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Tabula Rasa To Shut Down
NCSoft announced today that it will be closing down Tabula Rasa on February 28th. The sci-fi shooter-flavored MMO struggled for quite some time, despite recent attempts to draw in new players by announcements of new features, price reductions, and using Richard Garriott's trip into space as a promotion. We discussed Garriott's departure from NCSoft a couple weeks ago. This is NCSoft's second failed MMO, and apparently layoffs are in the works. They seem to be making an effort to make the game's last few months as fun as they can for their remaining players, though. "Before we end the service, we'll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009. We can assure you that through the next couple of months we'll be doing some really fun things in Tabula Rasa, and we plan to make staying on a little longer worth your while."
Last time the marketing department springs for a trip into space ...
They really WILL become a "tabula rasa".
This is why you spend 60 bucks on MMO's or other locked down games: just to see it disappear as the company goes under.
Asking around, no one so far has even heard of this game. I watched the intro video, looks cool. Too bad it's already over; I would say next time, look into advertising.
It's like when Bill Gates swam in a pool of money to promote Microsoft!
From what I read of it and the little I saw it was trying to kinda be a sci-fi World of Warcraft. Ok... But the problem is World of Warcraft is really good. Blizzard really did a lot right in that game, things other games had failed miserably at (like having a very easy, engrossing introduction to the game). So if you are going to try and take on WoW, well you'd better be damn good. They weren't so there you go.
The MMOs other than WoW that seem successful are the ones that try and offer a real different gameplay experience. Something like Eve Online or Warhammer. They aren't trying to be WoW, they have their own idea of what a game should be. Now that may not get you 10 million players, but it can get you a comfortable niche. There are people who don't like WoW's way of doing things. If you make a game for them, you've got a good chance.
While I certainly think a game can compete with WoW, and we will see one at some point that does, it is going to have to be really good, and good out of the gate. WoW does a whole lot right and is generally very polished. So you've got to get all that down. If you don't, well then you are going to have people try your game and say "Eh, WoW was better,' and migrate back. Just changing the theme a bit or adding some bits won't help.
Personally what I want to see is an MMO that is really good that isn't trying to be WoW. I'd really like a more PvP oriented MMO. Warhammer has potential, but right now really lacks polish. I'd like to see an MMO that is as good as WoW, but in a different area. That is going to have a much easier time succeeding than something trying to take on the king.
Its not just spending the money... nor the company collapsing. Disney shut down their free MMO VMK for no apparently good reason except that they seemed to want to generate bad will among their customers. At least NCSoft is trying to "promote good will".
Who wants to donate endless hours in development and management of the game? Who wants to pay for the servers? Who wants to contribute assets to the game: art, animation, story, dialog, etc?
Since the boxed sets are selling for $0.96 USD, they aren't going to recoup a whole lot of cash.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
This is a shame; TR had a lot of potential to be more than just another shooty take on MMOs. Ancient mysteries, xeno-archaeology, a strong theme of religion and myth, a dramatic war.... It could have been a lot more. Instead it was pretty bland at times. They had a lot of great ideas but they never seemed to implement them in time or well enough.
I was in the closed beta, and I really really wanted to like this game. The music was cool, the settings were fantastic, the scaling was pretty nicely done, and it was open to the casual gamer... but it was flawed. It just didn't grab a person.
As I said, it's really a shame. It could have been a lot more. Oh, well. I hope they learned something from it's failure. I just hope that 'Worlds of Starcraft' doesn't waltz in and take over the SciFi MMO slot.
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
Back in 1997, I was playing a character on the old TrekMoo, when the Q (the admins) were in the process of moving to new servers. They decided to all scorched universe on the remaining players and I have to say, that was a heck of lot of fun. The Borg invaded, the Romulans and Klingons got their ass kicked and we intrepid few in the federation were forced to make some tough choices that included sacrificing our ship. It was a small community of text based adventurers, but the collaborative effort made it a hell of a lot of fun.
I'm surprised there aren't more scorched earth games, where we build up communities just to have them torn down. I hope the loyal players of playing Tabula Rasa get to have the same kind of experience. I know it influenced me as to what good collaborative theaterical improvisation was all about.
And before anyone points Quake out, recall how long it took for them to release the source, and also recall that the release included none of the actual graphic assets or maps.
Firstly, I think you mean EMP not EMF. Secondly, EMP would have absolutely no impact on the bits that are stored on a hard drive platter, or a CD or DVD. Granted, those two forms of media won't last for thousand of years without severely degrading, but that property holds for paper also.
Our historic records are a scant fragment of what actually existed at one point, and imagine if the only pieces of entertainment we have today that can survive an archeologist digging them up in 50000 years would be a copy of ET for the Atari 2600 from the landfill out in the desert.
Learn something new.
It WAS a lot of fun. It just couldn't shake the stigma attached to it when it went through the public beta. The game had VASTLY improved throughout the year. They resolved many of the issues people had with the game. It is sad really.
This is exactly why MMO's don't lend themselves well to keeping a historical imprint on society.
Of all the criticisms I've heard of MMOs, I have to admit... that's a new one.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I'm sure other posters will mention Tabula Rasa's bugs, lousy control scheme, poor class balance, etc (typical MMO grievances) but to me the thing that always stood out about TR was its abysmal support for building communities.
Everyone's abuzz about Web 2.0 and "social networking," and somehow the TR devs didn't even see fit to have a Looking For Group feature in the game. The had on-line chat and a Friends list, and that's about it. The thing about massively MULTIPLAYER games is that they are only as good as the people you play with. Sure, a small percentage of MMO players exclusively solo, but for most people, the solo experience is basically a laggy, slightly glitchy single-player game, with extra monotonous grinding. In other words, you get bored of it after a month or two, max, just like any other single player game.
"Players come for the game, but stay for the community." -- I forget who said it, but that sums up most MMOs today. Compared to single-player games, any MMO is mediocre at best. The only reason people will pay $15/month for the MMO is to play with their friends. Tabula Rasa made it very difficult for me to locate people I might want to team with, let alone befriend. There was more incentive to solo than to assemble PUGs.
Suggestion to future MMO designers: Find a way to match up players with other players of similar game-play styles and compatible personalities. No, I'm not talking about in-game romance, just helping people find a good team. Match up Leeroy Jenkins with other Leeroy Jenkins, etc. Stop thinking of the players as an audience looking for "content." They're not. They're looking to hang out with friends and kill monsters.
Student: Is it true that the foundation of the universe is paradox?
Master: Well, yes and no.
For a lot of reasons not the least of which being such a thing would require a phenomenal amount of writing to be done to make all these unique quests and allow for all the branching. Hard enough to do something like that well in a single player game and in a huge multi player game, well it's near impossible. There's also technological hurdles to implementing such a thing.
At this point the closest you'll find to a game world you change is, again, in WoW. There are some quests that deal with a phased world. There are literally multiple versions of a given area and you experience the one relevant to your quest progression. So you do something and the world changes permanently because of it. However each person gets to do it. You are all in the same world, but there are multiple versions. Works pretty well.
At any rate the sort of thing you want isn't ever likely to come fully to fruition. You'd need something near a real artificial intelligence on the back end to deal with all this and a massive staff of writers and designers to try and implement this ever changing unique experience for millions of people.
With games you need to be satisfied to live in a small sandbox. There are going to be rules and boundaries of various kinds. That's part of what makes it interesting, fun, and doable. It is just like cards, you have to have a set of rules, limits on the deck and so on. If you just got people together and started drawing random shit on paper and trying to make a game you'd have the card game equivalent of Calvin Ball.
In terms of deep story and changing universe, you need to stick more to single player games, that's really the place it works. Play Mass Effect for a deep story, play WoW to kill night elves.
On the Ultima Online boards a few years ago, there was a discussion about player memorials (once a game has been around ten years, when a notable player passes away, it can have a real impact on the community - especially in a game where player houses can become landmarks). One of the arguments against player memorials was that there was no guarantee that the game would always be there, so it didn't seem the right place a true memorial.
One big EMF smackdown on the earth and its as if we never even existed past the early 2000's.
Well, much as I loved "Unbelievable," I don't think they're coming back, so we need not worry about that.
And anyway, do we really WANT to preserve the history of MMOs for future generations? They might see "LOLZ!!! N00BZ got pwned by agro horde!!!" and decide not to clone us back to life. Worse yet, they might emulate it.
First, I was supposed to beta test it. The installer kept giving me a weird error about a FIPS cryptographic package. I was never able to install it. The NCSoft Support team didn't seem to have a clue as to how to solve the problem and install the game. If anyone deserves to be sued, it's NCSoft. People bought TR with the expectation that it would be an on-going experience. It is now shutting down. The value that was expect is no longer.
They're using their grammar skills there.
The problem is that it's not just the software industry.
It may be fun now, but when a public beta is one dimensional and boring, this is what happens. And that summed up Tabula Rasa in a nutshell. Considering that the last few Origin games weren't that great (it peaked at 3-5), Garriott had lost his fastball.
MMOs are really about how good a game is at launch. The more bugs and poor gameplay there is, the worse the game will do. And it's hard to recover for a lackluster launch and first few months. Let's look at some examples.
City of Heroes had one of the cleanest launches of an MMO that I've ever seen. Almost no bugs, and for the first 20-30 levels, you don't really pay too much attention to how monotonous the game really is. Then the monotony gets to you, and players pushed through it. Personally, I think it was the costumes that made this game playable beyond those first 20 levels or so, as the costume generator is second to none. But the number of players dropped quicly after launch, because of that monotony. You can only go through so many "caves" or similar looking "installations" before you're done.
EQ2 launched, and the game was specifically designed to be just as hard as EQ, but with better graphics. There were a lot of interesting aspects to the game, but the #1 drawback is that you didn't play your real class until you hit lvl 20! You started off as a generic fighter/mage/healer/thief, and at lvl 10, you refined it down a little more, and at lvl 20 you finally gained your ultimate class. Well, nobody liked that part. While it was launched a week or two before WoW, EQ2 suffered for that initial stupidty. In many ways, EQ2 now is a better game than WoW is today, with a lot less downtime, a heck of a lot better with new content, and a more mature player base. But it is doubtful that it will ever recover from the blah launch it had. Maybe if Blizzard destroys WoW with some stupid expansion, EQ2 will explode, minues the PvP crowd.
WoW launched after a pretty positive closed and open beta. And unless you were on one of the original "terrible 20" servers (I was on one), the game wasn't too bad. Sure, they took about 6 months to stop having the same exact problem after EACH update, but the game has a genuine "fun factor" to it that didn't wear off until you hit level cap, unless you enjoyed PvP. Blizzard made a LOT of mistakes, but what they didn't screw up was making the game flat out fun. There's a reason they have over 10 million subscribers world wide: it's fun to play. It will remain to be seen if Blizzard's continual push for more Arena style PvP starts to piss the player base off, but it's hard to get a large group of friends to switch games, and WoW has most of them hooked deep. The only things that will be a WoW-killer are Blizzard and time.
LotRO was a pretty poor beta experience. When one class is completely dominant over all others, the game has problems. The primary healer class was also the best offensive spellcaster in the game. A group of 4 of them could handle pretty much all content easily in the early stages, leaving a poor taste in the player's mouth. It's not surprising that with all the history and the success of the LotR movies, the game saw decent numbers at launch. They didn't last very long.
AoC was a disasterous beta, in the fact that the open beta only let you experience the first 20 levels, which happened to contain the only fun part of the game. Look at it now. It's going to be the next game to shut down their servers. I'd guestimate that over 75% of the players that bought the game for launch left within 2 months. That's a staggering number.
Warhammer Online might make a decent dent in the market. For all the delays and the removal of content prior to launch, the game was actually a hell of a lot of fun in beta. I hate PvP for the most part, and even I enjoyed my beta experience a lot. I believe the game is doing well so far, from what friends are saying. The game didn't get a lot of good hype based on it's name alone, so the hype was all about the gameplay itself. This one could have staying power.
We won't even get into SW:G and everything that went wrong with that game. We'll just cross that one off as a colossal mistake.
Yes, it looks like a great game, actually. I would probably have played it, too. Would I have been upset with bugs, yes, but the genre of the game is what I like. In truth, there are so many games that it's hard to know what is out there at any one time.
So my question is, if the game has improved drastically, why are they making it free for the last month, if only to say to all the new players, "Ha! we told you it would be worth it" ??
If anything, they should make it free now and see how much play it garners till the end of the year. Enough mew players (and disgruntled early adopters) may come to like it enough to pay for more later.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Warhammer Online I would have to say will fall into your COH assessment. I played it up to level 26 and got bored and tired of the RVR content. It was repetitive and always the same. People were/are stupid and never worked together (on both sides.) Every match pretty much was the same, with the same tactics, and the same look. It was worse than sewers and buildings in COH. At least they changed layout in COH.
Now, you take that formula and make end game out of that? No thanks! I was sick and tired of the game when I hit level 20 without playing RVR and had to go to the other areas and complete partial chapters just to level. Then I found out RVR experience was a pretty huge part of the game and I started RVR'ing more. Then the boring repetitive run Morkain's Temple (sp?) over and over and over again until you got sick of it.
Granted, I'm not a fan of PVP/RVR content. I think it inspires all the wrong in people and they become competitive rather than cooperative. The type of people that play PVP games are generally less inclined to help other people. Nowhere better did this show than in Public quests. It wasn't about helping people complete it. It was about who could heal/damage/tag/collect more than everyone else. Then you toss in the random loot roller and you had a situation like I had with my friends. You see that a PQ was near completion, you'd jump in and get a few shots to have the opportunity just to get loot and out roll the players that had been there progressing the quest from the start.
Games like these make me absolutely hate PVP. Not because of all the good things that COULD come from it... but because of all the bad that DOES.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
In a word: No. This has been tried many times before. Perhaps the most notable project has been WorldForge (http://worldforge.org/).
For a bit of background, I've been developing MMO games professionally for over a decade, and did text MUD coding in college starting in 1993. I currently own and operate the MMO Meridian 59 , a game that originally launched in 1996. So, I have some idea of what is required for making an MMO game. I'm also a professional who has shown a personal interest in maintaining an online game world even after it was originally shut down; 3DO shut down the game in 2000, and my business partner and I bought the rights to the game and re-launched it. Let me tell you, that has turned out to be a somewhat thankless task.
The main problem with a "community MMO" as you suggest is that you need a strong, central vision for the game. You can't just have a bunch of people working on things and hope it comes together as a cohesive project at the end. You need someone like Linus with Linux, someone who can direct the path of the project. These types of people tend to be fairly rare, though.
Another major problem is that MMO games aren't just technological, they're also creative. One part of being a professional game designer is being able to realize that most of your ideas suck. It's easy to sit around and spitball ideas all day, but refining them and turning them into something that can be implemented into a fun game is a pretty rare skill. And, most people contributing to the project probably don't want to hear, "Your game ideas suck, stick to coding." The reason a coder would work on a game rather than another project is probably because you want to have input on the formation of the game. Again, you need that strong, central vision to keep things going.
Finally, game development is really hard. I've tried to start up a lot of small-scale projects in the past, bootstrapping the project instead of getting a questionable deal on funding form publishers. Of the few dozen people I've interacted with in the past few years, about 95% of them have flaked out on me. Most of them weren't experienced game developers, so when the real work reared its ugly head, they were suddenly scarce. As I said above, it's easy to sit around and spitball different ideas to see what might stick, but actually turning that idle chatter into an actual game is much more difficult than people realize. Without a paycheck, it's hard to keep people productive when the "real work" starts.
You're pretty off-base here. I'm not saying MMO servers are horribly complex (the server for Meridian 59 can be (and has been) run on my laptop), but they require a bit more than your typical IRC server, particularly if you want to support more than a few hundred people on a server. Most of the gameplay is calculated on the server, mostly to help reduce the effects of cheating. That's one of the reasons why a "distributed peer-to-peer" MMO is unlikely to work, unless you come up with some sure-fire way to prevent cheating. Given how much people have complained about WoW's Warden system on Slashdot in the past, that's a tall order to fill.
Some thoughts from someone who has some experience.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
My pleasure. I enjoy a good discussion about an area I'm pretty passionate about.
I don't know much about Cube/Sauerbraten, so I can't comment on it directly. I will say that it's nowhere near as complex as an MMO. The game boasts 7 weapons, whereas Meridian 59, which is hardly the largest game, has 13 melee weapons, 4 ranged weapons, and over 150 individual spells that all have to be balanced against each other. It has many, many rooms, which are about as complex as DOOM 1 levels, all interconnected. Now, imagine a game like WoW that has hundreds of weapons, armors, spells, stats, etc.
But, let me give an example of what I was talking about: MUDs.
Text MUDs were the predecessors to modern MMO games. They were entirely text-based, but they shared a lot of features with modern MMO games. The two primary game-focused ones were LP-MUDs (which allowed user programming on the fly) and DIKU MUDs. DIKU MUDs were a lot more popular for two reasons: there was only one administrator and the popular verions had a game world right out of the box. LP-MUDs had a tradition of allowing the top players to become Wizards (coders) on the game, and you usually had to write most of the game world yourself. The shared administration duties caused a lot of schisms, and probably at least half of the LP MUDs out there were formed when someone got into an argument and took a copy of the existing game to create their own version of the game.
And, in games where you had a variety of people working on them, you often had special issues. For example, every new player wanted to have the "best" area, which mean that you had to have something special in your area that was more desireable. Perhaps the most powerful weapon or armor, so you had the original cause of "mudflation". Or, you had one person working on an X-Men themed area right next to one area with Ninjas and another area parodying My Little Pony. A far cry from the (mostly) coherent storylines found in current graphical games.
MUDs used to be what people who wanted to do an online game made back in the day. There were a lot of them, and the best ones (and most of the ones that still exist today) had very strong, central authorities to support them.
One other thing to consider: What is the weakest area of open source development? Usually the documentation. It's not sexy and few people really want to do it. However, game development is about 50% documentation (that is, the game design). I noticed Sauerbraten has a Wiki, so it's ahead of that game. But, look at the documentation the vast majority of open source projects out there; the documentation only becomes mature once the project has been out there long enough. That's death for a large scale game like an MMO.
We're talking an MMO here, though, not something like a personal Neverwinter Nights server. The difference is trying to run a D&D game for your friends vs. trying to run D&D games for a convention. If you just want to play with your friends, then you're not talking about an MMO anymore. Not to say that something like a game server where you could play with your friends wouldn't be cool, but it's not the same.
So, there's some clarification on my points. I think the differences between a multiplayer FPS and an MMO is important. In fact, the first "M" stands for "massively", which was intended to separate these games from the 16 player FPS servers that were available back in the day.
Now, all this isn't to say that I think a community project would never work or that I wouldn't support one. I know a few of the WorldForge people and really respect them for the work they've done. But, I've heard from them first-hand about the issues they've faced.
More of my thoughts.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog