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An Inside Look At Tabula Rasa's Failure
Massively notes a couple of posts from people who worked at NCSoft while Tabula Rasa was in development. Adam Martin says the lengthy, wandering development cycle led management to push it through before it was ready. "Very late, they eventually hit upon a good formula, a good core game," but, "Before they could actually make that game, a difficult decision was taken to push the team to the wall and force an early beta test." Scott Jennings suggests that early warning signs, like the tepid reaction to the beta, were largely ignored. "One of the mantras that went around production discussions after Auto Assault's launch square into the pavement was that if you can't get people to play the beta for free, you have serious, serious issues. Tabula Rasa had those issues. Not as bad as Auto Assault — there were people doggedly playing every night and presumably enjoying themselves, and metrics were duly assembled to measure every movement those testers took. But it was pretty clear, at least from my completely disassociated and busy with my own thing viewpoint, that there wasn't a lot of excitement."
You don't have to be successful. The wages of the incompetent managers in charge alone outstrip many hard working, gainfully employed people.
Scott's summary really matches with my own experiences in my industry.
Many managers want all of the credit, and will accept none of the blame.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Only so long you can take. While it is nice to say "We'll just keep working on it till it's done," that isn't realistic. There's two major problems that can result:
1) It costs too much. Publishers have to make money on the games they publish. You can't ask them to just toss money down a black hole. Well if a development team spends a decade working on something with nothing to show for it, all the while collecting their salaries, needing equipment and so on, this puts the publisher in a bad position. They are so far in the hole that even if the game is successful, they may not make back all they spent. So while I can certainly understand why publishers are going to push a release at some point.
2) Duke Nukem Forever syndrome. Here's an example where they are self financing so they CAN do development for many years. The problem is it isn't working. At a certain point, you can't improve you game. Part of the reason is just that with really long cycles focus can get lost and such. However the bigger reason is technical. You are developing for 1995 hardware. It is now 2000, your game is outdated. So you have to redo your art assets, you have to rewrite or buy a new engine and so on. You get stuck on a treadmill of doing the same shit over and over. DNF has gone from Quake to Unreal Engine 1 to Unreal Engine 2 and will have to buy Unreal Engine 3 if they want to release a game today. That's a lot of respent effort (and money).
So I certainly don't condone publishers hurrying releases out the door, but I can understand how after a time they'll say "Enough is enough, we move forward with the launch." You can't ask them to wait forever. Often the end prodcut won't be good, or even get done (see DNF) and even if it is good, it may still not make enough money dur to the costs.
Actually, I haven't been in the beta for either, but the released product... well, it's probably misleading to say that HGL was better, but let's just say that Tabula Rasa was actually genuinely worse. In fact, since the OP mentioned SWG, I'll up the ante and say that NGE SWG was actually more fun than TR. Or more exactly, TR was actually less fun.
And I don't just mean the bugs and unfinished content, that everyone loves to hammer on, because those are _easy_ points to make. The problem is that even if you managed to avoid the bugs, the game just wasn't much fun to play. The design was flawed in a dozen different ways.
The problem was the whole "Tabula Rasa" concept. Lord British actually planned from the start to wipe the slate clean, and reinvent it all from scratch. I.e., work in a vacuum, and ignore a whole decade of proof of what works and what doesn't in a game.
In a way it was a continuation of how Ultima Online invented the graphical MMORPG, and ended up in third place as soon as there were two other competitors.
UO didn't _have_ to invent everything. There were already thousands of text-based MUDs, and whole discussions, correlations and theories (e.g., Bartle's) as to what works and how it works. You could tell from the start why a whole bunch of Lord British's ideas won't work, or won't make players happy, because the exact same had happened a thousand times before on MUDs.
But British basically chose to ignore all that. And to ignore the players complaining about it.
"Tabula Rasa" was basically the same failure mode repeated verbatim one more time. Now I'm all for innovation and trying new things, don't get me wrong. But it's not innovation if you repeat someone else's mistake. And it's not really "new things" just because British refuses to acknowledge the many people who tried the exact same things before.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Anarchy Online is still going, Tabula Rasa is dead. I beg to differ that Anarchy Online is worse. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Of course, Anarchy Online looks quite a bit dated, but then again, there are a few things more important than graphics. Like beer. And hookers. And cocaine.
You are developing for 1995 hardware. It is now 2000, your game is outdated.
In 1995, the PlayStation was hot droppings. In 2004 through 2008, the Nintendo DS is the big money maker, and it has hardware comparable to that of the PlayStation.