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A Postmortem

On February 28, 2009, one of very few active science fiction-oriented MMORPGs came to an abrupt end after only 16 months online. Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa, developed by Destination Games under the direction — or at least the branding — of Lord British himself (since promoted to General), the possible creative brain behind the well-known Ultima series of PC games, was released November 2, 2007 with relatively little fanfare and a very tepid reception from the gaming community, especially where it concerns the numerous review sites now sadly instrumental to the success of many a title. Despite its namesake being almost synonymous with great storytelling and gameplay, Tabula Rasa garnered nothing but excessively heavy-handed criticism and, after apparently repeatedly failing to meet quarterly earnings expectations by publisher NC Soft, the Korean company behind City of Heroes, Lineage, Guild Wars and their associated spin-offs and sequels, it was announced that it would be prematurely cancelled after it had reached only 12 months and 3 weeks of service. While possibly not an uncommon occurrence in the game development market — after all, it seems a great number of games die off while still in development, never having been published at all — I’ve the impression this particular situation warrants some postmortem analysis because of a very unique set of circumstances that may be partially responsible for the pre-emptive demise of what I considered to be a great offering in video gaming entertainment. More importantly, this latest casualty of the entertainment industry as a whole — video games, film, television or print — really just presents another symptom of an ongoing infection; a plague being treated by that industry with mediocre, monotonous, and uninspired content.

While this verbose autopsy was ignited by the event of one of my favorite live games being swiftly cancelled when confronted with grim sales, the ‘kindling’ of this critique has been building for ages from many different entertainment sources. And so the sparks have flown… A great idea, though certainly not without its flaws, Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa had undeniable talent and ingenuity behind its conception that went mostly overlooked so it could instead be vilified immediately upon its release for its few shortcomings, all of which were largely recognized to be common to newly-released MMORPGs but were nonetheless treated as nothing short of criminal offenses by many subscribers coming from more developed titles. It became evident almost immediately, even during the beta phase, that any and all such games were expected to be re-skinned World of Warcraft emulators with no special gaming mechanics to call their own. Regardless of its merits, and I feel there were many, it was put to an early death based on poor profits, which can be easily attributed to its publisher, NC Soft, generally not giving a damn and proceeding with minimal marketing. Apparently they banked solely on being able to sell a product branded with Richard Garriott’s name without exercising any further sales effort and, unsurprisingly, Richard Garriott himself appears to have banked on that, as well.

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Tags: EPIC FAIL, FAIL, MMORPG, NC SOFT, OVERVIEW EFFECT, POSTMORTEM, RANT, RICHARD GARRIOTT, SPACE, TABULA RASA, TL;DNR, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 4:41 AM and is filed under Entertainment, Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.