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Tabula Rasa to Close. Boo!

Aaaaaagh! I finally find an MMO that doesn’t get tiresome after a month and what do they do? They bloody close it down, don’t they?

(Yes, Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa is a big reason why I haven’t been posting for the past few months)

Here’s the message from yesterday:

“Last November we launched what we hoped would be a ground breaking sci-fi MMO. In many ways, we think we’ve achieved that goal. Tabula Rasa has some unique features that make it fun and very different from every other MMO out there. Unfortunately, the fact is that the game hasn’t performed as expected. The development team has worked hard to improve the game since launch, but the game never achieved the player population we hoped for.

So it is with regret that we must announce that Tabula Rasa will end live service on February 28, 2009.

Before we end the service, we’ll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009.

NCSoft have been nice enough to give active players a few months of their other games – 3 months of Lineage II, 3 months of City of Heroes, Aion beta access, Aion preorder access (whatever “access” means in the context of preorders) and a month of Aion gameplay. Some players aren’t happy but I think that’s incredibly generous of them.

Still, the closure of the only sci-fi themed MMORPG is very sad :( OTOH, also fully understandable. I’ve been playing for a good few months now. The game itself is great fun. The music is brilliant and does a wonderful job of setting the war-time atmosphere. The in-game events that preceded major updates were just plain awesome; previously-secure fortresses coming under heavy attack front of you and ultimately being taken by the Bane. Compared to WoW or LOTRO, TR has (had) no grind at all – when you get a collection quest to, e.g., get 10 hard drives, there’s no stingy 5% drop rate. In general, you go out, kill 10 reconstructor bots and retrieve their hard drives. Job done, hooray!

Of course, that sort thing has ultimately proven to be their downfall. See Rob Fahey’s Tabula Rasa analysis on Eurogamer back in April:

“…at its launch (and ever since, in fact) there has been essentially nothing to do in Tabula Rasa once you hit level 50. You could, of course, create a clone and play with the other class options available to you…

…All there is to do at the end of the ladder in Tabula Rasa is fairly limited player-versus-player combat, the uninspired nature of which is all the more disappointing given how well the active combat system should scale to PVP play.”

What were the design team expecting? There is little grind, so your players progress quickly. They reach the end, find there’s nothing there and… continue subscribing? Play the same game over and over with slightly different weapons? No. We unsubscribe, of course. All the more unfortunate is that end-game content like Omega Labs just came out in September, 6 weeks before NCSoft pulled the plug. I guess it wasn’t enough to draw players back in.

The other thing that normally keeps players hooked to online games is the social scene. The PvE campaign stretches across multiple worlds, with multiple areas in each and multiple instances for each area, presumably to keep the population controlled across the servers. In other words, a social scene simply does not exist. WoW’s crafting, postal and auction system creates natural gathering places like Undercity or Orgriammar. Tabula Rasa has no incentive to drive you to any particular locations, so meeting other players is a rarity. Strong clans could have helped, but the official website’s clan listing is painfully out of date and in-game clan-finding is limited to asking nicely on the general chat channel in the hopes that a clan at your level is recruiting. Chances? Slim-to-none.

Anyway, enough of that. It’s all going to disappear in February :( I guess I’ll have more time to blog.