Tabula Rasa Going Out With A Bang 162
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."
Re:Has an MMO ever had an ending before? (Score:4, Informative)
Dunno how much this counts, but the end of the WoW open beta was attacks on all the capital cities, where a death meant you were done.
Re:Nuke it from orbit... (Score:3, Informative)
Or Aliens.
Re:Open sauce (Score:2, Informative)
In addition to what the other posters said, there's also the issue of proprietary third party code. They may have a large chunk of that in there that they don't have the rights to release. Happens with a lot of closed source.
Then dummy it out. Id Software's initial public source release of Doom had its proprietary third-party sound code taken out, but enthusiasts quickly built up a replacement.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Has an MMO ever had an ending before? (Score:3, Informative)
There's at least one...
LOTRO, scripted start, middle, end. The devs are very open about how many updates/expansions there will be.
We know everything will culminate in the ring going into Mt Doom. There's not been much said about the ending (only being 1/2 way through the expansions), but I can hazard a guess that it will be quite big.
Re:Has an MMO ever had an ending before? (Score:3, Informative)
It's a game, it's just a set of rules that you have to obey when you play in order to reach a certain objective. That's how all games work: computer games, board games, sports, even economy, politics, etc. I did a dungeon of 5 with just 2 people (me and another guy). It took 3 hours but it actually was fun and stimulating, pushing the limits of the game's rules.
Yes, maybe 60% of the hundreds of hours I put into the game were not as fun but I think that those rarer cases make it worth it. Just like playing soccer is mostly running except for the 10% of the time when you're touching the ball. Or a politician working 30-40 years to become president for 4 years.
Re:Unfortunately the bankruptcy officials ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:You must have been the only one (Score:5, Informative)
Well, stuff like the game telling you in the tutorial to use cover, but then it didn't actually do anything. You could take cover behind a crate, and then you (or better someone else looking at it from the side) could see the enemy fire or spells going straight to the crate, then up, horizontally over the crate, then down behind the crate at you. Like it was a terrain-following cruise missile, instead of a stupid bullet.
Then stuff like that it was nigh impossible to even tell who's a player and who's an NPC, because:
A. There were no names or anything equally obvious on the screen
B. Everyone looked the same
So I'd run into a group of merry retards jumping around shooting at some enemy, and I'd think, "ah, it must be players jumping like that, I better not steal their kill", and then discover it was NPCs after all.
Lighting also didn't help. Under the trees for example it was really dark, so I had trouble even telling that someone's there, much less who's who. And again, bear in mind that everyone dressed pretty much the same, and in the dark it was even more hopeless to tell who's who.
The minimap was a funky SF thing in blue, which was unnecessarily hard to read. If you look at the one in WoW, it being in colour really helped recognize the terrain. You can go, basically, "ah, there's the road because it's a brown stripe." You didn't really have those clues in TR.
Balance was a joke too, though I've come to kinda expect that in MMOs. Other than Blizzard, it seems like nobody ever tried to get that right.
The mix of FPS and MMO was IMHO badly done. It was neither really FPS, nor the, well, bastard child of EQ or MMO. It was as if Mr Macho FPS got Miss MMO pregnant, but they were both on drugs and she was taking Thalidomide [wikipedia.org] too at the time, and then they both scratch their heads and wonder why the kid was born with flippers instead of arms and legs ;) Joke aside, they took the worst of both worlds, basically. You could neither just turn and shoot at what's under the cursor (and expect to hit, anyway) like in a twitch-gamer fps, nor just select the enemy and use the mouse on your toolbar like in most MMOs.
Etc.
Finally, again, bear in mind that "sucked" is a very subjective thing. We have at least one person in this thread who actually thought it was a great game. Also, well, maybe "sucked" is too hard put. We're not talking Anarchy Online class crap, but merely a thoroughly uninspired game which tried to ignore all that was known about game design, and what works and what doesn't in a game, and reinvet it all from scratch. (Hence the "Tabula Rasa" name.) And ended up not much fun to play. Maybe not as in "I'd rather have root canal instead", but at the very least up to the "why would I actually want to pay a monthly fee for this?" mark.
Re:Let it out as open source - DONT let it die (Score:2, Informative)
While not entirely LEGAL per se [ok, more, not at all legal] if you google "private Ragnarok Online server" you'll find a few top 100 sites. Several of these servers do manage a decent up rate considering they aren't backed by a huge company.
Its open source atleast in the software they use to make the games run on their own server..