We've touched upon the bitterness of loss and have gone over the life of Tabula Rasa, and now it is time to poke the corpse and speculate where NCsoft's development team went wrong and what the death of this game means for the MMOG industry as a whole. Were mistakes made? Could this all have been avoided? How does this effect the future of those games still yet to see the light of day?
Tabula Rasa tripped, fell, and lunged face first into a pile poo in this regard. The extended beta allowed way too many players to play for free for more months than the current ADHD-ridden demographic even play any given game these days. To make things worse, this also gave critics an ample amount of time to gather their ammo and spread it in neon lights across the world wide web at blazing speeds.
from what i've heard from others Richard Garriot quickly going back to old and outdated MMO formules that -used to be- succesfull, hanging on to a long dead golden goose is a good way to kill a succesfull project.
Rather then seeing what was wrong and what could've been improved.
Beta was indeed too long and while other games did that same mistake they -atleast- did it in waves and invited 'fresh' people that were still fully enthusiastic about the product.
Also upon entering beta as a person who actually wanted to test you were clueless, there was no visible presence of a QA team and can't remember real effort being made to ask the player about their opinion. (just giving them forums doesn't cut it)
If they dared to took more risks then perhaps they didn't die a slow (painless?) death.
The biggest sin of games these days is they are either trying to recreate the past or they are trying to clone WoW.
I'm not a huge fan of WoW but the game did sort of went off and did it's own thing and as much as I adore some of the older game designers out there, some fresh blood (and ideas) would do this genre some serious good.
Lets talk about the one element of TR that many development houses need to hard code to memory. TR's AI! These Bane would roam around, sometimes in packs, attack player installments etc. It really made the world come alive, as you never really knew what was around the corner.
WHY WHY WHY? Please someone tell me why other MMOs have not done this with AI before. I have seen glimpses of this is the WOW expansion packs, but nothing on the level of TR.
The only reason I can come up with as to why this is not standard MMO practice is the 'go kill X amount of y creatures.' In the ADHD world we live in this would cause frustration among some players, if they could not easily locate the y creature.
I would love to see a leap forward in AI, in which there players engage in a living world with a real ecosystem. Wolves hunting rabits, rabits hunting pastures of greenage and so on.
Another MASSIVE oversight was the fact the bane was not playable. TR had lore that was SCREAMING for PVP content. I'm thinking something between Warhammer and Planetside.
TR did some things right, but it just could not connect all the dots.
Ah yeah, I agree. You just can't hand people big bad guns and not let them run wild shooting each other. FPS type games cry for PvP action. In fact, that would have provoked me to play too.
Ryzom does the whole AI thing. It is however not something you can easily justify in the current crop of linear progression MMOs.
TR's big issue was it wasn't good enough to justify the development cost. If you're going to throw that much money at a game, it has to be a AAA title.
Ryzom does the whole AI thing. It is however not something you can easily justify in the current crop of linear progression MMOs.
TR's big issue was it wasn't good enough to justify the development cost. If you're going to throw that much money at a game, it has to be a AAA title.
But I heard the mortgage on richard garriots castle isnt cheap!
Problem is advanced AI goes hand in hand with high serverload.
And often people like FFA PvP more then advanced AI therefor the AI gets dumbed down to make it possible so that people can play lag free.
And if i remember TR often had major 'spikes' where your game would freeze, they could've solved that but that could also be that plenty of people left the game and thus lowering the server load and so this issue rarely re-surfaced.
The Tabula Rasa Autopsy: What Makes Games Die?
Linear Mode
