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Tabula Rasa Goes Free, Brings New Content
Posted by
Soulskill
on Tue Dec 23, 2008 04:42 AM
from the as-in-beer-with-lots-of-guns dept.
from the as-in-beer-with-lots-of-guns dept.
Last month we discussed NCSoft's announcement that Tabula Rasa would be closing its doors at the end of February, and their plans to remove the subscription fee for all players in January. Well, they've decided to go completely free a month early, alongside the release of a variety of new content. The game has finally gotten a first-person camera view, something many players have been asking for since launch. A new instance and several other bits of additional content are available as well. NCSoft also previewed player-controlled Mechs and PAUs, which will go live in the next major patch. Ten Ton Hammer has an interview with Net Devil's Scott Brown about the closure of Tabula Rasa.
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Tabula Rasa To Shut Down 244 comments
NCSoft announced today that it will be closing down Tabula Rasa on February 28th. The sci-fi shooter-flavored MMO struggled for quite some time, despite recent attempts to draw in new players by announcements of new features, price reductions, and using Richard Garriott's trip into space as a promotion. We discussed Garriott's departure from NCSoft a couple weeks ago. This is NCSoft's second failed MMO, and apparently layoffs are in the works. They seem to be making an effort to make the game's last few months as fun as they can for their remaining players, though. "Before we end the service, we'll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009. We can assure you that through the next couple of months we'll be doing some really fun things in Tabula Rasa, and we plan to make staying on a little longer worth your while."
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Worlds.com Sues NCSoft Over MMO-Patent 261 comments
Lulfas writes "Worlds.com today sued NCSoft over its patent on a scalable virtual world, filed in 2000 and granted this February. This is a very broad base patent, and there is no reason to expect they will only sue NCSoft, when they should be able to use the same patent against other companies. 'Specifically, the suit claims that NCsoft has infringed on patent 7,181,690, "System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space" through its games, including City of Heroes, City of Villains, Dungeon Runners, Exteel, Guild Wars, Lineage, Lineage II, and Tabula Rasa.'"
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Tabula Rasa Going Out With A Bang 162 comments
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."
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any possibility of open sourcing it? (Score:3, Insightful)
If they plan on closing it down anyways, doesn't it make sense to open source it so people can run their own 3rd party servers?
or am I missing something obvious here?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, there's always the possibility of various licensing issues, keeping them from redistributing the code.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:any possibility of open sourcing it? (Score:4, Insightful)
The sound effect of the shields in Tabula Rasa was almost 100% identical to the sound effect of the force field bubbles in City of Heroes/Villains.
I assumed it was just borrowed from there.
If this is typical of stuff used throughout... then open sourcing would be very difficult, you'd have to separate everything like that.
It's fairly unlikely the server code makes heavy use of sound effects. :P
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Plus, who wants to compete with their own failure? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only could it potentially give a leg up to a potential competitor, but from the perspective of a company like NCSoft, if you release the whole thing for free, and it starts to get popular once it's free, even though you couldn't make it a commercial success, you setup a potential competitor for your own future products. It's hard (though not impossible) to compete with free products. There's already enough competition, without creating more for yourself.
Now, some might say that if it's free, that it doe
Re:any possibility of open sourcing it? (Score:4, Insightful)
To many, your idea sounds impossible. But Cyan did just this same thin recently with Uru (Myst Online). They have announced their intention to open source the product and are working hard right now to prepare the code.
I see this as even more proof that Cyan cares about its customers. They have tried and tried and tried to make Uru a viable game, but have failed each time. I'm not sure why it can't make it, since Myst obviously can, but they did their best and they are continuing to support the fans.
Parent
Why bother? (Score:2)
Seems a bit pointless really. As an RPG I assume that it is designed to have a long play-time (what with levels or other character development mechanisms).
Why bother to invest time in such a game that'll be gone in a few months time?
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the point in playing any game? After reaching the end (or whenever they get tired of it), it's likely a lot of people won't play a single player game after that. Was it time/money wasted? Depends on if you enjoyed it or not. The enjoyment in an online game for some people isn't just having a max level character you can point to and brag about, but if you have fun. I'm playing the game and I'm having fun, even though I might not see the max level. YMMV, of course.
It's a real shame, because I think Tabula Rasa is a fairly interesting game. I'm more of an RPGer than an FPSer, so I like the combat system what puts more emphasis on preparation and strategy rather than twitch action. I think TR's cardinal sin was that they didn't define what they were. They appeared to be an online FPS, but that's not what the game is; so RPGers tended to give it a pass and FPSers were disappointed once they got into it. It didn't help that the development went on way too long and cost too much money to ever hope to turn a profit. It's also kind of sad to see Richard Garriott's career fizzle out on yet one more in a string of mediocre games.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's an aspect of MMORPGs that I find interesting. Players will often dedicate the same amount of time they put towards any given hobby. But even though they're spending build-a-ship-in-a-bottle time to build up their character(s), they don't get the ship-in-the-bottle at the end. When the server plugs get pulled, everything is gone. Like it never existed. There's an almost tangible loss.
The thing is, this isn't the first intangible hobby. People also dedicate considerable time (and money) to their
The interview is interesting (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I was just waiting for Cedega to support it or a version of Wine that does to last for more than one patch and not require installing Mono. :(
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
It's called Windows, try it one day, you'd be surprised how well it works.
None of that silly Cedega nonsense.
Re: (Score:2)
and if this was fox news we'd be modded down for enjoying festivus or whatever it's called. My point here is there everywhere you go is bias and complaining about it is pointless.
You do realise that slashdot is part of the open source developer network don't you? It's pretty clear they'd have a bias towards open source.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nice ending (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly, were I a Tabula Rasa user I wouldn't touch this offer with a barge pole. They paid somewhere around $50 for a game, only to be used as its beta testers. Then to add insult to injury, they find that almost precisely one year after the release date (and perhaps only a matter of a few weeks or months after they shelled out their $50), the game would cease to work just three months after its first birthday.
This is precisely why I don't buy games or applications that entirely rely on a central server hosted by the parent company for their survival.
If NCsoft wanted to make a good faith measure to Tabula Rasa users, their parting gift to the community would be the ability to host the game on third party servers. They're not doing that though, they're taking the money and running - and insulting their users' intelligence with the suggestion that upsales are "gifts" when they're nothing more than a marketing campaign being run at a wholly distasteful moment.
Parent
An alternative (Score:5, Interesting)
I kinda agree with you, but then I can also see why they wouldn't do this also. There are probably issues with IP and third-party licenses that keep them from distributing the server code.
What I would like to see, though, is maybe something like a "dead MMOG clearinghouse" company. If I were such a company, for example, I would pay NCsoft $x for the rights to set up and run one or more Tabula Rasa servers so that players could continue playing. There would never be any more updates to the game, except maybe content updates to advance the storylines given the existing mechanics. (I.e. the stuff probably stored in text files.) I would charge some nominal fee to access the game, and the client would be given away for free.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Those aren't gifts, they're fairly desperate attempts at getting you hooked on any other game in their lineup, in order to keep your revenue.
Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Insightful)
How stupid are you?
They'd want a credit card back when you were subscribing too. They're just changing the cost to 0$.
Man, no wonder we have so many stupid anon posts.
TR was a creative game, and this is a great way to end things, heck, a free bonus is pretty nice.
Parent
Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a difference between "free" and "free if you give us billing information but trust us we won't dick you". I thought we all learned that in the heyday of AOL free trials?
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Informative)
While I read that too, I went ahead and set up a free account to see what the game was like. I was never asked for my credit card number - I assumed that they changed the sign up policy since they wrote that page on their support site.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
u is so smart. u saw rite thruh there evil skem to carg u money on ur credit card with out asking.
Right.
There are plenty of people not worth tossing your credit card number too for a free activation. Doing it for a Russia snuff porn site? Eh, probably a poor idea. Doing to a multinational company running a handful of other MMORPGs? Probably not all that risky. If they do decide in a blatant act of malevolent glee to empty your bank account like some Nigerian scam, I am pretty sure that the law kicks i
Simple - generate a one-time number (Score:4, Insightful)
Dunno if your bank supports anything like this, but Bank of America has a feature in their web banking system, called ShopSafe, which (if you have a CC account with them) lets you generate a one-time use CC number whenever you want, with a limit you set. For something like this, you could genenerate a number with a limit of like $1 (or whatever the minimum is). Then, you don't really have to worry about getting ripped off by companies.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I picked up a copy of TR from Best Buy the other night cause it was going for fifteen bucks, and I wanted to see the world before it closed down.
I took it home, installed it, registered for an account and started playing. I had to enter the serial code for the game, but I don't remember giving them any credit card information. I was off and playing.