Tabula Rasa Goes Free, Brings New Content 87
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.
Re:FP (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. :(
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: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.
Re:any possibility of open sourcing it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, there's always the possibility of various licensing issues, keeping them from redistributing the code.
Re:any possibility of open sourcing it? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Yeah right (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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
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?
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.
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 doesn't really count as 'competition', because the people still have the money in their pockets that they are not spending on that product, so they might still pay for your future products with the money they aren't spending. That might, in some cases be true, but in other cases, people might decide that they spend enough time on, and enjoy the free product enough, that they decide not to look at other, 'premium' options.
Re:Why bother? (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 favorite sport(s). Yet at the end of a game, you're still left with no ship-in-a-bottle for the effort. You do get the experience. And maybe you have some souvenir from the game to try and provide material representation of that experience.
So why is it so different with MMORPGs? An Onyxia t-shirt or pennant doesn't quite do it. And perhaps the reason is that we fool ourselves in to accepting too much of the digital illusion. With a sports game, you know how long its going to last - the game clock is there from the beginning (baseball notwithstanding). With an MMORPG you can believe it will last forever.
It never does.