f13.net forums - Tabula Rasa, a post mortem.

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June 19, 2025, 09:32:04 AM

we're back, baby

I just had to be snarky.

My ability to aim in games is much, much worse than it is in real life. The skills don't necessarily translate.

This is just one of the things that really bugs me about a lot of games. For instance, WW2 FPS games that have health packs floating around. Why go through all the painstaking historical recreation to totally murder it with fucking health packs?

Why have a game with guns if you can't aim them? At least make it like Contra, where you have SOMETHING to do with the trajectory of the weapon.

Anyways, nobody ever agrees with me on this subject. FAREWELL TR.

Quote from: Trippy on February 26, 2009, 02:55:38 PM

The shotgun is a special case cause it doesn't have the weird hybrid "lock on" mechanism that most of the other weapons do (or did when I played, dunno if they eventually got rid of it). With the shotgun it really does feel like you are playing a 3rd person shooter.

I'm a grenade launcher whore, have been since UT. My weapon of choice wherever it's implemented. TR did them pretty darn good, I don't recall a bounce effect, but you could arc your shots for skill based shooting.

I'm only passing with a bow and shotgun, but good with rifles, never actually fired a real grenade launcher...should get one! I'm better irl with a rifle, but worse with everything else.

I'm on both sides of the issue. I like skill-based games, but will always be wtfpwnd by the folks who learn every map and sploit and play for days and days on end. I like stat-based games, but will always be wtfpwnd by catasses who play for days and days on end. So I don't give a shit either way, it's not like I'll ever be "good", relatively speaking.

Quote from: Nija on February 26, 2009, 09:06:59 PM

The fact is...TR was never, ever, ever damn did someone mention NEVER about aiming. That was literally the first thing anyone following that mmo who could actually read understood. I don't know why someone will play TR expecting something remotely realistic when every interview, game-preview, any information about the game at all clearly stated that whole game is really dice roll.

Mouse aim is ghey anyway, and all FPSes suck for having it. It's light gun or nothing! DRILLING AND MANLINESS

Quote from: DLRiley on February 27, 2009, 07:18:42 AM

More trolling by DLRiley, f13's most worthless poster.

Necros the other TR thread to say he never played it: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=10842.1295 Then posts in this second thread about the game he's never played, to make a strongly worded argument about game mechanics, using the "dice roll" phrase from above to evoke a response.

Does the same in the politics forum.

Quote from: Tale on February 27, 2009, 12:10:41 PM

Quote from: DLRiley on February 27, 2009, 07:18:42 AM

hmm defiantly feeling the love tale. mind if i bring up your post history for old times sake?

Quote from: Lantyssa on February 26, 2009, 06:43:11 PM

Quote from: Delmania on February 26, 2009, 05:44:15 PM

Eh? I'm fairly certain if any one of us picked up a bow or shotgun and fired it, we'd miss the mark.

I come from a family of hunters.

Yeah, throw me in the 'can game and can shoot IRL' crew as well.

I'm sorry about my general lack of Tabula Rasa knowledge. I tried the beta when I had a chance. From that experience I did not buy the retail game. When I first heard of the game it was wearing completely different clothing. I couldn't keep track of all the developmental changes, so I put it in a black box until they released something that I could play. I do the same thing with Peter Molyneux games -- don't read a single preview or 'first impression' of the game or believe any of the hype until you have it in your hands and can see for yourself.

I wanted a shooter game in the same vein as Planetside, but with more character development and a more telling and lasting impact on the game world. I figured a game by LB featuring some topless redhead with laser guns might provide that sort of gameplay. Obviously, I was mistaken.

Well, now that you bitches have gotten your slapfight out of the way, I'll weigh in and say I'll actually miss the game.

At least I got to go home...

How do you get to Earth? I don't think I'll get time, I'm not even level 50 yet and I'm logos-impaired due to lack of gaming time.

Quote from: Nija on February 27, 2009, 01:54:27 PM

I wanted a shooter game in the same vein as Planetside, but with more character development and a more telling and lasting impact on the game world. I figured a game by LB featuring some topless redhead with laser guns might provide that sort of gameplay. Obviously, I was mistaken.

S'alright. I thought Ultima Online was going to be about Role Playing.

...

wait for it.

awesome, for real

Quote from: Tale on February 27, 2009, 04:21:24 PM

How do you get to Earth? I don't think I'll get time, I'm not even level 50 yet and I'm logos-impaired due to lack of gaming time.

If the server's haven't melted by tomorrow morning, look for one of my myriad variations of starcrossed. Get to 50 and we'll go to Earth.

That is, of course, if the Bane and the Neph haven't fucked everything up between now and then.

I got to 47 and went to Earth anyway - sorry for not looking you up! Got involved with defending the Earth bases but gave up eventually and went into Cellar Arena, then realised everyone was gradually being forced in there with me.

Stayed to the end, great party, funny moments (devs are saying their farewells in chat broadcasts, someone demands they wish him a happy birthday, and suddenly there's a broadcast "happy fucking birthday"). Very sad to see the game close. Plenty of people were enjoying it.

Edit - also I should say the last few weeks were extraordinarily well engineered. The uber items and XP bonuses they introduced into the game were very well implemented and the defeat of humanity was brilliantly executed.

For those not there: the bad guys developed stronger troops, they attacked all player-defended bases until we were all gradually overrun (fighting was actually effective, but it was just too much struggle to keep going). Planet after planet was lost, the teleports to the overrun planets became inactive, and the surviving players were all forced into Cellar Arena (teleport hub), which the bad guys then overran (which turned into a party instead).

I was there when we lost Earth.

And then Arieki...

And then Foreas...

The good guys didn't win and the Neph. (The bad Eloh) came in and cleaned our collective clocks. Then Penumbra blew them all to hell.

If I had the cash, I'd pull the devs from this and throw them at a game involving the refugees that survived. There was a lot of decent storyline there. Sad to see it go.

That sounds really fun. It's nice that they spent the resources to develop this storyline to an end that aligned with the server closing, instead of just "Here this day we be done" non-event.

Has anyone found out how much it cost to develop TR? Ive seen 100m number tossed around quit a bit but not where that number came from.

I think they should have stuck with pink Unicorns shooting rainbows, that would have been awesome.

Anyway it is sad to see a lot of potential being flushed away like the remains of a good party.

R.I.P. Tabula Rasa

Quote

Transmission over

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 ###

A spy fights one of the Neph in the last stand on Earth.

Pretty good TR combat video from the European server shutdown event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EChK-DbZuv4

RL photos of the devs running the shutdown event: http://www.planettr.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10647

TR Tale was kind of hot.

The arena in Cellar Arena at the end:

Chatbox madness.

No more TR ever.

edit: someone's video of the same moment, from just below me - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVh1J9MxZL4

I dunno if I've got any shots of helmetless surlyboi in any of their forms... =(

I ran with "show helmet" switched off because part of the officer's cap graphic was close-cropped brown hair, even for redheads swamp poop

Did the lady in that video come with her own Stripper Pole?

Quote from: Fordel on March 01, 2009, 05:33:58 PM

Did the lady in that video come with her own Stripper Pole?

It's an emote called /poledance (in a game with a Richard Garriott mask ...)

I also liked /airguitar9000

very.

Though I will say, I spent a good chunk of the last day in florescent pink armor doing the /rave emote.

Heh. Psychochild was in that last screenie.

(that's why I picked it)

Dev posts from http://www.planettr.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=8

Quote from: Dev_Leonidas

Thanks for sticking it out with us
I guess we all need to say our piece, so here's mine.

I've been working on TR since July 1, 2001. That's far longer than I ever expected, and I truly have put my heart and soul into this game. I vowed that I would be here until they turned the lights out on me. Well, I was, and they did, and all told, I'm a better man for having done it.

I have learned so much from this project, but one of the greatest lessons I've learned is that all of our work is meaningless without you players. You are our final and only true judges. Your presence with us as we traveled this final path to our close has meant everything to us. You are what motivated us to put everything we had left into the final publish, rather than simply let things ride as we might have done.

And now, exhausted from 12 hours of prepping and playing and fighting fires during our final event, I'm sad because a truly wonderful chapter in my life has come to its end.
But more than anything, I feel valued and appreciated and loved by our players and by our wonderful team of devs, QA, Ops, and support folks. And this is what really matters.

Thank you.

Quote from: Mann

Thank you for being awesome
I just wanted to say thank you for the wonderful support you all showed our team over the last 16 months. Tonight was a very intense and sad moment for all of us, but I hope that you had a fun and memorable time through it all. I know that my experience on Tabula Rasa will stay with me for the rest of my life, and I will never forget how lucky we were to have such an amazingly friendly and constructive community.

Your praise and complaints, your suggestions and demands, your constructive and not so constructive feedback; these things continued to drive me, even when things started to look bleak. Every day I came into the office to make Tabula Rasa a better game in the hopes that all of you would have more fun, more memories, more victories, and more laughs.

In the end, it is our memories and experiences that stay with us and shape us for the rest of our lives. Things didn’t turn out as we planned, but I don’t regret a minute of it, and I hope none of you do either. I can only hope that every one of you had as much fun playing Tabula Rasa as I had helping to make it, that your experiences in the game were as wonderful as my own, and that the bonds of friendship you forged in game are even half as enduring and precious as the friendships I forged among this team of talented developers.

I envy the next developers who will next earn your attention and respect, I wish you the best of luck in finding a new game to have fun, unwind, and create new memories, and I hope that I’m lucky enough to see some of you again on my next project, whatever it may be.

Cheers,
Brian Hudson
Game Designer

Quote from: Leilo

Re: Thank you for being awesome
I won't make a separate thread for this, because, wow - Brian just summed up everything far more eloquently than I can this morning. (Let alone that he did it last night, when I'm not sure I could have managed words.)

So I will simply say thank you. Last night was a fitting swan song for years of hard work, hilarity, debates, debugging, caffeine, crunch food, howls, and laughter. It took hundreds of developers and thousands of players to truly bring Tabula Rasa to life, and I am so proud to have been one voice in that great community.

As Brian said above, I envy the developers of the next game that captures your attention, because you are one hell of a group of gamers and they will be lucky to have you.

Take care,

-Susan

(And one last thank you goes out to the ex-Tabula Rasa devs who turned out to help us with the event last night, and to the NCsoft teams who helped us keep publishing patches and running a full game service until the end. All of those people went above and beyond the call to help us bring this to an end with style. Thanks everyone.)
__________________
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Susan "Leilo" Kath

Quote from: Dev_Leonidas

Re: Did you check today?
I didn't try of course, because I personally typed in the shutdown command last night so that our producer could ceremoniously hit the "Enter" key when the countdown reached 0.

However, I caught myself twice today looking forward to logging in tonight in my dev character to spend a little more time rapping with the players in game before time ran out on me.

Time does strange things to a mind sometimes.

Quote from: DCoder

Thanks players
Winding things down today is a bit more emotional than I thought it would be.

But really - my heartfelt thanks to everyone who played and loved TR. To think that you put in your hear-earned cash and your sacred free time means so much to us developers. Even though the plug is being pulled, our work was worth it.

Really and truly - THANKS!

Quote from: Leilo

Re: Thanks players

Quote from: Bobbitt

I have to admit, I got a bit teary when the admins started counting down...

As the one doing the countdown, I can say that you absolutely weren't alone with the teary-eyes...
__________________
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Susan "Leilo" Kath

Yeah. I'm really gonna miss this game. They shoulda put a bullet in Lineage II instead. swamp poop

Uhh, is this like the world first MMO LAST DAY Event or something? I've ever been in one but this sounds quite dramatic.

I stumbled on this video and agreed with the point it made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p5_NFQinNc

Quote from: rk47 on March 02, 2009, 03:45:56 AM

Uhh, is this like the world first MMO LAST DAY Event or something? I've ever been in one but this sounds quite dramatic.

Not the first, but probably the best.