An Inside Look At Tabula Rasa's Failure 44
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."
Sounds a bit like sour grapes (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty sure the writer has his valid points, but some parts really read like he blames NCs focus on TR on the failure of his project. Maybe rightfully so (when you have a tenth of the budget and manpower of another project but are expected to outperform it, you are prone to fail), but it sure sounds like it.
Re:Worst beta I've ever been in (Score:5, Interesting)
TR beta was no beta. It was one by name, but I've been in a few late-alpha / early-beta tests that had better stability and fewer killer bugs. TR beta was a nightmare. Suddenly you were ... somewhere. Shortly thereafter, you were at your Desktop. Logging in put you back to ... somewhere, only without a way to get out. Quests were simply and plainly broken, most had to be done to the letter if you wanted to have any chance to finish them, and even then it was often a matter of luck whether the right triggers fired at the right time of you were stuck with a permanently failed quest, which actually got worse through the levels, post level 40 quests seemed to be completely untested. Some skills simply didn't work at all. Others didn't work as intended. Skill progression was a joke, some things that worked great on early levels left you stranded as soon as you progressed, simply because damage did not progress. Ammo cost was insane for rapidly firing guns, limiting your choice pretty much to using a shotgun.
And that's only what I can remember without even investing a minute to think about it. And no, we're not talking about early beta or anything. This is the state the game was in right before release, and even well into its live stage. Hell, they redid the skills until well into the second half of 2008. And I don't mean skill tweaking. I mean ripping out whole skills and replacing them with something completely different.
Does this sound like a game that's live? That doesn't even sound like public beta.
I blame Garriott (Score:3, Interesting)
If he had any creative control over this game then he clearly did not comprehend why Ultima Online was successful. If he did know why it had been successful, but chose to go another direction, then he is a moron. He failed at making "WoW with guns," which is the only thing I can derive from the essence of TR.
Just so I don't sound like a whiner, I will toss in some info. What made Ultima Online successful? It was not your run of the mill RPG. It had near total character freedom. You could be a warrior one day, mage the next. Your characters were not stuck in some Arch-type mold, but rather could be any combination of the many (I think 40+) skills available in the game. Naturally some skills worked better together than others, but still there was a lot of freedom. You wish to be a Mage Blacksmith? Be my guest! A Warrior Tamer? Ok, it's up to you. An Archer Bard? Sure! FREEDOM
Furthermore, there were no levels. You character didn't magically "ding" and he was higher level. Instead he gained skills through using them. This kind of progression was really great. Of course one had to learn, usually through trail and failure, what monsters they can and cannot kill with their current skill level. But that was fun of the game. Hell when I started the game and picked rather confusing ensemble of skills. I quickly found myself crying out for help, because I was losing a battle against a small bird while using a dagger. The game was just awesome.
Now why did TR fail at being a "WoW with Guns?" Lot's of reasons. For one thing if you try to copy WoW, you should have at least 2 factions. Not the numb Humans vs the NPC alien invaders. That gets boring real fast. There should be at least 2 factions of players. I can only assume that money was the reason they did not go this route.
Money seemed like the source of a lot of the problems. Why the map was so small? Well at least it felt small, small as hell. Maybe it wasn't, but the instant-warp points made it feel small? I can't tell.
The game had very little choice when it came to your character, this was a huge failure. Maybe they thought that giving the player few choices would be more casual-friendly. But whatever the group-think, it was wrong. On top of that, none of the classes were well balanced. Most classes were useless. And as another posted points out, shotgun was really your only option.
Worst failure of all, total lack of player interaction! There was no PvP, no economy, and no reason to adventure together. The game was basically single player game, where you could chat to other people playing the same single player game.
All it's faults came together in making TR probably the most boring game I ever played.
Didn't even know that TR existed (Score:2, Interesting)
I didn't even know that TR existed before I read the news that it was about to close.
I think that is a marketing error. Or maybe they never did trust their own game.
Re:Dunno about the beta, but the release was worse (Score:3, Interesting)
1. SWG before the NGE? Just because _you_ can't name one, doesn't mean they don't exist, ya know?
2. Also, in the meantime UO did fix a bunch of the stuff that wasn't funny. Most of it after Lord British gave up. So it's a bit misleading to showcase UO _now_ as a testament to Lord British's skills.
3. Well, tastes being a subjective thing, I don't doubt that there is a niche that still likes UO.
But to put things in perspectie:
- 110 times more people currently prefer to pay more for WoW than play UO
- EQ peaked at 5 times that
- SWG was well over 2 times that when Sony decided it needed a NGE to stem the playerbase decline
- TSO was at about 110k players when EA proclaimed it a flop
- ditto for Auto Assault IIRC
- Tabula Rasa was IIRC at about 3/4 that when NCSoft threw in the towel. So, you know, god knows that even with a buggy, unfinished, poorly-designed POS you can land in that kinda ballpark figure
So basically if you happen to be in the minority that actually likes UO, good for you. But the cold hard fact is that those "ravenous hordes" gave _far_ more players what they wanted in a game. For the average mainstream gamer, UO just wasn't that much fun, and while it's been fixed after British, not enough by half.
4. But, anyway, to get back on topic: yes, that's literally what I'm saying. That UO was launched full of piss-poorly thought-out ideas that were known not to work well.
And if you disagree with that, hey, argue with Origin about it. Because if they got fixed later, surely Origin and EA did consider them to be mistakes.