Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa took it’s last breath today, beginning at 8 PM GMT, with an invasion by the Bane (the games enemies), resulting in a shutdown at midnight. We all know the story of the game and it’s terrible failure. Tabula Rasa was free to play and download since December 23rd, 2008, so I decided to take a look. Well, not a look to the game itself. I just came to watch it die.
I logged on today around 1 PM GMT for the first time, with the account of a friend who had gained some levels before, so I could explore and get into some higher level areas. On my first login I noticed something.
Seems like people didn’t even care for the ending. After walking around for about 20 minutes I finally got into an area where I met some people. It was the starting area and first map of the game, the only place where people seemed to be active. There were around 10-20 players at the first outpost fighting some NPCs. Speaking of NPCs, they were the only ones doing anything in the game. Walking around searching for other players, the only thing that moved were NPCs which shot at other NPCs. Interesting. I logged off.
Coming back at 8 PM GMT, people had gathered at “Foreas Base”, an outpost still controlled by humans. The event was about to begin and suddenly more people arrived. A lot more.
Eventually the invasion began and the Bane took over each planet, resulting in the evacuation of players to a hideout. The developers actually prepared some nice stuff there. We would have a last stand. On Earth.
Arriving in New York City, it turned into a lagfest and the servers lagged out several times. Eventually more instances were opened so players could enjoy their final battle.
Yeah right, they do! At least the standard server software is still intact! More and more enemies spawned until the humans couldn’t take it anymore. They got defeated.
All this happened 5 minutes ago.
Richard Gariott’s Tabula Rasa died at 12 AM GMT.
Anyone want to buy my boxed copy which I got back in 2007? Might be a collectors item some day!
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Makes me wonder how Blizzard will end WoW if they ever do.
Not to say this was a bad idea, just poorly implemented on Blizzard's lacking hardware. If MMOs could scale better during an event like this, I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, the MASSIVE part of the games is exactly what makes them so appealing. Hopefully CCP's World of Darkness game will have a ton of events like this one, only there hopefully won't only be one huge one before the game ends.
though i'm quite sure most other interesting MMOs wouldn't fail if people stopped riding WoW's nuts 24/7.
Never played it, but it's said to see a developer's dream die.