Tabula Rasa, now with no FUN!

[Tale]

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!

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

[Merusk]

How's, "I found it crap at release and it's closing forever in less than a month so I can't be bothered to waste the time downloading and installing it, even if it were super-supreme awesome now." grab you?

Because that's the real reason most of us aren't bothering with the dead piece of junk.

[UnSub]

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?

I agree - they suck.

However, devs like them because they don't have to answer curveball questions or ones that might not be expressly their area - they've got time to check the answers, have Marketing / PR confirm they aren't doing anything they'll get fired over, etc. It is a very controlled interview format.

And when you talk through an interview, 10 minutes might get you a few answers, but maybe not to the same level of detail. People go off on tangents, go "umm, err, ahh" a lot, perhaps miss the point of a question, etc. In text format a few more people will go over it (probably / possibly).

[Sophismata]

And when you talk through an interview, 10 minutes might get you a few answers, but maybe not to the same level of detail. People go off on tangents, go "umm, err, ahh" a lot, perhaps miss the point of a question, etc. In text format a few more people will go over it (probably / possibly).

It's the job of the interviewer to keep things on track and interesting, though. I think the real problem is that 'real' journalism seems to have died.

[Sir T]

2 interesting aticles

From Adam Martin on T=Machine

We need to talk about Tabula Rasa; when will we talk about Tabula Rasa?
January 16th, 2009 by adam

In the online games industry, if we keep quiet about the causes, the hopes, the fears, the successes, and the failures of the best part of $100million burnt on a single project, then what hope is there for us to avoid making the same mistakes again?

Unlike Scott, I actually (superficially speaking) agree with this statement as to why Tabula Rasa, Age of Conan, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and Hellgate:London failed (TR, AoC, PotBS, and HL from now now…)

   

“No, these games failed because their developers let it happen.”

    * Funcom *should have* learned enough lessons with Anarchy Online not to make the mistakes they did with AoC; not the precise same mistakes, but the same “class” of mistakes were made, suggesting that they tried to fix only the symptoms and failed to understand the causes
    * Destination Games knew a long long time before TR went to beta that it wasn’t (going to be) ready even for beta, let alone launch. IMHO NCsoft collectively knew very well that TR wasn’t ready for launch, but went ahead and launched it anyway
    * Bill Roper went on record to say that no-one understood their sales/revenue model, from the start. As I’ve mentioned before, that pretty much guarantees failure, and it’s not rocket-science to understand why!
    * Pirates … I have no idea, actually. It’s the one that I have never played (although I really wanted to) nor even *seen* (which is unusual). I’m not going to talk about PotBS any more, since I really know nothing about it

NB: I don’t happen to agree with anything else in that post. I’ve got nothing against it, I just didn’t find anything interesting or new about the games themselves in the post, and IMHO the list of “why this happened” is too shallow and derivative to be worth saying in 2009 - the same has been said many times over the last ten years by many people, and ain’t particularly insightful in the first place. Sorry, dude.

How do you “let” an MMO fail, pre-launch?

Anyway, back to the interesting bit. This is why I find the statement particularly interesting: the choice of phrasing, that the developers “let it” fail.

The implication being that they didn’t do anything wrong, perhaps, but that they stood by and watched the train rolling slowly towards the brick wall and didn’t try (hard enough) to stop the collision.

TR was in development for 7 years (give or take a bit, and arguably just half that depending on whether you count the bit before there was an official “resetting” of the project (and re-shuffling of staff)).

When did they first ship a playable that people found fun?

Ah. Hmm. Um. Well. Now, *I* certainly wasn’t around during all this, so I can’t authoritatively answer that. However, I well remember the large number of people remarking that the beta - just before launch - was starting to be “actually a lot of fun to play”. 6+ years to get to the first fun version, eh? Hmm. Traditionally, you start with something fun, then you build a game around it, not the other way around.

Rating Tabula Rasa, in Alpha

While people are busily shooting me down in flames for such disloyalty :), I’m going to make a confession: I played TR in the alpha, and (to the great amusement - and in many cases total disbelief - of my colleagues) I actually enjoyed it. It certainly wasn’t a lot of fun to play, but there were nice elements that I could really see how they would develop (could be developed) into a great game, if we started development of the game at that point. I was accustomed at the time to making forward-looking evaluations of games, and reading between the lines and guess at how the final product would look.

i.e. it was a good pre-production prototype, and if I’d been asked “this studio wants us to fund them to turn this into a full game, should we do it?” I’d have said “well, modulo some small but fundamental changes that are needed, and the fact we need to explain to them a small number of basic mistakes they’re making with misunderstanding the MMO market, and they obviously will want a *lot* more money to build it up, flesh it out, and implement what they’ve barely sketched out in outline at this point … definitely YES. This will make a great game, probably”.

(IIRC … I was asked this question at the end of my second playsession and gave pretty much that answer. At which point he said something like “Yes. We’ve been telling them that for a while. They’re not going to do any of it”)

Which maybe sounds very negative? To me it wasn’t. At that time I was (one of many people) doing due-diligence reviews and milestone reviews for games being published by NCsoft. IMHO no game (and no studio) is perfect in pre-production. Every studio worth their salt pushes the boundaries, and - critically important - their own personal comfort zones. That guarantees that they’re not experts at producing the new game-type when they start. There are always warts; that’s partly why they make the prototype - to show to many other people, get second opinions, find out the flaws other people see, and then go “ah! yes! and actually … now you’ve said that, we’ve just thought of a much better way of doing this!”.

(incidentally, I found Valve’s post-mortem discussions of Team Fortress 2 fascinating, revealing that even for a studio with a perfect record of successes making new IPs they still screwed-up the pre-production work on TF2, and only late into the project did they really turn it around into the shining piece of awesomeness that they finally shipped. I can’t find a google link to the frank interviews Valve did on the subject, but here’s an interesting one on how much they still had left to do post launch - 53 updates (!) - even AFTER rescuing the project halfway through by fundamentally rethinking it)

Time-out: who are you, again?

I…:

   1. …was the European CTO at the time
   2. …was not on the TR dev team (wasn’t even in the same office)
   3. …started playing TR as soon as I joined the company, and played Alpha, Beta, and some of Live
   4. …unlike many outside the TR team (I suspect: “the vast majority”) I voluntarily played TR during my free time
   5. …got locked-out when the game launched, and it took many months for my official corporate free account to get allowed back in, thanks to some stupid bugs in NCsoft North America’s account management systems
   6. …was on a lot of the internal development mailing lists. Particularly interesting ones were the bugs list, the internal playsessions list (both for the dev teams and for other internal players), and the producers list (especially the scrum-masters list when the team eventually switched to Scrum).

I want to be clear about this: I had nothing to do with the development of TR. But, like many people who can say that, I was heavily exposed to it - both the project, and the game, and the politics. TR had a massive effect on the company at the time, everyone was touched by it. Anyone in development - anywhere - got affected a lot more than most; it affected budgets, management structures, technology investments, publishing strategy, investment strategy, etc. I’m not claiming to know what was going on in there for certain, but given my position I had the luxury of a lot of insights that other people wouldn’t have had.

So … although I know a lot about what happened, please view this post (it was going to be about the 4 games generally, but it appears to have warped into a TR-centric story) as an outsider’s view. And don’t read it as all true, I may accidentally report some rumours (and, you know, I don’t want to get sued if someone takes this as 100% literal truth) though I’ll try hard not to. TR team members may well find some big mistakes in what’s here - and I’d welcome their corrections and counter-arguments.

(I know my name appears in at least one set of the credits due to an NCsoft policy of “crediting all staff who were employed on the launch day of the product”, especially ironic since I think I’ve ended up being “officially” credited only on the game I did *not* work on :).)

Back to the topic:
The difficulty of …. Timing

It wasn’t ready for beta. I said so. Many others said so. How privately they said it, in many cases I don’t know. However, I am aware of plenty of people that said it pretty loudly internally at NCsoft (I saw the emails, or sat in the meetings).

NB: I said “wasn’t ready for beta“. We’re not even discussing “launch” yet.

But it was never going to be as easy as simply saying “hey, I’m not that busy for the next fortnight; howabout we launch TR next week? Or do you want to wait another year or two?”. On a project that had already burnt through tens of millions of dollars with almost nothing concrete to show for it (not necessarily a “fair” judgement; but if you were *literal* about it, which by that point many people were, then technically there was “nothing” to show), and had on the order of 100 people employed full time working on it every day, there was a lot of money at stake even just delaying launch by a single week.

(do the math; you’re already counting in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars” each time you prolong development by a single week there)

And then there were the political issues, for instance the fact that NCsoft North America had never developed a game internally in their long years of existence (all the internal games were developed by studios that NCsoft acquired during development). That means that the core business for the USA wasn’t making any revenue *at all* (publishing and development are usually seen as different divisions). Again, I’m not defending this perspective, or claiming it’s fair - but it was technically true, and was mentioned a lot.

Such things tend to scare stakeholders, especially shareholders. Especially directors of a public company who are trying to keep shareholders happy. Especially directors in a foreign country who may or may not even speak the same language as you. (I’m not trying to make veiled accusations against individuals here, nor against the different national divisions within NCsoft - I’m simply pointing out basic facts of life when it comes to large multinational companies, and observing that there was *inevitable* pressure along those lines, independently of whether or not anyone deliberately applied it).

And there were other issues. With that many people working on one project? Some of them for more than 5 years? Well. There’s plenty of dirty laundry on a project that size. But I don’t feel that anyone except the people directly involved get to decide whether its fair and reasonable to air it (because, frankly, no-one else is going to have much insight into what really happened).

So. It was hard, surely, to make any decision on launch dates.

There are no easy decisions in such situations, no “obviously, the best solution is X” (although to many different people such obvious answers seem to exist, the “easy” answers tend to screw-over several other teams). Making any decision was hard, but the decisions that were taken were considered inarguably “wrong” by many people, immediately that they were made.

They may not have known what the “best” solution was, but they certainly recognized (or felt they did) one of the “worst” ones.

And they were vocal about it. A survey was taken, internally, asking what people thought. The results were never published - so no-one (apart from the survey takers) knows exactly what the results were, but we were told that the *company* knew.

TR: The stage is set

To summarise so far (I know, I know - this is a long post, sorry)

   1. TR went off the rails on some meandering journeys into research & development for many years burning through lots of cash (this is not necessarily something to castigate them for - many hit games did exactly the same; if you can afford the cash + the chance of failure (and NCsoft is a billion-dollar company, so let’s face it: they could), then it’s perfectly reasonable to decide on this course of action / allow it to continue)
   2. Very late, they eventually hit upon a good formula, a good core game
   3. Before they could actually make that game, a difficult decision was taken to push the team to the wall and force an early beta test
   4. …and then the even more difficult decision taken to push them even harder to do an insanely early live launch. Certain alignments of astrological constellations in the Marketing department (also known as “tenth anniversary of the launch date of the last MMO that the core members of this team shipped”) may or may not have had something to do with this
   5. The choice made was widely (if not universally) regarded as “very bad”
   6. The company was made aware of the volume of people holding opinions along those lines

…and as they say on the Quiz shows: What Happened Next?

And this is where we come back to the point that interests me: did we, collectively as an organization, “allow it to happen”?

Personally, I believe the answer is an unqualified: “Yes”. Because many people worked *really hard* from that point on to make the game a success; many who had been working very hard already pushed themselves to work harder. And yet, in parallel, while working their asses off to make sure the train was big and beautiful, no-one stopped the train-wreck from happening.

There are excellent mitigating excuses for why individuals allowed this, many of them related to “not wanting to lose my job”. Many others relate to “life is too short to kill myself (with stress) over continuing to bash my head against this particular brick wall” (many people had complained long and hard about TR in the months and years running up to that point). Some people had just given up hope, and decided it was less painful simply to stop caring. Others were relishing the impending catastrophe, and I can think of some individuals who I personally believe were deliberately planning to get maximum political advantage for themselves out of the death of TR.

Re-reading this as I go, I remember there was another big excuse that I never gave credence to: “I’ll bury my head in real work and make *my* parts as good as I possibly can, and hope if everyone else does the same, it will All Come Together In The End”. This one wasn’t voiced so much, but is simply what people did, in some cases.

Hope is not a strategy. Whenever your attempt to avoid disaster revolves around the H-word instead of a concrete averting action, you are doomed.

But since I’m not trying to blame anyone here, it doesn’t matter whether or not we had good reasons for allowing it. What I’m really interested in is “how to make games better”, so the important point is that - collectively - we did allow it.

What would Jesus do?

What should we have done, not as an organization, but as individuals? How often does anyone talk about this?

    % of player forums posts that blame developers for launching early                           XXXXXXXXXXXX
    % of player forums posts that explain what an individual employee should do about it  X    

It’s very easy to “work harder” when doom is impending, but as I’ve mentioned above this achieves nothing.

There are plenty of cases in the games industry where disasters are forseen, and the people involved charge into them with gusto, screaming “YOU’RE ALL WRONG! DON’T BE A HATER!”, and deserve what they get. But in those situations where people know it’s wrong, what can they do?

One colleague attempted various things and ultimately ended up trying to deal with the “root” of the problems by bringing about wholesale organizational change. Not in terms of who was employed, who was in charge, etc, but in terms of the basic attitudes and beliefs of the people turning up to work each day. He tried to remove the cultures of secrecy and fear (*) and replace them with cultures of actively seeking constructive criticism and actively supporting naysayers, so long as they adhered to rules of “decency” when it came to how criticism was provided.

(*) - (tens of millions of dollars spent and the game doesnt work but is going to beta/live? Fear was ever-present. Maybe (I heard rumours, and saw some … strange … stuff, but I don’t know for sure) for other reasons too. c.f. my comments about dirty laundry above)

In the end, I suspect if he’d started his campaign a year earlier, it *might* have worked. It certainly seemed to be having some surprisingly impressive results towards the end.

Among other things, the team itself tried adopting Scrum, with some tremendous results IMHO. Incidentally, I’m hoping one of the talks at GDC this year will be someone from the TR team (perhaps Andy Bruncke or April Burba?) on their experiences adopting Scrum with a team of 50-100 people at the end of development of a > $50million failed AAA title.

(If that talk does happen, I’ll be the one at the back of the room during the Q&A session at the end sticking my hand up to ask: In your opinion, if the team had adopted Scrum 12 months earlier, might it have saved TR? I would be very interested to hear the team’s thoughts on that)

Of course, both of those paths - and some of the other things people tried - were probably too little too late. TR didn’t have the luxury of time - the (contested) decisions being made were by definition time-critical.

So … what should we have done? Both as individuals, and as members of an organization that we each believed in?

What would you do?

Not long after, for unrelated reasons, my manager resigned. And shortly after that, so did several other people, myself included. TR didn’t (I believe) cause any of us to leave - none of them were on the TR team itself - but some of the problems it exposed within the company did come up often in people’s informal (down the pub) complaints about leaving.

When the organization disempowers you, and nothing you do seems able to make a diference, but - in your opinion - the impending event is an “extinction-level” disaster, is resignation the only valid response? Surely not?

Final Note

To my knowledge, NCsoft never admitted that TR was a failure, internally.

In June 2008, when I left the company, the CEO had gone, the lead designer had gone, and the rest of the directors were about to get axed in the pending re-shuffle (which hadn’t been announced even internally yet) - but still no admission in sight.

I used to gently point out that until we admitted the failure, we would fail to fully respond to it, and to fully adjust and improve - so that we were almost certainly doomed to repeat it. As far as I know, the painful admission has still never been made, even internally. The subject was danced around many times, but no-one would come out and say it publically (internally); it was always oblique references, and statements such as “Tabula Rasa is doing very well, although not as well as we hoped” - eliciting mirth, disbelief, looks of remembered pain, or simply blank looks of “wanting to forget it ever happened” etc among the various people in the company.

Personally, for each of the senior management at the company at the time, I shall never forget that you guys did not make that happen. To me, this one thing was symptomatic of, and encapsulates, the institutional failure to respond to the failings of the project.

Privately, reasons were cited to me varying from “it doesn’t matter any more, everyone knows its over” to “I don’t want to hurt anyone more than they’ve already been hurt” to “just basic tact” to “let’s not rock the boat” to “we should look on the bright side and get on with the other games we’re making as a company, and not get mired in history / water under the bridge”.

But as one of my friends said at the time: what’s it got to do with hurting people? we just want to use the experience to learn to make better games. And how the hell are we going to do that when you people won’t even admit we were wrong?

[Sir T]

From Scott Jennings on Broken Toys

Perspectives
January 16th, 2009


“You’re leaving here… for NCsoft? You *know* Tabula Rasa is going to crash and burn, right?”

– heard from someone when I announced my plans to leave Mythic, a year and a half before Tabula Rasa shipped

Adam Martin, formerly CTO of NCsoft Europe, has posted his own …post-mortem isn’t a good word, more of a memoir of his peripheral experiences with Tabula Rasa’s launch. It’s a good read - and you should go read it now. As his posting title puts it, “We need to talk about Tabula Rasa; when will we talk about Tabula Rasa?”

Well, Adam’s a bit safer in that he’s on a whole other continent. Here in Austin game development, it’s hard to find someone who isn’t, at a maximum, one degree removed from someone who was involved, at one point or another, with TR. It was a massive project, it employed a great many people over its lifetime, and at least half of the resumes currently sitting in my email are from people involved, at one point or another, with TR. Combine that with Midway’s long-running explosion and you have most of the Austin game development community polishing resumes.

So what happened?

My take is pretty similar to Adam’s, actually. I was considerably closer geographically, but not that much closer from a development perspective. To mirror Adam’s “who is this guy and why is he pontificating, again?” bona fides, I…

   1. …was a designer on another, smaller project at NCsoft Austin’s office (hired as system designer, eventually promoted to lead designer)
   2. …wasn’t on the TR dev team
   3. …am not much for FPS games, am pretty sad at them, and usually die horribly in Team Fortress 2
   4. …used that as an excuse for staying as far away from TR discussions as possible
   5. …it was a pretty weak excuse, yeah.
   6. …was on the same mailing lists Adam was (save the cool management ones he was privy to, which was probably for the best) and heard much the same angst, cheerleading, and general “holy crap what now” gestalt.

Gathering Feedback, Putting It Into A Box, Never Speaking Of It Again

As TR moved closer to release, company wide, we were *ordered* to start particpating in weekly playtests. As I mentioned, I wasn’t really fond of shooters, and clung to that Get Out Of Jail Free card fiercely. I mean, being one of the most obnoxiously opinionated persons on internal email lists, along with the whole ranting on the web for a decade thing, having an excuse *not* to have an opinion on That Thing Looming Over All Of Us was pretty sweet.

But closer to release, we were told to play the game and give feedback. Which I did. I think my overall feedback was “it wasn’t THAT bad” (for those at Mythic who remember the blistering we-should-probably-fire-your-ass-right-now-for-that-very-unhelpful-email feedback I fired off about Imperator prior to its final E3, that may raise an eyebrow or three). It *wasn’t* that bad. The tutorial was kind of meh, then got kind of cool, then you wandered around and shot things. It wasn’t World of Warcraft, which I considered a plus. I didn’t really enjoy playing it, but it wasn’t for me.

(I’m sure my somewhat constant resentment over Tabula Rasa being the twelve thousand pound gorilla which had dozens of programmers and a floor full of artists while our project was flailing about wildly for just one concept artist and maybe a server programmer or two had nothing to do with it. But I digress. For now, We’ll get back to that somewhat constant resentment in a bit.)

The calendar moved forward inexorably, and TR went into marketing beta - you know, where anyone can play it so they get ALL excited and make guilds and get ready for release and… yeah, that didn’t happen. People downloaded the game, had varying degrees of the “it’s not THAT bad” reaction, and didn’t play it again.

This was noted. One of the mantras that went around production discussions after Auto Assault’s launch square into the pavement was that if you can’t get people to play the beta for free, you have serious, serious issues. Tabula Rasa had those issues. Not as bad as Auto Assault - there were people doggedly playing every night and presumably enjoying themselves, and metrics were duly assembled to measure every movement those testers took. But it was pretty clear, at least from my completely disassociated and busy with my own thing viewpoint, that there wasn’t a lot of excitement.

So, as Adam mentioned, a survey was sent out shortly before the game was scheduled to release, anonymously asking, among other things, if the game should be delayed. I put that it should, based on the Auto Assault beta-not-lit-on-fire thing and the general principle that if you have to ask if it should be delayed, it probably should be. But I didn’t feel very passionately about it one way or the other. (I’m told later that most of the team DID feel pretty passionately about it and made it known so.)

The survey’s results weren’t announced. Internal rumors swept pretty widely (I know, because if they got to my end of the building, they were pretty wide) that the results were almost unanimously for a delay.

There was no delay.

Whoops.

You’re The Next Contestant On The Game Is Wrong

All during this time, I was pretty busy. Our game was trying to move into full production. We were the next product scheduled for shipment after Tabula Rasa. We were scrambling to fill some pretty key hires, justify an ambitious/insane production schedule, and generally get our shit into gear.

Right about then, the following things happened:

    * We were faced with some pretty key technical issues (I can’t go into any further detail, just assume for the moment they made us look like complete blithering idiots and go from there)
    * Tabula Rasa shipped, promptly flopped, and everyone went “uh… What the hell?”
    * Everyone in management decided that was *not* going to happen again, and most had their own theories on how that would be prevented.
    * The poster child for making sure it was *not* going to happen again became… us.

There was a company meeting about then, which was designed to boost the company morale. Chris Chung had just taken over from Robert Garriott, people were scared about their future, and we were tasked, as a key part of our presentation, to show how kickass we were.

We failed.

We had no game systems to show, because we had no functioning game server beyond a prototype that we had migrated away from months prior. We showed a depressing landscape of twisted trees and rocks, and our lead designer, who normally is one of the most inspirational speakers I’ve heard in the industry, understandably wilted under the stress of YOU MUST SAVE OUR COMPANY NOW and gave a pretty depressed speech about the game’s fiction that didn’t match much of what was shown onscreen. The internal response was brutal to the point of sadism, and in a failing of management was made known to the leads along with who gave the comments. Most of whom were… on Tabula Rasa.

This was not helpful to morale, to put it mildly.

Things got worse. An executive from Korea came to check on our progress, and was surprised that we were working on an MMO. (I wish I was joking.) We were told that our jobs weren’t in danger, really. It’s FINE. You’re good for at least a few months or so.

Meanwhile, Tabula Rasa chugged on.

We soldiered on, moved inexorably towards our first playable demo. It was a really kick-assed zone, our artists (which we finally had) outdid themselves, our programmers (which we finally had) did awesome work, I had taken over lead design duties due to the former lead being promoted onward and upward at his own request (his vision of the game long before eviscerated by budget cuts) and we were gonna kick ass, it was gonna be great, everything was finally firing on all cylinders, we were going to show everyone at the company that we could follow through on our promises and our ninjitsu was superior and and and the first team playtest we did on the new server failed completely.

The team meeting following that was unpleasant. I imagine the same “it was your fault no it was your fault no you” conversation took place at Tabula Rasa more than once.

Shortly thereafter the project was cancelled. Not one of the highlights of my career, especially since I was one of the folks who had to man up and tell our superiors that no, we were not going to be able to deliver a playable demo on schedule and yes, we knew what that meant. Our team shrunk by 2/3rds as we swiftly moved to working on a new prototype to justify our continued existence.

Meanwhile, Tabula Rasa chugged on.

There was another company meeting, which was designed to boost company morale. We were told that we were eminently replacable in general (which I’m told later was a wildly, wildly misconstrued statement, but to put it mildly, did not boost company morale) and that our team in specific was a “distraction” from NCsoft’s core business model. Everyone, including me, immediately began looking for work.

When we were finally let go a month later, it wasn’t a surprise, and most of us already had offer letters in hand elsewhere. (I was given the option to transfer to another NCsoft studio, but declined, as we had put down roots here in Austin.)  At this point, my personal perspective came to an end, since I, well, didn’t work there any more.

Meanwhile, Tabula Rasa chugged on.

What Would Snarky Bloggers Do?

So, I don’t have any magic solutions for what should have been done differently. My personal view on Tabula Rasa is that it was a project in search of reasons - the original design was “let’s make a game both Korea and the US will go for”, and when that failed, it became “let’s make a game both shooter fans and MMO fans will go for”. Not being a full shooter and not being a full MMO, it didn’t do well at attracting either. But that’s from the outside looking in - any armchair designer could figure that out.

To quote Adam:

   

When the organization disempowers you, and nothing you do seems able to make a diference, but - in your opinion - the impending event is an “extinction-level” disaster, is resignation the only valid response? Surely not?

Our response was to keep our heads down and do the best that we could at our jobs. From what I gathered from hallway conversations with others, that was a fairly universal take. It’s what you CAN do.

Unfortunately it wasn’t enough, for our project, and ultimately, for Tabula Rasa as well. There’s nothing that you can point to and say “here was the big mistake”. There were a lot of tiny mistakes, and they built up.

Would delaying Tabula Rasa’s open beta have saved it? Probably not.

Would delaying Tabula Rasa’s release have saved it? Probably not.

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. The biggest failing, though, was that it was in development about twice as long and spent twice as much as it had any right to. And that’s what promotes it, in this snarky outside blogger’s view, from understandable failure to extinction-level company-slaying train wreck. That took precedence over any design failure or engineering failure or art vision or whatever your personal opinion on why it failed might be.

It just. took. too. much. money.

[WindupAtheist]

It just. took. too. much. money.

Same thing I thought as I was reading this. The difference between a trainwreck release and merely a troubled testing phase could well have been all the time and money they wasted before even really getting started. I mean it had been in development for how long? Was NC supposed to listen to "Just a little longer!" forever? They were bound to shove it out the door sooner or later.

[Johny Cee]

It just. took. too. much. money.

Same thing I thought as I was reading this. The difference between a trainwreck release and merely a troubled testing phase could well have been all the time and money they wasted before even really getting started. I mean it had been in development for how long? Was NC supposed to listen to "Just a little longer!" forever? They were bound to shove it out the door sooner or later.

Without doing any tax research, since that's all on my work computer, and the fact I have no direct experience with tax law in regards to software development....

We can pretty safely assume a marginal tax rate of 35% on NCSoft's US earnings.  I'm unsure how much of the development costs the firm had to capitalize, though top of my head I'd say all of it.  Software tax depreciation is three years for purchased software,  though the IRS has fiddled around with self-developed software usefull lives....  might be 7 or longer.


By continuing to delay the release of the game, you have a growing long-term asset account that you aren't getting any tax write offs on.  In other words,  you have cash going out without either: A. Any cash going in, or B. Any associated tax write off.

The marginal rate of 35% x the total dollar value of capitalized development costs is your Deferred Tax Benefit, which is basically the amount you can offset in income tax liability.  On a $100 million project, that could be $35 million in tax benefits sitting on your balance sheet.  That's $35 million in cash you're paying out to the government that you could keep for yourself.

There's additional benefits if we assume that the company is financing this all through debt,  since you're paying interest on the debt that you're using to finance your assets.


The advantage of shutting down the operation, or having a firesale of it, is you get to write off your entire develpment costs in one shot.  A one time tax benefit of $35 million looks a hell of alot better than a trickling of returns that will never match the development outlays. 

Especially when you consider that inflation is whittling down the real tax benefit every year.  Depending on how long it takes to amortize the development cost, you could be talking about losing millions in real value tax benefits while the amortization slowly ticks down.

Doing it this year, the Fed has brought back 5 year Carrybacks of Net Operating Losses,  so even if the company operates at a tax loss this year they can go back and apply the losses against taxable income for the previous years, which gives you cash in the bank..

[rattran]

They patched in Mech Suits for some reason, a few weeks pre-shutdown. Seems a tad insane.
http://eu.playtr.com/en/news_article/deployment_164_patchnotes_known_issues_february_2009_live

[Lantyssa]

A last hurrah for the fans who stuck with them.

[Slyfeind]

At the end of the UO Beta, they killed off Lord British and declared the world lost forever. I think it would be interesting if at the end of Tabula Rasa, they defeated the Bane and won the war. It would certainly be a change since most games these days end with everybody dead or dismembered and listening to goth music.

[tmp]

They patched in Mech Suits for some reason, a few weeks pre-shutdown. Seems a tad insane.
http://eu.playtr.com/en/news_article/deployment_164_patchnotes_known_issues_february_2009_live

They have also apparently either introduced or upped the drop rate for some extremely powerful armour sets and weapons, with no level requirement to use these. As well as some items granting hour-long 20x boost for the exp gain. These basically turn the game into god mode if player chooses to use them, and allow to breeze through the whole thing in couple days of playing... perhaps they have indeed something planned at the end and want to allow everyone to experience it, or it's some sort of "oh well, we're going to hell anyway, Satan guide my cock let's party"

[Surlyboi]

They've also upped the difficulty on a lot of shit for some reason.

[Mrbloodworth]

Screen shots of mech suits?

[Ratman_tf]

I always said I'd join up if they got mechs in. I doubt I'd be able to find a copy now though, unless I went dumpster diving.

[tmp]

I always said I'd join up if they got mechs in. I doubt I'd be able to find a copy now though, unless I went dumpster diving.

It's free download from their web page and free to play for the two more weeks or so it's going to exist.

[Ratman_tf]

I always said I'd join up if they got mechs in. I doubt I'd be able to find a copy now though, unless I went dumpster diving.

It's free download from their web page and free to play for the two more weeks or so it's going to exist.

Well then. Registered and downloading. The price is right. 

[Fordel]

Man, they even tossed the collectors editions? Don't those have art books and stuff? I love art books!

[Merusk]

Man, they even tossed the collectors editions? Don't those have art books and stuff? I love art books!

Circuit City is still selling them for $30. Run out and buy all you can!  You can pick up a copy of Fury and Hellgate: London while you're there.

[Hawkbit]

Man, they even tossed the collectors editions? Don't those have art books and stuff? I love art books!

Maybe 4-6 months ago someone was ebaying collectors editions for $1-5 a piece, shipping included.  I'm guessing they went dumpster diving and decided to make a profit.  After shipping I can't imagine it was much, though. 

[Ratman_tf]

Ok. It's nuts. Some crazy uber items have dropped for me. A commander's jacket with 8000 armor and a set of dual laser pistols that are one-shotting anything I shoot at. And you start with 5 one hour duration tokens that boost xp gains like 2000%.

They're going out, and they don't care if the toys get broken now. 

*Edit* Oh god, chat is awful. I mean, they fixed the chat box so it's actually legible now. Kudos for that. But now I'm getting to see all the morons in chat. Talking about WoW (as usual, every game chat has to be about WoW. From Eve to AO and back again. Jesus.) and making the same lame internetz jokes from about a decade ago. Killy McStabstab!

[Tale]

Ok. It's nuts. Some crazy uber items have dropped for me. A commander's jacket with 8000 armor and a set of dual laser pistols that are one-shotting anything I shoot at. And you start with 5 one hour duration tokens that boost xp gains like 2000%

I just did levels 23 to 42 in four hours, and I wasn't trying - that includes a lot of exploring and shopping.

The 2000% XP buffs are random drops - as far as I can tell, you don't start with them. By the end of my four hours, I had 22 of them!

The "red" uber items are amazing - I ended up in a full suit of godlike armour, with godlike weapons to suit most situations. The only problem was ammo - the reds use the most expensive ammo, so you need lots of money. Fortunately you can sell excess reds to vendors for 25,000 credits or so. I doubt they would go for more at auction, everyone's getting more reds than they can use.

I've been hanging out at enemy-held control points, shooting their gate to make them all come running, hiding around the corner, then firing my new red uber cryogenic shotgun at them (area effect). Soon I'm running at 6x XP bonus from all those kills, times the 2000% XP buff. Level up every couple of base clearances.

Only trouble is, I chose engineer because I'd always wanted to have the turret pets. And they're pretty useless now compared with the damage you can dish out with a red weapon.

If you always thought you'd like to explore TR but didn't like the idea of levelling up just to explore, the levelling curve is now short enough to make the last two weeks a fun exploration.

[Ratman_tf]

I got the uber minigun and more uberarmor. It takes more time for my minigun to spin up and start firing than to kill mobs. 

Notes from a beta tester: The intro mission is completley changed, and the first instance is really good now. The game seems a bit more focused in the development of the PvE elements.

I will say it. It's a damn shame the game is ending. Not the silly uberdrops, but the improvements they've made are really improvements. I... still wouldn't pay an online fee for this, but it got closer. Maybe if Tabula Rasa didn't have such a colorful past (and gobbled down a shitton of dev money) it could have been a neat little game.

[Tale]

 

[Rake]

Just a question for you Tale. Did they ever redesign the way you dropped the turrets?
Because it was one of the classes that hadn't really been thought out well in the early stages of development.
It was a pretty confused class and there was never enough room for all the choices of turrets to drop. I was thinking they might switch to some multi drop system, where you might be able to group them up and just with a single press have all the turrets down and then get out the weapon of choice and keep some mobility going.

I always wanted this game to actually succeed and not just be thrown out the door all half assed and all, but history keeps repeating itself in this business.

[Tale]

I put the five turrets on a bank of five hotkeys. Shift+2 to get to the bank of hotkeys, then numbers 6-0 to drop whichever turret. So I might press 7, 8 and 9 for a physical damage turret, a sonic turret and an EMP turret if I wanted that combination.

But bear in mind I've only been an engineer for two hours of gameplay because it goes so fast now. And I haven't used them since I discovered they're not scaled up to the death-of-TR damage my character can put out.

Maybe there's a better way or a combo way, I haven't had a reason to investigate, and I probably won't have a reason to try before they close the game. But people on forums seemed to like playing engineer and using turrets.

[Surlyboi]

*Edit* Oh god, chat is awful. I mean, they fixed the chat box so it's actually legible now. Kudos for that. But now I'm getting to see all the morons in chat. Talking about WoW (as usual, every game chat has to be about WoW. From Eve to AO and back again. Jesus.) and making the same lame internetz jokes from about a decade ago. Killy McStabstab!

This. Seriously. I got into a chat slapfight with someone who stated, with no doubts in his mind, that the only reason TR failed was poor implementation of PVP. When I asked him to name games that were successful strictly due to the PVP, he pulled out WoW, EVE and...Guild Wars.

[Ratman_tf]

Did Pravus Research today. I  that instance. Storm the bad alien base and thwart their vile plans to turn the nice alien goons into robot soldiers...

[Tale]

If anyone's trying to play, the servers are down. According to unofficial forums, it's something to do with a server merge. I think they're merging all the servers into one, for The End.

[Surlyboi]

They're up now. Still not merged. 

[AngryGumball]

You know even though I never played Hellgate, and never played Tabula after release. I would put a copy of that Collectors Edition on my shelf just to have. To be all nostalgic with thinking how cool it could have been if only it played better to get me interested in it.

[ghost]

You know even though I never played Hellgate, and never played Tabula after release. I would put a copy of that Collectors Edition on my shelf just to have. To be all nostalgic with thinking how cool it could have been if only it played better to get me interested in it.

You're in luck.  They have copies of both at my Best Buy just waiting for some lowly schmuck to pick them up and take them home.  Can you imagine the surprise when they get home and can't play because the servers don't exist?

[Surlyboi]

Not to BSG this thread up but...

"I've been to Earth, Lee... it's a blasted out shithole"

[Ratman_tf]

You know even though I never played Hellgate, and never played Tabula after release. I would put a copy of that Collectors Edition on my shelf just to have. To be all nostalgic with thinking how cool it could have been if only it played better to get me interested in it.

You're in luck.  They have copies of both at my Best Buy just waiting for some lowly schmuck to pick them up and take them home.  Can you imagine the surprise when they get home and can't play because the servers don't exist?

HGL has single player.

[Tale]

My gaming PC died. Too busy to investigate. Must fix before Tabula Rasa ends :(