I’d been meaning to return to it at some point to see if it had improved, but I guess it’s moot now. The low-end game seemed decent enough, but I guess they struggled with high-level play and retaining players.
This bums me out a bit. I enjoyed the game when I played it, but I never stay with an MMO for more than a couple of months. Of all those I’ve tried, Tablua Rasa was one of the most fun for sure.
WoW. Guess we all figured it would come, but this seems pretty quick.
But isn’t there going to be a nude spread of one of the Tab Rasa chicks in the new Playboy? Surely that will cause a resurgence right?
Nah, they blew that wad (so to speak) last year.
Now to go dig up those recent “we are totally committed to the future of Tabula Rasa” quotes…
People here should have learned to “read”.
Imho it’s another good sign for the industry.
This post applies to me also. I think it’s foolish to shut down so soon. They should at least leave one server up. What a scam.
(Recently bought a collector’s edition on the cheap for kicks).
Wow. Is this the fastest an MMO has come out and completely crashed? This didn’t even make it a year, did it? Or maybe just over?
Wow, that was sooner than expected. With all the money they sank into develoment, you would think that they would at least change the game over to a free-to-play format like Guild Wars and try to make money off content additions or something.
It looks like Fury had a shorter life, at 10 months, though that’s the only one I can find offhand. TR made it just over a year, or 15 months if you count this trailing period before the actual shutdown.
What about a development costs to days in service ratio? I bet TR wins that one hands down.
Nevermind: according to yonder wikipedia, Auto Assault actually lasted around 16 months. My memory compressed it.
I’m not surprised except that the closing is coming earlier than I’d have guessed. I didn’t give it good odds for lasting through 2009 but figured it would last closer to the end of the year.
TR did a number of things right and I enjoyed the aspects that made it feel different than the EQ/WoW model, notably the FPS-style combat. But it lacked cohesion and character development was very bland. The crafting may have been the worst I’ve ever seen in an MMO – unless you liked making armor paint. :P
Sad to see it shut down so soon, though. NCsoft’s got to be smarting after this and Auto Assault both failed. No wonder they are putting so much investment into City of Heroes. Its playerbase may be shrinking but at least it’s holding relatively steady and the game is profitable.
I really like auto assault.
Is there a direct correlation between games who’ve had their female characters depicted in Playboy and financial failure? Let’s see, there’s been Tabula Rasa, Age of Conan, Hellgate: London, Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude, Kane & Lynch, and Jericho. Am I missing any others?
Bloodrayne. Didn’t she start it all?
Lemme add that it’s a little strange to see rule 34 go mainstream.
How’s the Bloodrayne franchise doing these days? Bloodrayne 2 couldn’t have done too well since Majesco pulled out of the premium console market shortly after its release.
Yeah, I also thought it might be interesting to take another look at the game after another year or so, just in case the designers really had big ambitions they didn’t have enough time for at launch. But I guess that didn’t work out… A pity, because I was sympathetic to the basic idea of the game at first.
So they had semi-fun basic gameplay in the beta because you could just blow things away pretty easily in PvE. Net-guns for the win :) Soloing one of the instances they planned for a group was an interesting challenge, though it made a mockery of their planning. Then they got rid of the easy PvE setting in the name of balance and presumably to slow down level progression. Oh well, so much for that, because it made the dreary repetitive combat a horrible chore.
TR had a superficially interesting setting that turned out to be meaningless and vapid when you looked at it – really appalling considering Garriot’s reputation. That whole logos thing was just a tease; the sad remains of a good idea that I gather they didn’t know how to implement properly. They also had a ludicrous story, a nonexistent economy, almost pointless loot, a terrible crafting system, and nothing much to do but level up, at launch. I imagine that even after the big game revamp and restart on a sci-fi game, they must have had several false starts and changes of direction in order to ship such a thin game.
At least AC2 had the excuse of being whipsawed by Microsoft and commanded to produce a content-free game at launch; but since TR clearly wanted to have a lot of complex content, what was their excuse?
Lessee, Conan (the console brawler as well as AoC) and the Witcher were in last year’s; and I seem to recall Darkwatch featured prominently a few years ago. So clearly, “Playboy nude pictorial = career suicide” applies to videogame gals as well.
According to Kotaku, this year’s lineup features Afro Samurai, Ride To Hell, Velvet Assassin, Saints Row 2, Domination and Rise of the Argonauts. Anybody want to make bets on which besides SR2 will actually sell well?
Hey, she’s got two games and two movie classics under her belt - what more does she need?
The best part of tabula rasa was that astonishingly long line, consisting of hundreds of players, for the first rune logo thingie right after the tutorial in the beta. I got a great screenshot of my character cutting in line, grabbing the rune logo thingie, and shouting “suck it, line bitches!” with everybody around incredibly upset. It was awesome.
IMO, that beta was TR’s biggest mistake. They opened the doors way too early. Was TR fun on release? Who knows? I certainly never played it again.