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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.
I've been jumping into every MMO beta I could ever since asheron's call, and frankly TR had the worst quality beta and launch I've ever seen.
Dungeons were unfinished. There were some very clear best and worst class tree picks. The control point assaults were terrible, to the point most people just ignored them. Holes in the terrain geometry were scattered everywhere.
It just had a whole game feel of not all there, much like the feeling you got playing starwars galaxies.
Personally I found auto-assault to be a much better game, and I still wasn't surprised when that one tanked.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
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.
Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty sure the writer has his valid points, but some parts really read like he blames NCs focus on TR on the failure of his project. Maybe rightfully so (when you have a tenth of the budget and manpower of another project but are expected to outperform it, you are prone to fail), but it sure sounds like it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
If he had any creative control over this game then he clearly did not comprehend why Ultima Online was successful. If he did know why it had been successful, but chose to go another direction, then he is a moron. He failed at making "WoW with guns," which is the only thing I can derive from the essence of TR.
Just so I don't sound like a whiner, I will toss in some info. What made Ultima Online successful? It was not your run of the mill RPG. It had near total character freedom. You could be a warrior one day, mage the next. Your characters were not stuck in some Arch-type mold, but rather could be any combination of the many (I think 40+) skills available in the game. Naturally some skills worked better together than others, but still there was a lot of freedom. You wish to be a Mage Blacksmith? Be my guest! A Warrior Tamer? Ok, it's up to you. An Archer Bard? Sure! FREEDOM
Furthermore, there were no levels. You character didn't magically "ding" and he was higher level. Instead he gained skills through using them. This kind of progression was really great. Of course one had to learn, usually through trail and failure, what monsters they can and cannot kill with their current skill level. But that was fun of the game. Hell when I started the game and picked rather confusing ensemble of skills. I quickly found myself crying out for help, because I was losing a battle against a small bird while using a dagger. The game was just awesome.
Now why did TR fail at being a "WoW with Guns?" Lot's of reasons. For one thing if you try to copy WoW, you should have at least 2 factions. Not the numb Humans vs the NPC alien invaders. That gets boring real fast. There should be at least 2 factions of players. I can only assume that money was the reason they did not go this route.
Money seemed like the source of a lot of the problems. Why the map was so small? Well at least it felt small, small as hell. Maybe it wasn't, but the instant-warp points made it feel small? I can't tell.
The game had very little choice when it came to your character, this was a huge failure. Maybe they thought that giving the player few choices would be more casual-friendly. But whatever the group-think, it was wrong. On top of that, none of the classes were well balanced. Most classes were useless. And as another posted points out, shotgun was really your only option.
Worst failure of all, total lack of player interaction! There was no PvP, no economy, and no reason to adventure together. The game was basically single player game, where you could chat to other people playing the same single player game.
All it's faults came together in making TR probably the most boring game I ever played.
I was in the Auto Assault beta test. It was a fun game but it's problems were many, starting with the beta system itself. They only had the servers up for a few hours at a time, a couple days a week. Something like 6pm-11pm on tuesdays and thursdays. I had a hard time matching my schedule with theirs, so didn't get to play much. When I did I was frustrated by way the game handled vehicle upgrades. Killing things in the field caused many many items to drop and almost all of them were useless, either outright useless, or useless because it's something that too high level or too low level for my car. Even if I found something that was in my level range and would fit on my car, I couldn't install it without having high levels of crafter skill. So I spent a good deal of the little time I was in there sorting through useless crap in my inventory and selling it to a junk vendor. I also didn't like the disconnect between player characters and cars. You were either outside playing a car, or inside a walled no-combat possible city playing a buffed out avatar wandering around looking for quest NPCs with exclamation points over their heads. There was also no good reason to group up with other players. Still, once you got out in the wasteland with your vehicle it was fun to explore and shoot things. They got that part right pretty much. It was everything else that was wrong.
I didn't even know that TR existed before I read the news that it was about to close.
I think that is a marketing error. Or maybe they never did trust their own game.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB