the end of the company? It just seems crazy.
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I can’t say I’m surpised – it had a whiff of DOOMED from day 1. Any time somethings comes along saying it’ll revolutionise change the world, then fails to, its days are numbered.
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Not really suprised, but damn that was fast wasn’t it? Are they just cutting their losses early or are they truly boned?
MMO’s of this style really don’t work in a sci-fi setting(I actually kinda believe no MMO like this works but whatevs).
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What a shame.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
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