After several hours of the AFS players furiously and frantically battling the Bane and the nefarious Neph, Earth and all Allied territories fell to the alien invaders. All we once knew is now but a memory. Nothing exists but darkness.
Tabula Rasa’s Live team made one final post this morning giving their appreciation for the players that stuck by them and the game:
As we return to Earth, our battle comes to an end. Thank you to all the fans who have supported us for the last few years! We hope you have enjoyed your journey through the galaxy and that the next worlds you visit will be filled with excitement and fun.
We’d like to extend a special thanks to our community – fansite administrators, forum administrators, and friends – for it is your passion and commitment that drives us to keep creating new and unique games. With every ending comes a new beginning, a clean slate, and a new story to be written. Thank you from all of us on the Tabula Rasa team, past and present.
### end of transmission ###
I’ve said before that the TR Live team deserves admiration and applause for doing the best they could with the confused mess of a game the Development team dumped in their laps post-launch, and I stand by that statement now. I’ve been under the impression that the Live team was pretty small while the obstacles lying before them were many. Too many, as it turned out.
The Checkered Past
My interest in Tabula Rasa began as beta neared and I began reading interviews with Richard “General British” Garriott (Executive Producer / Creative Director) and April “CuppaJo” Burba (Online Community Relations Lead / Associate Producer) and catching up on anything I could relating to the game, including the GDC videos of Garriott narrating a demonstration of the game. I’ve always been a fan of Richard “Lord British” Garriott throughout the years, though to my recollection I have only played a single game of his: Ultima III. He always seemed not only charismatic, but genuine which is an important distinction when compared to other charismatic developers who, in their wacky video podcasts or drug-induced 4am forum theses, have consistently given me the “used car salesman” heebie-jeebies.
And so it was, from the pre-beta hype to my fondest desires of hoping for a more modern and action-packed return to my old-school SWG roots and perhaps an unhealthy dose of man-love for it’s Idea Guy, that I teetered dangerously close to the precipice of fanboyism. Several times per day I would check every site that covered TR for any new news as well as checking forums, especially the Stratics forums where April would often hang out and make posts. This behavior continued until I finally earned a slot in late beta and all my hopes and dreams came crashing down in a brutal cascade of reality: Tabula Rasa didn’t know what it was, didn’t know what it wanted to be when it grew up, and it was nowhere near ready for launch. What I was playing was not what I’d been reading about. The hype had created a very detailed and specific mental image of what I’d be seeing in Tabula Rasa and this was not it. 
I’ve always had a rule that if I was accepted into a beta that I would do everything I could do test things and provide detailed feedback to help make the game as good as it could be at launch even, like with The Burning Crusades, I knew I would not be playing the game. With Tabula Rasa I broke this rule. I was so disappointed, let-down and again, heartbroken over what I was seeing that I couldn’t bring myself to login. I didn’t buy the game either, though I would read any TR-related news stories to come across sites like Massively, especially regarding patches and content updates. I still had hope that it would find its identity and the pieces would fall into place. Alas, that never happened.
The Checkered Present
On November 21, 2008 the Tabula Rasa announced in an open letter that NCsoft would be shutting down the game on February 28, 2009. Nostalgia for what could have been and a desire to see what changes had been made in the year since I’d last seen the game prompted me to place an order from Amazon.com where Tabula Rasa was selling for $1 USD. NCsoft originally planned on making the game free to play starting January 10 but things changed and Tabula Rasa went free to play on December 19. I was away for the holidays so it was the end of December before I was home and logged in. Knowing what to expect this time things went smoother initially. I created a new Recruit named Jerreth Markley and at level 5 chose the Specialist class. It was soon after this when I admitted that I just wasn’t enjoying myself. There were still some glaring technical issues with the game’s engine, controls, and combat that kept destroying any sense of engagement but the bottom line was that the low-level content was generic. While the voice-overs were usually OK, the quest text was not the least bit interesting to read and soon I was just clicking-through on each of them, grabbing as many as I could find and not caring what they were. Travel here and talk to Joe Shmoe NPC. Kill Ten Alien Rats. No… make that Kill 40 Xanxi spiders and 200 Thrax soldiers! 200?! Oh, that’s right, NCsoft published the game — one of the Lineage II grind-quest writers must have hitched a ride to Austin to “help” with Tabula Rasa. Gee, thanks… 
I made it to level 7 until I’d had enough and with a sigh, logged off. To be fair though, the Xanxi spiders were actually quite fun to fight!
On a side note, I did find it ironic that I only made it to level 7 at that point, which is the same level as my City of Heroes character I’ve had since that game’s launch. I check in maybe once a year, so it was last year that the CoH character dinged 7. Two NCsoft MMORPGs that I just can’t be bothered to care about. I can get away with saying that since Guild Wars is not a MMORPG… 
The Last Stand
The Live team put together a live event for the final two days of the game. In addition to the Bane attacking the Control Points (often with Elites!) the developers and GMs were playing the Neph, a super-powered alien race related to the Eloh. At level 7, I could not participate in this end-game (literally) event so I set out to see what I could see and do what I could do while keeping an eye on chat and player activities to gauge the overall feeling of the shutdown.
OH.MY.GAWD the LAG! Last week the remaining three US servers were merged into a single server, Hydra. From that alone I expected some latency issues, assuming enough players cared to login and play. Did they ever! The shutdown event came in two stages, however: one for the EU server which went offline at midnight GMT, then one for the US server which shut down at midnight CST. They allowed EU players to join the US servers which just exacerbated the latency. This was a double-edged sword and I’m torn on how to feel about it. On the one hand, it’s great to have an open policy and allow players from all over to pick which regional servers to play on. It’s also great that the EU players wanted to show their support by continuing even after the EU server had gone offline. On the other hand, they’d already had their event now they’re on our already-busy server doing it again and adding to our server load. Overall, the latency and lag-related effects and problems were the worst I recall seeing in a long time, maybe ever, but at least it came in spikes. Sometimes server reaction time was right around one second, which is noticeable but certainly playable. Other times the server was unable to react to events (looting a mob’s corpse, for example) for upwards of 30 seconds. With most of the 50’s defending the various CPs from the Neph, apparently things were much worse than what I was experiencing out in the Forean wilderness if the comments in chat were any indication.
Every base and CP that I saw was jam-packed with players, mostly level 50’s. I got to see a few examples of cool armor, including one with an eerie resemblance to that of a Spartan from the Halo games. A few were running around wearing disturbingly gigantic General British heads.
If I was near a base or CP in that first Foreas zone that was under attack I rushed to help, otherwise I spent some time exploring and doing quests. In the end I reached level 10 (this close to 11) and had increased a couple skills. I think I had rank 3 in the Lightning and Ruin Logos abilities. Loot tables had been tweaked so by level 10 I’d nearly completed a red set of Officer armor just from drops. I don’t know what “red” means in Tabula Rasa (epic?) but when my gloves had an armor rating of 86 and the red Officer gloves had 3500? Guess which one I’m going to wear?
I’d seen pretty much all of that first zone on Foreas and bits of some of the adjoining zones. I accidentally wound up in the Irendas Penal Colony where initially not much was happening so I explored a bit, discovering the zone was for the mid-20 levels so worked on finding a way back to Foreas when a legion of elite Thrax warriors attacked the base!
The Thrax were downright vicious! Most of the players I saw at Irendas were in their 20’s and low 30’s. Someone sent word on the chat that Irendas was under attack. What the hell, I roared “for the AFS!” and charged into the fray where I was promptly one-shotted into oblivion.
I respawned at one of the hospitals in Foreas and set out exploring again, this time trying my first instanced mission in the game, The Caves of Donn. Not bad for a first instance, though it reinforced one of the key issues Tabula Rasa never overcame: practically everything was soloable with no real incentive to group or to have any interactions at all with fellow players. I solo a lot in MMOGs and I advocate developing soloable content. But not the entire game.
I mentioned I had encountered a few issues with the game, so I’ll get those out of the way now.
I wasn’t overly fond of the art direction. The worlds were passable and even very nice in some areas, but they never seemed alive. Very few wildlife critters and the trees were just still models just like in the early areas of DDO. I’m not asking for the super-exaggerated swaying of Vanguard’s trees, but anything to increase the player’s immersion in the setting is a good thing. Additionally, I wasn’t always comfortable with the look of some of the characters. I often wondered if the artists were recruited from Ritual Entertainment because some of Tabula Rasa’s characters and gear looked like a clone of John Blade and other characters from the SiN universe. Mind you, I enjoyed SiN back in 1998 far more than the other game that came out of nowhere that same year and buried SiN in forgotten obscurity — Half-Life — and… hang on, there’s a mob outside waving torches and yelling “burn the heretic!”
Running through the zones the past few days, some of the terrain textures reminded me of WAR where everything was low-res textures until fairly close, but even when they switched to the high-res textures they were still blurry. Not all of Tabula Rasa was like that, but a goodly chunk of the areas I was able to visit from levels 1 to 10 were. Very mild issues in the grand scheme of things, but they were there and worse – were issues that typically are not improved upon post-launch in any MMOG.
Technical issues were still there like the engine’s Z-axis problem. Going up or down terrain caused the screen to become jittery rather than being able to move smoothly. Even jumping had a tiny bit of jitter attached to it, but worse was the jump lag. In practically every other MMOG I have ever played (the exception being SWG) I press the spacebar and my character instantly jumps, just like it should. In Tabula Rasa (and SWG) I press the spacebar but it’s roughly a full second later before the jump occurs. Line of sight issues made combat frustrating, especially combined with the Z-axis. I could be in straight view of my opponent with no objects whatsoever between us but if we weren’t on flat ground, I’d often get errors trying to shoot at it. Even running directly up into the mob’s face, and my character is still telling me “I can’t do that” and other error messages. Highly aggravating. The default third-person camera was decent and easily playable but the recently added first-person camera was an utter failure. I often had the impression that the developers wanted to make a shooter MMOG, but none of them had ever worked on or even played a shooter. It’s as if they simply watched some Fraps footage of shooter gameplay and called it a day, deciding they were now informed of all they needed to know about creating a compelling shooter “feel.” Simply moving the camera location to my character model’s head doesn’t cut it; there are a few other elements that must accompany that camera shift in order to successfully pull of a first-person view. These were all minor technical issues however that could have been (and likely would have been) eventually fixed in a patch.
Content. Even now as the game shuts down I still read that not enough new content was added to the higher levels. Level cap is 50 yet I’ve been reading since launch (even from the developers) that there was little reason to continue beyond 30. Like the technical issues, content can be included in patches. The problem is that content is time-consuming to create, and I’ve been under the impression (perhaps incorrectly?) that Tabula Rasa’s Live team is roughly the same size, if not smaller, as Vanguard’s Live team. Compare patch notes from both games and you’ll notice most patches strictly deal with the technical side of things while new content is relatively sparse. But with both games having such a low population and therefore low income, how is extra manpower to develop content justified when not only is there no guarantee of a return on investment, but the subscriptions themselves indicate the expense would come at a loss? Simple – it isn’t justified at all.
Crafting and PvP. Neither made sense to me in this game. We’re all part of the AFS, an inter-species military group. Why are we crafting anything whatsoever? This is a war! The military assigns equipment to its soldiers. Since TR never left the Diku mold, it already has levels, ranks, factions and content to cover the acquisition and upgrade of gear. PvP? We’re fighting for our very existence, the one time ever when it’s time to come together to fight the Bane. Yet we’re going into arenas and fighting amongst ourselves? What. The. Hell? Again, I cannot help but see this as yet another of those areas where the developers didn’t know what to do with the game. “It’s an MMO and all MMOs have crafting and PvP whether they’re needed or whether they add anything to the experience or not. It’s like, a rule!” Rules were made to be broken, no?
Combat. There were moments where it really shone but mostly the combat was lackluster. To make my point I will embed a video taken by Hauntshade from To Worlds Unknown showing the final three minutes of the game:
Notice anything? This is supposed to be a Shooter-RPG with lots of action! But everyone’s just standing still shooting. I’ll reiterate that nagging feeling that for all the cooks in the kitchen during Tabula Rasa’s design and development, none of those cooks had any shooter experience. Tabula Rasa was an RPG first and foremost, and I will stand by that; I’m not suggesting TR should have been a straight-up shooter. But its shooter elements and gameplay were half-assed, probably because, despite all of Garriott’s protestations about how DikuMMOs were broken and doing it wrong, Tabula Rasa was using those same “broken” and “wrong” mechanics itself. This left a feeling of engaging in very generic “Rock ‘em, Sock ‘em Robots” melee combat disguised as ranged shooter combat.
The final, and worst, problem with the game is largely due to a culmination of all those other smaller issues: apathy. Scott Jennings wrote an insightful article as an NCsoft insider’s view on Tabula Rasa back in January, and towards the end says this:
In the end, some games – most games, actually – just fail. Tabula Rasa was one of those. There wasn’t anything obvious or magical to it. It just wasn’t a game that very many people got passionate about.
Therein lies the fatal flaw for players: for all TR offered, for most of us it just never inspired any passion. I had neither an interest nor investment in my character. The low-level or new player experience was not engaging. This is absolutely critical! From the moment you login, those first few levels should grab the players, show them how fun the game is and show them glimpses of how much more fun the game will be as they progress. WoW did this. LOTRO did this with its story-based instanced starting areas. Both DDO and Vanguard saw completely revamped starter experiences added to their games in 2008. [Counterpoint: DDO, LOTRO, and Vanguard also run the risk of losing players if that great starter experience changes once players enter the “real game.” Just wanted to state that before anyone felt like trolling.] TR’s lowbie experience is lackluster, mediocre at best, and for me anyway, failed to spark much of a desire to see and experience the later content. The only other mainstream “AAA” MMO whose starting experience inspired this level (far worse, actually) of apathy in me is EQ2. In 1987 R.E.M. released their album “Document” and one of the singles was the popular “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” and that sentiment is largely how I feel about the demise of Tabula Rasa. As an MMO fan and player, it’s disheartening to see one go away forever, but this game was unable to make me care. I feel fine indeed, and that is truly unfortunate.
I’ve been fairly negative about Tabula Rasa, so just let me add that the past two days – especially yesterday once I’d gotten beyond the level 7 doldrums – I had plenty of “ooh” and “aah” moments that I did not have during my brief time in beta. Whether they were there all along and I’d simply missed them or if they were due to the changes of the past year, it was those final hours where I finally felt like most of the pieces of the puzzle had at least been placed on the table and merely awaiting being assembled. Maybe it’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time with my 360 while on break from MMOs but I really felt like TR would have shone on consoles. The UI was streamlined compared to what we see in the bloated fantasy MMORPG UIs. Weapons and Logos abilities were hotkey-swappable, which is already the same mechanic used in console shooters. All the options were in a circular menu, similar to Mass Effect, which is quick and easy for analog sticks. Chat would have been a sticky issue to overcome, naturally but all in all, in my opinion Tabula Rasa had far fewer PC-to-console issues than any other MMOG currently out there.
Sentients! Ready your combat rations and eat hearty… For tonight, we dine offline!
The final hour of Tabula Rasa began as players began expressing their sadness at the game’s demise, the hope it would someday be resuscitated, and wishing the faithful followers the best of luck in their endeavors in their next MMOs. It seemed, much like with Hellgate London, that the players would come together as a cohesive group along with the developers and bid the game a final and respectful farewell.
How wrong I was.
T-60: Neph attacks escalated and players fighting them seemed to be having a blast other than the lag they endured. It turned out that “Dev13” was leveling anyone who asked up to 50, too. It was made clear that it was strictly increasing your level, it was up to the player to get his skills, etc. increased at the trainers. I declined the opportunity because, only being level 10 at the time, I didn’t think I would be able to afford the training and purchasing vendor gear upgrades in order to be able to truly participate. In retrospect, I wish I’d have just done it so that I could have visited the high-level areas, and been able to witness the final battle.
T-30: A developer posted a final thank you in the Admin Message channel:
As the clock ticks down, we’d like to take one last moment to thank everyone for playing. It’s been a fantastic ride, and we’re happy you stuck with us for the last year.
At this point, I expected a heartfelt outpouring of sentiments from the players. Instead, a small group of players started spamming the chat. This behavior spread as the clock ticked closer to zero. This is not to say everyone was spamming, far from it. But as it got closer to shutdown time, more and more players joined in and the chat window scrolled so fast it was impossible to read.
T-20: A player by the name of Volto, annoyed at the spamming that was starting to occur said “Tabula Rasa TEAM – Thank you and apologies for a culture full of fail.” I couldn’t agree more.
T-15: More spam, and more people spamming but the chat is at least manageable. The devs started joining in more with the chat (not spamming however) and being a little free with their language. What, are they going to get moved off the team as a reprimand? It was one of the player’s birthday and people who were not spamming wished him a happy birthday. Then a bright yellow Admin Message came through from a developer: “HAPPY FUCKING BIRTHDAY” and then “One for my homies! *pour*” Wow. Ya don’t see that every day. 
T-10: More spam. The Neph have taken over most of the CPs by now and have pushed the AFS back to Earth for the final fight. A dev sent an Admin Message reading “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!” Aw, c’mon, you knew it was coming! 
T-5: The spam is getting ridiculous at this point. Mostly meaningless twaddle and gibberish, with a flurry of nasty comments about Richard Garriott. The nicest one was “Richard Garriott is a commie bastard!” The rest, I won’t repeat here.
During the past hours and minutes, a few players did manage to say their goodbyes though. A few that I managed to capture include:
Thanks for an enjoyable time!
Thanks devs and GMs, thanks fellow players.
Much thanks to you, Tabula Rasa team. I hope you sift through these messages later and find this. I also hope you keep this IP and do something badass with it – it’s a great setting for a traditional RPG if nothing else.
Goodbye Tabula Rasa. This game will always be in my memory.
Sad to see it end, but we will meet again in the halls of Valhalla!
From beta, to launch, to now I’ve been Rasa… I and many others. You were a breath of fresh air in such a stale MMO world. The first MMO I’ve ever seen with FUN grinding. You will be missed. So truly missed. Goodbye Tabula Rasa.
Unfortunately the fellow who posted that last comment, Synfulldeedz, also began spamming it during the final few minutes. Seriously guys, this is how you want Tabula Rasa and its community to be remembered? As a bunch of chat spammers? Especially those of you saying things that would make the foul-mouthed kiddies on Xbox Live cringe. I’d have thought that Hellgate London would have had a worse community, since most of that game was free to play all along, but they put you to shame. Hellgate wasn’t even an MMO for fuck’s sake, yet those players came together in the end and made its demise touching, respectful and worthy of remembrance. You Tabula spammers are an embarrassment to gamers as a whole, and MMO gamers in particular. Go play Halo or Counterstrike where the rest of your despicable ilk reside. You’re worse than the XBL General Public. You’re worse than the vocal dregs of the Darkfall “community” for that matter. (Ok, maybe not that bad…)
There, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest…
Someone had hinted over chat that it may actually be possible for non-50’s to get to Earth and posted the route to take. I was on my way but never managed to make it due to my unfamiliarity with the higher-level zones and control points. Again, regret that I passed on the opportunity for a free level 50…
At T-10 seconds, the devs began counting down the seconds to shutdown. The only way it was even readable in the barrage of spam was because Admin Messages were that bright yellow color. At T-3 I stopped wherever I was as an alert came across center-screen reading “This region has been lost to Bane forces!” and there was no way I was getting to Earth in 3 seconds.
3…
2…
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