Tabula Rasa, now with no FUN!

[Rake]

TR is now free to play until it shuts down.

No big deal but if you wondered what it was about and have time on your hands.

Here

[peryn]

The process of obtaining a serial is a little unusual. You need to open a ticket through the support site and request a key, then wait for them to get back to you (about 5 hours for me).

[Rake]

I don't even want to try.

Was in the friends and family beta and they removed any amount of fun I had early on, way before they got near release.
Oh yes it did have fun in there at some point.

Anyway, it's sad that so many MMOs just can't get it right.

[Venkman]

For the folks who showed up to the genre through WoW and played just that for a year or two, there really aren't more than three other games with a similar level of quality but a different enough experience to make leaving WoW worth the trouble.

Prior to WoW though, our view of getting "it right" was different. A lot of games that have closed or stopped development since would still be hanging around due to there not being the 900lb gorilla of painfully-obvious success. Going down the list, I'd say AA, TR, and maybe even Fury wouldn't have shut down, and that Gods & Heroes and maybe Wish wouldn't have stopped development. And while AoC and WAR would have maybe started with fewer subscribers, they would have retained a higher percentage of them.

This is because our understanding of things was skewed by the quality of the day. You could rely on game jumpers to follow the next foozle, to want to be the first on virgin servers, to work through the patently obvious flaws in the game because they so believed in the developers, themselves having garnered niche rockstar status for some cutting criticism of the games they were up against at the time. Just doing one major thing right was enough to keep a player for three or six months until the next game launched.

But those days are gone. You've got your open beta to convert them to a box and one month. If you haven't built the game well enough or had bad ideas, you'll have it shown to you in unavoidable ways. The key of course is to not let it get to that point, listen to your players when more than 60% of even the forum posters are saying the same exact things are wrong, and actually try to fix it instead of hoping to fill your accountbase with a bunch of niave non-MMOers walking through GameStop that day.

[Baldrake]

The sad thing is that retailers are still selling TR. I was in my local Future Shop* the other day, and tried to explain to them that they really shouldn't have this on the shelves, but was met with bored shoulder-shrugs.

Wierdly, if you look at the TR home page, there is absolutely no mention of the shutdown. Perhaps with the free play period, they're trying to give the game one more blast of life.

* Kind of like Best Buy, but in Canada

[Signe]

Some places are still selling Hellgate: London CE for $56 - $99, too, at some places.  It's outrageous.

[Tale]

I don't even want to try.

Was in the friends and family beta and they removed any amount of fun I had early on, way before they got near release.
Oh yes it did have fun in there at some point.

Anyway, it's sad that so many MMOs just can't get it right.

What a pathetic attitude. You know fuck all about Tabula Rasa the retail game. You dismiss everything about it based on your outdated knowledge from Wankers and Fanbois Beta. You're a dinosaur.

The title of this thread is wrong. Many people have had a lot of fun in Tabula Rasa, the retail game.The setting is good, there are interesting things to see and character choices to make, and participation in PvE base defences in Tabula Rasa should be part of everyone's MMOG history.

As should a taste of its FPS-style combat system where terrain and objects provide cover, which broke new ground for the genre. There are stupid people around who dismiss the TR combat system because they lack first-person shooter skills and try to play it RPG-style, using the weapons poorly. Others claim it's just a traditional RPG combat system with a fake FPS overlay, and those people are fucking idiots.

I encourage people to try Tabula Rasa during this time if you're looking for an entertaining distraction. It's only a good attempt, not a great game, but it has plenty to offer for a month or two of fun.

[Rake]

I don't even want to try.

Was in the friends and family beta and they removed any amount of fun I had early on, way before they got near release.
Oh yes it did have fun in there at some point.

Anyway, it's sad that so many MMOs just can't get it right.

What a pathetic attitude. You know fuck all about Tabula Rasa the retail game. You dismiss everything about it based on your outdated knowledge from Wankers and Fanbois Beta.

The title of this thread is wrong. Many people have had a lot of fun in Tabula Rasa, the retail game. You're a dinosaur.

I encourage people to try Tabula Rasa during this time if you're looking for an entertaining distraction. It's only a good attempt, not a great game, but it has plenty to offer for a month or two of fun.

The setting is good, there are interesting things to see and character choices to make, and participation in PvE base defences in Tabula Rasa should be part of everyone's MMOG history.

I know enough not to have bought the game. I know that it's a dead game. I also know it could have been a successful game.
I don't care to try it, because if it was any fucking good it would be alive and not getting flatlined soon.

[Sir T]

Gaming history is filled with bloody great games that failed to sell boxes. That proves nothing.

I encourage everyone to give TR a try. It will cost you nothing.

Here's a playlist of TR movies I made if you are curious.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=4ED2CB2F066CB717

Enjoy.

[KallDrexx]

Base raids/invasions, whatever were so fun.  I'd sign up again just to do those again.

More MMOs need stuff like that.

[Venkman]

Yes. TR's combat system is somewhat uniquely suited for this though. Even it wasn't full FPS, it at least did an admirable job of trying for those who rarely or never played FPS games.

It didn't have a big enough market though, which sucks because like CoX, there's a number of good ideas that absolutely should be ripped off by successful MMOs but won't because they don't need to.

[Ghambit]

I want everyone to imagine what TR would've been like if:

1)  There was meaningful PvP
2)  You could play the Bane
3)  PAUs were implemented
4)  Contestable flashpoints were implemented

All these things were close to being released until they tanked the game.  I fully planned on subbing it again when they got their content in order, but now... not happening obviously.  It's a sad sad shame.

[Mrbloodworth]

Apparently TR is free to play until its dead.

[Venkman]

I want everyone to imagine what TR would've been like if:

1)  There was meaningful PvP
2)  You could play the Bane
3)  PAUs were implemented
4)  Contestable flashpoints were implemented

All these things were close to being released until they tanked the game.  I fully planned on subbing it again when they got their content in order, but now... not happening obviously.  It's a sad sad shame.

Back to my above question: how do you make "meaningful" that which needs to be reset due to player dominance? Uniserver? Not in the cards for TR ever, so they weren't close there. Vehicles? Until they changed their mind they claimed the engine couldn't support it. Pitched battles? Last game that did that passingly-well was PS, and that was because of heavy compromises in graphics that TR didn't bother even considering.

Contestable flashpoints would have been a feature under "meaningful" PvP, as would PAUs.

And your #2 should be your #1 in bold. The ONLY way PvP makes sense in a game about decimated races surviving in their own corner of the universe is with playable Bane. Heck, even the concepts of economy and faction didn't make sense in TR, which a number of us in early beta pointed out.

But in the end, TR was not built to be the pseudo twitch PvP game it could probably have done better as. So they weren't "close" really. They were just wrong twice.

[ghost]

I want everyone to imagine what TR would've been like if:

1)  There was meaningful PvP
2)  You could play the Bane
3)  PAUs were implemented
4)  Contestable flashpoints were implemented

All these things were close to being released until they tanked the game.  I fully planned on subbing it again when they got their content in order, but now... not happening obviously.  It's a sad sad shame.

It still would have been a boring, bland world.  One of the biggest issues with this game for me was that everything looked exactly the same, like an army that consisted of nothing but homeless dudes wearing camo jackets. 

[Ghambit]

Yes. TR's combat system is somewhat uniquely suited for this though. Even it wasn't full FPS, it at least did an admirable job of trying for those who rarely or never played FPS games.

It didn't have a big enough market though, which sucks because like CoX, there's a number of good ideas that absolutely should be ripped off by successful MMOs but won't because they don't need to.

I've played many an FPS MMO and honestly I preferred TR's hybrid style.  Fact is, FPS in a gaming sense sux unless you're willing to go full on milsim... or at least most of the way there (if u have a multitude of gameplay elements available, such as 2142).  Furthermore, in a Sci-Fi sense, TRs combat engine made the most sense because honestly... in the future, combat wont be anything like we're used to.  I'd go as far as saying combat in the future will be more like a turn-based game then a twitch shooter; complete with HUD and smart weapons.  So as much as people were knocking the system, it worked perfectly for the theme they had.

Now, if they'd had everything they had today within a month of release, they would've knocked it out of the park.

[schild]

Now, if they'd had everything they had today within a month of release, they would've knocked it out of the park.

No, they wouldn't have. It's still a boring piece of shit. I'm sorry, but anyone saying, at any point, that Tabula Rasa became good, was good, or is somehow worth playing is just lying and is totally ignoring the rest of the gaming industry, with or without MMORPGs. Doesn't matter how you slice it, the entire thing was a waste of money and that was incredibly obvious from the moment the first trailer came out. Thing was a sinking ship from day one. Much like Auto Assault, Matrix Online, Stargate Worlds, Darkfall, Gods & Heroes, and Imperator.

[Nebu]

No, they wouldn't have. It's still a boring piece of shit. I'm sorry, but anyone saying, at any point, that Tabula Rasa became good, was good, or is somehow worth playing is just lying and is totally ignoring the rest of the gaming industry, with or without MMORPGs. Doesn't matter how you slice it, the entire thing was a waste of money and that was incredibly obvious from the moment the first trailer came out. Thing was a sinking ship from day one. Much like Auto Assault, Matrix Online, Stargate Worlds, Darkfall, Gods & Heroes, and Imperator.

Agree.  WWIIOL is a classic example.  MUCH better game now than at release and still nowhere near good enough to attract a massive audience.  TR may be better, but that's not saying much when the starting product set the bar so low. 

[Venkman]

I've played many an FPS MMO and honestly I preferred TR's hybrid style. 

Heh, and how many of those are there exactly?  I count four that launched, and a series of promises as yet unrealized. If you meant JUST "FPS" then I can understand your preference.

In any case, I agree with you that half-pregnant FPS sucks but disagree that TR's failings can be accepted because "it's nothing like we've seen before". AC2 ranged combat was nothing like we'd seen before. AA character avatars were nothing liked we'd ever seen before. 

I don't agree with where you think combat in the future will be, but that's besides the point. You either like TR's combat system at face value or not. We both seemed to like that part. It was the rest of the game wrapped around it that failed for a lot of people. And those failures started before they even invited the first beta testers, so weren't going to be fixed a month or a year after launch. These were systemtic level things that were just bad or niave choices. And now it gets relegated to the stable of games from which you pull features to make the "perfect" game in idle chitchat.

[Lantyssa]

Can you kill things quickly yet?

I remember in beta being able to feel like a Goddamned Hero on the battlefield.  Then they slowed it down so it took way too long to kill one thing and you couldn't fight a small group on your own.  I stopped playing.  Then I heard they did it again.  It went from a well-paced hybrid shooter to a slow as molasses "I'll go get a drink (except I can't leave the keyboard)" generic MMO.

[Ghambit]

Can you kill things quickly yet?

I remember in beta being able to feel like a Goddamned Hero on the battlefield.  Then they slowed it down so it took way too long to kill one thing and you couldn't fight a small group on your own.  I stopped playing.  Then I heard they did it again.  It went from a well-paced hybrid shooter to a slow as molasses "I'll go get a drink (except I can't leave the keyboard)" generic MMO.

You hit the nail of the head on a main reason why the game failed so quickly.  They had GREAT gameplay, but people were blasting through content so fast that they scaled down the PC dmg. and scaled up the shielding on mobs.  Mostly because an entire mid-level zone was lacking content and from then on the game was largely a grind.  Endgame was nonexistent, so they basically turned it into a Korean grindfest. 

As time went on (and the playerbase left) they injected more content and balanced everything out, removing the grind (errr. not as bad).  But, too late.

Coulda, shoulda, woulda.  The game released a few months too soon so it could beat out other releases, and they paid the price.

[Trippy]

Can you kill things quickly yet?

I remember in beta being able to feel like a Goddamned Hero on the battlefield.  Then they slowed it down so it took way too long to kill one thing and you couldn't fight a small group on your own.  I stopped playing.  Then I heard they did it again.  It went from a well-paced hybrid shooter to a slow as molasses "I'll go get a drink (except I can't leave the keyboard)" generic MMO.

Yup, when they nerfed the shotgun in beta and made it so you could no longer solo the "stalkers" I knew the designers were hell-bent on removing all fun out of the game before release.

[Sir T]

Havingf played bith. aside from Endgame conmtent TAB RAS right now is better than WOW. And I'll be hopping on thew server off and on till it shuts down. WOW only held my interest for a week.

On topic here is an interview on Tab rasa's closude with an ex developer of auto assault.

http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/51644

The End of Tabula Rasa - An Interview with Auto Assault's Scott Brown

Posted December 18th, 2008 by Cody Bye
When the news of Tabula Rasa’s imminent demise hit the internet, the social gamers of our MMO industry lit up like they had just sat on a massive mound of fire ants. People were scrambling to figure out why NCsoft suddenly opted to pull the plug after they had been declaring to numerous press establishments – including Ten Ton Hammer – that the game was safe and secure and would be enjoyed for months, if not years, to come. However, that proved not to be the case.

Only a few other development companies have had to face the closure of their games and even fewer have had the game operate for such a short amount of time. Out of that selection, Ten Ton Hammer got in touch with NetDevil’s Scott Brown, a man that has been fairly outspoken about his experiences with Auto Assault's closure in 2007, and asked him a number of questions regarding Tabula Rasa’s impending shut down. In part one of this two part interview, we ask Scott about the future of the developers at Destination Games, his thoughts on MMOG closures in general, and how NetDevil bounced back from the end of Auto Assault.

NetDevil's Auto Assault faced closure in mid-2007.
Ten Ton Hammer: What’s the attitude in a studio like when you know that your game is going to be cancelled and things are wrapping up? What kind of processes will the Tabula Rasa team go through mentally to close down the game?

Scott Brown: So basically what happens is the game doesn’t meet expectations and people start trying to figure out how the game is going to make a profit. In the case of Auto Assault, NCsoft opted to just close the game versus running it with a smaller team. I don’t have any insight into the situation, but it looks like they did the same sort of thing with Tabula Rasa.

On the other hand, with the original Jumpgate we just scaled our team back until it was profitable. I really don’t understand why you’d ever shut off a game, in my opinion.

Ten Ton Hammer: Why would a company turn off a game rather than just scaling back the team?

Scott: I don’t know the answer to that. I can tell you that it was certainly a disagreement between us and them.

I would never turn off a game. I would do what I would need to do to make the game support itself, but why turn it off? Especially when there are people that love your game?

There’s a site – and I don’t know how many people have seen it – it’s called biomek.org, and it’s an old Auto Assault site/forum. There are a bunch of people that go on there and post about how they liked Auto Assault and enjoyed playing it. There aren’t a ton of people, but the point is that there is a community out there that enjoyed playing the game. I still get emails from people asking me to turn the game back on. And I wish I could, but it’s not my IP.

I think communities form, but they don’t necessarily have to be the size of the World of Warcraft to be a success. Really, I would never turn this stuff off.

Ten Ton Hammer: What happened internally when the decision to shut off Auto Assault was made? What does that do to the development team? Where do the guys go from there? Do people start looking for jobs? Is it a relief knowing that there won’t be any more churning to try to keep the game alive?

Scott: Here’s what we did. NCsoft certainly knows how to make a game, and they committed to a long amount of support for the group to stay on the game for a while after launch. So some of the first stuff that we did was we went up to the Auto Assault team and said, “Look, the game’s obviously not performing well enough to cover its costs. We don’t know what’s going to happen.”

That was the first thing we did, and we tried to be really honest with everyone. We were straight with them. We thought we were going to get more work, but we weren’t sure. We supported people, and the situation was just too unstable for some of our crew. We helped them find new places in the industry, and they were free to use us as references. At that point in time, the president of Gas Powered Games was actually talking to us and reached out and hired a few people that were nervous about being in that situation.

While some people have that sort of entrepreneurial spirit and the “Let’s just keep going!” attitude; some people have families and kids in college and just decided to move on. As a whole, we just wanted to support everyone in the best ways that we could. We didn’t want to shock everyone and just say that we’re out of money and can’t pay them.

Ten Ton Hammer: Didn’t want to take ‘em out to the parking lot?

Scott: I’ve never understood that approach at all.

So that’s the way we did it. We just let everyone know what was going on. So then we scrambled and tried to find work. We decided that we needed to diversify as a company. Games are so hit and miss and we can’t have our company survive or fail off of the success of one game.

That’s when we signed LEGO, and a group of people transitioned from Auto Assault over there. After that we signed Warmonger more as a tech demo because we had done all this work on Auto Assault on physics and had worked with Aegia on creating an Aegia-supported mode on Auto Assault. Everyone was getting a kick out of it, and we wondered what we could do if we took that destruction to an even higher level. A group of the Auto Assault guys that worked on the physics and destruction in the game split off and worked on the Warmonger deal.

With the rest of the team, we took a step back and looked at Jumpgate. We still had fans in that game and people that love the game. What if we took what we had learned from Auto Assault and see how great we could make it.

At the same time, we wanted to try to get into the web games business too, because there are a bunch of games – like Club Penguin and Webkinz – that are just rocking and kicking our ass.

NetDevil didn't take the closure of their studio lying down; they actively fought to find jobs for their employees
Ten Ton Hammer: They’re making SO much money!

Scott: And with such a small team! Shouldn’t we be looking at that too? So we diverted a different group onto that project, which still hasn’t been announced yet. We really took some of the web-based code from another development team that’s been working with web tools and combined that with some of our tech that we developed for our MMOs and combined them. That group is about to go public with some of their stuff, and it’s really freaking cool.

So now we’ve got those three big groups: LEGO, Jumpgate, and the web game. It’s all pretty neat.

The other thing that’s been cool for us is that when you do an internal post-mortem on a game, you really beat yourself up over it. Why did the game fail? What did we do wrong? What lessons did we learn? A lot of people have heard the talk from us, but that’s when we made our decisions about the first fifteen minutes of the game, vertical slice, etc.

That’s when we determined that we needed to commit to this, because if we’re not going to do it great, it’s not worth doing. It worked out well for us.

We talked with a variety of companies – I’m a big ArenaNet fan, and I think those guys are some of the best and smartest people I’ll meet in my life – and we discussed a bunch of ideas with them and the direction they took with Guild Wars.

Ten Ton Hammer: It seems like you bounced back pretty well from the closure of Auto Assault. How did you – and perhaps eventually the team at NCsoft – bounce back from the closure of a game?

Scott: It’s hard. When you pour your life into something for four years, it’s hard when it fails. We sat down – Peter, Ryan and I – and asked if we wanted to do this anymore. We really asked ourselves if we wanted to make games or not. Are we going to go fight for this, or not?

Before, when someone said something to us or thought we were doing something the wrong way, we were too scared to say no. We didn’t want to get put out of business. It’s not that I think we’re right all the time, but sometimes – as a developer – there are times when you just need to put your foot down.

We were scared. We were more concerned about staying in business, and I think what that experience taught us was that we’d rather lose our jobs or rather go out of business than make a bad decision. Even after we did that, we were still scared about the first time we had to say no to someone.

And in reality, it’s been a very positive experience. It hasn’t been an adversarial thing. If LEGO or Codemasters wanted us to do something a particular way, and we said, “We need to do it this way, and here’s why.” It’s usually worked out okay.

It turns out that everyone wants the same thing, right?

Ten Ton Hammer: They want a success.

Scott: Yup!

It made a big difference, and it changed our philosophy to one of rather than working in fear to one of believing that we know what we’re talking about.

Rob Pardo’s talk at AGC a couple years ago was a huge inspiration to me. I was sitting there listening to his talk and thinking, “Wow. We knew all this stuff. We just didn’t do it.” You always rationalize it. I hear so many people that say, “But they’re Blizzard!”

And I just want to tell them that if they want to do something great, you have to do it that way. At least that’s what I believe.

Ten Ton Hammer: There are definitely ways to make games and ways not to make games. Blizzard just did it right the first time, and I don’t know if they got lucky or if they got good.

Scott: To be honest, I think the thing that no one talks about is that they learned. They made a bunch of games before they ever had the huge mega hit. They learned that process and it became the studio culture. Now that culture has become very addictive and it works and no one argues with them.

Ten Ton Hammer: It’s interesting that they did so well on their first shot with an MMO though.

Scott: Certainly, but it’s not like they didn’t make tons of mistakes and spends lots and lots of money working through those mistakes. They just had someone that believed in them enough to let them work through those mistakes.

But they also earned that right. They had made several very successful games before that so they really earned a little bit of time.

Ten Ton Hammer: How much pressure is there on a developer? When you get that first set of numbers back and it’s not looking too great; how much pressure does that put on a development team to get your product in the black?

Scott: It’s all on the publisher. As much as developers like to cry about publishers, it’s the publishers that are taking the risk. It’s publishers that are spending the money. At that point that’s where the rubber hits the road, and they have to figure out the way to make the money.

Everyone that we’ve ever worked with have been good people. It’s never been the evil publisher, and it’s never actually been that way. They have a responsibility to the people that gave them the money, and some of them stick their head out to you to make this game and know they’ve got to make it profitable.

Most of the time, you'll know if a game will succeed before it is even launched.
Basically, the pressure is almost all in beta. I mean, there’s some pressure at launch, but most gamers know if a game is going to be successful way before the actual launch. Right? You just know.

If there’s a beta that you go and play then you never play the game again, you know it’s probably not going to do so well. But if you play a beta and wish that the game was already launched because you don’t want to lose your character, you know that the game is going to be a hit.

It comes down to really simple stuff.

Ten Ton Hammer: Where in the development process can you look at the game and know that it’s going to be profitable or not? Alpha? Beta?

Scott: It’s the moment when you go home at night and play your game instead of something else.

Ten Ton Hammer: What if there’s a game out there that’s just amazing? I know a lot of the NetDevil crew are fans of WoW…

Scott: That’s the problem; there isn’t really a single point where you know the game is ready. It’s a very soft thing. In reality, everyone talks about these numbers called “conversions” right? There’s some percentage of people where your game is a success or a failure.

You’re never going to convert everyone. There’s never a game out there that everyone likes. It’s basically how good you can get that percentage to be.

For something like Jumpgate Evolution, it doesn’t have to have the same sort of numbers that LEGO has to have in order to be a success. But maybe you have to have a higher percentage because the amount of people that try the game is smaller, or something like that. I don’t pretend to be marketing and know how to explain this sort of thing or not, but to me it’s simple.

Do you like to play it or not?

When you’re at work, are you thinking about it? Do you dream about getting back into the game and finish building the project you were working on. Or you can’t wait to try that mission again. Or you need to get back into the PvP so you can kill those guys.

That’s how you know.

[schild]

Havingf played bith. aside from Endgame conmtent TAB RAS right now is better than WOW. And I'll be hopping on thew server off and on till it shuts down. WOW only held my interest for a week.

On topic here is an interview on Tab rasa's closude with an ex developer of auto assault.

Quoted for drunkness.

Also, I like Scott Brown but that interview was ehhhhhhh, well, I guess it was an interview.

Edit: To be fair, I really liked this answer:

Most of the time, you'll know if a game will succeed before it is even launched.

Yes, you should. As such, I don't know how Tabula Rasa or Auto Assault ever got greenlit. /shrug

[Venkman]

Drunken post or an iPhone post. Sort of a short distance

[schild]

If it's an iphone post, when did they at copy/paste?

[Venkman]

I was kidding. The iPhone wouldn't have allowed "havingf" and "bith", and he'd have had to go out of his way to override the spelling correction.

And yea, still no copy/paste  ... stupidest oversight I can think of today, particularly this far into the tech.

[Ratman_tf]

Yup, when they nerfed the shotgun in beta and made it so you could no longer solo the "stalkers" I knew the designers were hell-bent on removing all fun out of the game before release.

And I think we can point to this exact moment in the game's development and say "That's when they killed it."

I think TR lacked a lot of things. I found it quite fun, but not sticky. They needed PvP and PvE elder game content. Hell, even rep and item grinds would have sufficed. But instead they tried to slow the player's advancement down. They took away instead of adding to.

[UnSub]

I saw the irony in NetDevil saying they'd never shut down a MMO when that seems to be par for the course for their products. Easy to say when you aren't footing the bills, I guess.

[shiznitz]

Ten Ton Hammer: What’s the attitude in a studio like when you know that your game is going to be cancelled and things are wrapping up? What kind of processes will the Tabula Rasa team go through mentally to close down the game?

Scott Brown: So basically what happens is the game doesn’t meet expectations and people start trying to figure out how the game is going to make a profit. In the case of Auto Assault, NCsoft opted to just close the game versus running it with a smaller team. I don’t have any insight into the situation, but it looks like they did the same sort of thing with Tabula Rasa.

On the other hand, with the original Jumpgate we just scaled our team back until it was profitable. I really don’t understand why you’d ever shut off a game, in my opinion.

Ten Ton Hammer: Why would a company turn off a game rather than just scaling back the team?

Scott: I don’t know the answer to that. I can tell you that it was certainly a disagreement between us and them.

I would never turn off a game. I would do what I would need to do to make the game support itself, but why turn it off? Especially when there are people that love your game?

One thing that needs to die? Email interviews where the "interviewer" emails 10 questions and the interviewee replies to all ten.  Scott answers the second question while responding to the first making it obvious there is no "conversation" going on. These suck.  These questions would have amounted to a ten minute phone call. Why is it that so hard on everyone?

[Merusk]

Ten Ton Hammer: What’s the attitude in a studio like when you know that your game is going to be cancelled and things are wrapping up? What kind of processes will the Tabula Rasa team go through mentally to close down the game?

Scott Brown: So basically what happens is the game doesn’t meet expectations and people start trying to figure out how the game is going to make a profit. In the case of Auto Assault, NCsoft opted to just close the game versus running it with a smaller team. I don’t have any insight into the situation, but it looks like they did the same sort of thing with Tabula Rasa.

On the other hand, with the original Jumpgate we just scaled our team back until it was profitable. I really don’t understand why you’d ever shut off a game, in my opinion.

Ten Ton Hammer: Why would a company turn off a game rather than just scaling back the team?

Scott: I don’t know the answer to that. I can tell you that it was certainly a disagreement between us and them.

I would never turn off a game. I would do what I would need to do to make the game support itself, but why turn it off? Especially when there are people that love your game?

One thing that needs to die? Email interviews where the "interviewer" emails 10 questions and the interviewee replies to all ten.  Scott answers the second question while responding to the first making it obvious there is no "conversation" going on. These suck.  These questions would have amounted to a ten minute phone call. Why is it that so hard on everyone?

Lack of interpersonal skills and inability to deal with other people when they're anything other than abstract glyphs on a digital screen. Aka: INTRAWEB JOURNALIST.

[Venkman]

Email interviews are a LOT easier to respond to, particularly if you're crazy busy on building a game. Phone calls can be forgotten or missed. It just becomes the job of the editor to not just copy paste the whole thing into a post. THAT is the part at fault here. But we're by really talking true journalism here.

[Sir T]

I guess there is no evidance as strong as "I found it crap a month before release and over a year ago" to prove it was definatly not fun at all now and definatly could not have been made a far better game in the past year. No, it was crappy in beta so its defiantly crappy now and does not deserve to exist.

Definatly makes sense, that argument.

[Sir T]

I guess there is no evidance as strong as "I found it crap a month before release and over a year ago" to prove it was definatly not fun at all now and definatly could not have been made a far better game in the past year. No, it was crappy in beta so its definatly crappy now and does not deserve to exist.

Definatly makes sense, that argument.

[Venkman]

I guess there is no evidance as strong as "I found it crap a month before release and over a year ago" to prove it was definatly not fun at all now and definatly could not have been made a far better game in the past year. No, it was crappy in beta so its defiantly crappy now and does not deserve to exist.

Definatly makes sense, that argument.

I guess there is no evidance as strong as "I found it crap a month before release and over a year ago" to prove it was definatly not fun at all now and definatly could not have been made a far better game in the past year. No, it was crappy in beta so its definatly crappy now and does not deserve to exist.

Definatly makes sense, that argument.

Oh man, I thought we were done with that Xhibit crap!