Tabula Rasa Going Out With A Bang

Mytob notes that sci-fi MMO Tabula Rasa is set to close down tomorrow, and the development team has something special planned for the game's final hours. The decision to close the game was made in November, and it went free-to-play a month later, while the developers continued to roll out the new content they had planned. Now, after a round of patches and server merges, the beleaguered MMO has reached its shutdown date. The game's primary enemies, the Bane, are launching an all-out offensive on Allied forces, which will culminate in a battle beginning at 8PM on Saturday and lasting until midnight. All players are being called in as reinforcements in this apocalyptic fight, though the final announcement says, "Penumbra has been informed of the situation and is standing by on the use of their last resort weapon. We can not afford to be complacent or uncertain, but if it is truly our destiny to be destroyed, we are taking them all with us."

Comments

Nuke it from orbit...

[Majik Sheff]

It's the only way to be sure.

Re:Nuke it from orbit...

[amaupin]

Wow. Your Slashdot membership is hereby revoked.

Open sauce

[Lehk228]

they should release an open server even if it lacks the content and patch the client to allow the user to specify a server.

If a virtual worlds ends...

[NotQuiteReal]

Does anyone notice?

Re:If a virtual worlds ends...

[Anonymous Coward]

If a bear craps in a virtual forest, and there is nobody to hear him break wind, can you see the Pope from there?

Re:If a virtual worlds ends...

[Culture20]

Apparently, yes. The neat thing about this is that these guys _care_ about their users. They could have kept things going business as usual, letting it whimper. If I see their names attached to a project, I'll know to give it a longer look.

Re:Why stop there?

[symbolic]

I have to give NCSoft some serious credit here - it was a great game. I started when it was first released, and there's not much I didn't like about it. It's a damned shame they have to close it.

Has an MMO ever had an ending before?

[dreemernj]

As in a proper, scripted end to the entire world?

Re:Has an MMO ever had an ending before?

[murdocj]

Sure, they have backstory, but as far as the in-game story goes, it may as well just be a news report of what's going on while you're grinding

The quests in WotLK get you up close and personal with Arthas. My priest is level 80 and I'm doing the Ice Crown quests, not to grind or get experience or loot, but because I've GOT to know the rest of the story.

You pay for the game, you pay for the expansions, and you pay for every month you sink into the damned game.

Well, let's see... should Blizzard give the game away for free? Should they be running servers for 12 million people for free? And as for expansions, Blizzard has release a ton of content w/o charging. Just off the top of my head both Black Temple and Sunwell were released well after BC came out, no extra charge, and they've already indicated that WotLK will include several more expansions, no extra charge.

You're in no way involved in any moving plot, and you're in no way involved in anything epic that's truly yours.

It's hard to imagine how you could be more involved with the story. Look at the Wrathgate and tell me you don't make permanent changes to the world. Yes, other players can have that same experience. What computer game have you played where each individual player gets a completely unique, custom tailored experience? For $15/mo should Blizzard have a couple of GMs follow you around and create events for you?

There is zero gameplay, and there is zero point to the game, especially since the game "doesn't really start" until you reach level 60 and start going on raids that thousands of people have already done before you. There's no glory, no nothing.

Sounds like you played hard and then got burnt out. Well yeah, you don't play for glory, you play for fun. No one is going to think you are uberz just because you are 60, or 70, or 80, or have the bear mount, or whatever. You play ALL computer games for fun, not glory. If you want glory and adventure, go climb a mountain. Go trek into uncharted wilderness. Computer games are spare time relaxation. What's wrong isn't the game, it's your expectations of what the game will provide you.

my wife says...

[purpleraison]

I am totally lame to be reading about this on a Friday night. .... rolls dice...... score!!

My favorite part about Tabula Rasa

[Grimbleton]

And I mean this seriously...

Was my bugged character.

I could run at about 5x normal speed, jump about 60', climb to the edges, and beyond (and fall off the edges of!) maps by bouncing up them, very easily.

I must say, once I got bugged, I didn't die once. How could I? I'd just RUN UP A MOUNTAIN and get away.

Unfortunately the bankruptcy officials ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

What would be better is to release the source to the client and the server so atleast it could live on in the community.

Unfortunately the bankruptcy officials may consider it part of the company's assets, to potentially be sold to pay off creditors.

If the stockholders had put something like that in the company charter BEFORE THEY TOOK ON DEBT it would be another story. Ditto if the creditors could be persuaded to release claims on the source for this purpose.

Also: Some players might form a consortium and make a bid on the source. (They could probably make a rather SMALL bid and still get it.) Once they own it they can do what they want with it - including releasing it under any license terms that don't violate those of any licensed IP it contains.

At least that's how I understand it. (Insert obligatory IANAL disclaimer here.)

Re:Unfortunately the bankruptcy officials ...

[Blue Stone]

>Unfortunately the bankruptcy officials may consider it part of the company's assets, to potentially be sold to pay off creditors.

Couldn't they just wipe the slate clean?

Re:it will be a glorious site

[Arthur Grumbine]

How many beers before she asks you to untie her - all the while promising you that she won't tell the police?

You must have been the only one

[Moraelin]

I guess it just shows how subjective tastes are. I also tried it when it was first released, like many other people did -- you know, because it's Lord British and all -- and my conclusion was the exact opposite: there was not much to like about it. In fact, I hated every single design decision about it, except for "let's make it SF." Even as the "let's make a bastard child of MMO and FPS" went, it had been done much better before: e.g., Planetside.

In fact, you're the first person I even hear about which considered it a great game. I know several gamers IRL, and lemme tell you their tastes are spread all over the spectrum. There are a couple which prefer EQ2 over WoW, there's one guy who's actually become a big WAR fan, the mandatory couple of WoW addicts too, etc, among other distinctions. So, you know, at least about them you can't say that they didn't even try TR because of WoW, because more than half don't even like WoW. And invariably the talk went something along the lines of:

Mr X: "So, what have you been up to lately?"
Me: "Ah, I got Tabula Rasa last week."
Mr X: "And, how do you like it so far?"
Me: "To be honest, I'm don't like it that much."
Mr X: "Heh. Why don't you ever ask first? I could have told you it sucked."

Mind you, I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong in a matter of subjective tastes. Just that you were obviously a too small minority to keep the game running.

Re:You must have been the only one

[Moraelin]

Well, stuff like the game telling you in the tutorial to use cover, but then it didn't actually do anything. You could take cover behind a crate, and then you (or better someone else looking at it from the side) could see the enemy fire or spells going straight to the crate, then up, horizontally over the crate, then down behind the crate at you. Like it was a terrain-following cruise missile, instead of a stupid bullet.

Then stuff like that it was nigh impossible to even tell who's a player and who's an NPC, because:

A. There were no names or anything equally obvious on the screen

B. Everyone looked the same

So I'd run into a group of merry retards jumping around shooting at some enemy, and I'd think, "ah, it must be players jumping like that, I better not steal their kill", and then discover it was NPCs after all.

Lighting also didn't help. Under the trees for example it was really dark, so I had trouble even telling that someone's there, much less who's who. And again, bear in mind that everyone dressed pretty much the same, and in the dark it was even more hopeless to tell who's who.

The minimap was a funky SF thing in blue, which was unnecessarily hard to read. If you look at the one in WoW, it being in colour really helped recognize the terrain. You can go, basically, "ah, there's the road because it's a brown stripe." You didn't really have those clues in TR.

Balance was a joke too, though I've come to kinda expect that in MMOs. Other than Blizzard, it seems like nobody ever tried to get that right.

The mix of FPS and MMO was IMHO badly done. It was neither really FPS, nor the, well, bastard child of EQ or MMO. It was as if Mr Macho FPS got Miss MMO pregnant, but they were both on drugs and she was taking Thalidomide too at the time, and then they both scratch their heads and wonder why the kid was born with flippers instead of arms and legs ;) Joke aside, they took the worst of both worlds, basically. You could neither just turn and shoot at what's under the cursor (and expect to hit, anyway) like in a twitch-gamer fps, nor just select the enemy and use the mouse on your toolbar like in most MMOs.

Etc.

Finally, again, bear in mind that "sucked" is a very subjective thing. We have at least one person in this thread who actually thought it was a great game. Also, well, maybe "sucked" is too hard put. We're not talking Anarchy Online class crap, but merely a thoroughly uninspired game which tried to ignore all that was known about game design, and what works and what doesn't in a game, and reinvet it all from scratch. (Hence the "Tabula Rasa" name.) And ended up not much fun to play. Maybe not as in "I'd rather have root canal instead", but at the very least up to the "why would I actually want to pay a monthly fee for this?" mark.

Re:Why stop there?

[PFI_Optix]

I think the community needs to be saying a HUGE thanks to these guys for showing the industry how to bow out gracefully and give closure to customers. Too often they simply abandon communities to wither and die; it's wonderful to see a company recognize when a game can't support itself in the long term and give the users a positive experience as they end it.

Re:it will be a glorious site

[Mr. Shotgun]

a bunch of fat faggot geeks sitting around on a saturday night weeping over the end of a mmo while spanking off to some epic space federation battle. wtf is your problem people? go out, have a drink or two, talk to a real live girl.

Why should we go out? Everyone's got your mom on speed dial and she makes house calls.