An Inside Look At Tabula Rasa's Failure

Massively notes a couple of posts from people who worked at NCSoft while Tabula Rasa was in development. Adam Martin says the lengthy, wandering development cycle led management to push it through before it was ready. "Very late, they eventually hit upon a good formula, a good core game," but, "Before they could actually make that game, a difficult decision was taken to push the team to the wall and force an early beta test." Scott Jennings suggests that early warning signs, like the tepid reaction to the beta, were largely ignored. "One of the mantras that went around production discussions after Auto Assault's launch square into the pavement was that if you can't get people to play the beta for free, you have serious, serious issues. Tabula Rasa had those issues. Not as bad as Auto Assault — there were people doggedly playing every night and presumably enjoying themselves, and metrics were duly assembled to measure every movement those testers took. But it was pretty clear, at least from my completely disassociated and busy with my own thing viewpoint, that there wasn't a lot of excitement."

Worst beta I've ever been in

[Adriax]

I've been jumping into every MMO beta I could ever since asheron's call, and frankly TR had the worst quality beta and launch I've ever seen.

Dungeons were unfinished. There were some very clear best and worst class tree picks. The control point assaults were terrible, to the point most people just ignored them. Holes in the terrain geometry were scattered everywhere.
It just had a whole game feel of not all there, much like the feeling you got playing starwars galaxies.

Personally I found auto-assault to be a much better game, and I still wasn't surprised when that one tanked.

Re:Worst beta I've ever been in

[necro2607]

"I've been jumping into every MMO beta I could ever since asheron's call, and frankly TR had the worst quality beta and launch I've ever seen."

Damn.. did you play Hellgate London beta? I thought it was freaking horrible. I was honestly surprised that the game I was playing, was one that was supposed to be launched/live in like 2 or 3 weeks. Wasn't even slightly surprised when I heard the servers would be getting shut down...

Problems with Auto Assault

[Flentil]

I was in the Auto Assault beta test. It was a fun game but it's problems were many, starting with the beta system itself. They only had the servers up for a few hours at a time, a couple days a week. Something like 6pm-11pm on tuesdays and thursdays. I had a hard time matching my schedule with theirs, so didn't get to play much. When I did I was frustrated by way the game handled vehicle upgrades. Killing things in the field caused many many items to drop and almost all of them were useless, either outright useless, or useless because it's something that too high level or too low level for my car. Even if I found something that was in my level range and would fit on my car, I couldn't install it without having high levels of crafter skill. So I spent a good deal of the little time I was in there sorting through useless crap in my inventory and selling it to a junk vendor. I also didn't like the disconnect between player characters and cars. You were either outside playing a car, or inside a walled no-combat possible city playing a buffed out avatar wandering around looking for quest NPCs with exclamation points over their heads. There was also no good reason to group up with other players. Still, once you got out in the wasteland with your vehicle it was fun to explore and shoot things. They got that part right pretty much. It was everything else that was wrong.