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."

Comments

Re:Worst beta I've ever been in

[Opportunist]

TR beta was no beta. It was one by name, but I've been in a few late-alpha / early-beta tests that had better stability and fewer killer bugs. TR beta was a nightmare. Suddenly you were ... somewhere. Shortly thereafter, you were at your Desktop. Logging in put you back to ... somewhere, only without a way to get out. Quests were simply and plainly broken, most had to be done to the letter if you wanted to have any chance to finish them, and even then it was often a matter of luck whether the right triggers fired at the right time of you were stuck with a permanently failed quest, which actually got worse through the levels, post level 40 quests seemed to be completely untested. Some skills simply didn't work at all. Others didn't work as intended. Skill progression was a joke, some things that worked great on early levels left you stranded as soon as you progressed, simply because damage did not progress. Ammo cost was insane for rapidly firing guns, limiting your choice pretty much to using a shotgun.

And that's only what I can remember without even investing a minute to think about it. And no, we're not talking about early beta or anything. This is the state the game was in right before release, and even well into its live stage. Hell, they redid the skills until well into the second half of 2008. And I don't mean skill tweaking. I mean ripping out whole skills and replacing them with something completely different.

Does this sound like a game that's live? That doesn't even sound like public beta.