Tag: Tabula Rasa

Warhammer Online To Close More Servers


I normally start out every Warhammer Online article with a now famous quote by Vice President of Mythic Mark Jacobs, but at this point perhaps we can manage with just a bite,

“If you’ve seen a game consolidate servers, you know it’s in deep, deep trouble.”
-Mark Jacobs

Following the huge layoffs at Mythic, and the hints of desperation summoned by the endless trial system, it comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody that Mythic has announced that more servers will be shutting down in the near future.

On the American side, Dark Crag and Phoenix Throne are shutting down, where Europe has at least one server shutting down in the near future. Transfers are set to begin soon, if they haven’t already, and players will be given 20% experience bonuses on their new servers to ease the pain. After this shutdown, Warhammer Online will have five servers in North America, and Europe with eleven servers.

More on Warhammer Online after the break…

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Mechscape Cancelled, Stellar Dawn Coming 2010


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It always pains me to see an MMO fail before it is even launched. As is the case with Mechscape, Jagex’s upcoming Science Fiction MMO, a spiritual successor to Runescape, as CEO Mark Gerhard confirmed to Eurogamer today that the title is indeed canned.

In an interview with Mechscapeworld.com, Mark Gerhard had this to say:

“Sadly the game was not as complete as we wanted and we spent the first few months trying to “fix” the game where we could. About a month or so ago we took the decision to stop trying to “fix it” as we still wouldn’t have the game we wanted and the game certainly did not meet all the objectives and specifications established in the original game design document and therefore it would be better to go back to the founding principles and build the game we always wanted –Andrew [Gower] is now overseeing the project and working very closely with the team to build Stellar Dawn, not all was lost as we naturally have developed the game engine substantially over the last few years and the new designs benefits massively from this as well as a ton of experience within the team as to what works and what doesn’t. So whilst the content and a lot of the game play will change from what was previously built almost everything else will go straight back into Stellar Dawn.” – Mark Gerhard

With the death of one comes the rise of another. Innovations brought about by the production of Mechscape have gone towards the production of Stellar Dawn, a different yet somehow similar MMO to the little guy who never had a chance.

Hopefully Jagex has learned the same truth that Richard Garriot learned with Tabula Rasa: Just because you are an established name, does not guarantee all of your products will succeed.

On that note, it is good to see Jagex catching up to the rest of the mmo world in terms of features. The company just launched a name changing service, and is currently beta testing a feature to see a log of your character’s activity, including amount of time played (see WoW Armory)

Tabula Rasa: What Happened


Tabula Rasa was an MMORPG that blended role playing with 3rd person shooter tactics, in an open ended and dynamic war waged between the human and bane forces. The game focused on Logos, artifacts that players collect to enable certain powers. While the game focused on PvE play, the introduction of PvP content introduced war games, allowing various game modes to be played between warring clans.

Unlike most other MMO’s that feature a targeting system and auto-attacks with the addition of hotbar attacks, Tabula Rasa features a targeting system for only some weapons, combined with a third person shooter system, and rpg hit/miss and damage calculations. Tabula Rasa focused on the war aspect of the game, and both sides of the war would launch attacks on each other’s bases. It was completely possible to lose a base to the Bane forces, meaning that access to the NPC’s, vendors, spawn points, teleport locations, and anything else located in the base would become inaccessible until the area was retaken.

So where did Tabula Rasa fail? The easiest way to answer that is unfulfilled promises. The game launched with very little, if any, end-game content, and the developers took so long to introduce any inkling of end-game content that many of the players who had reached the level cap had quit long beforehand. Certain promises of player-driven mechs, pvp wargames, and more, weren’t fulfilled until literally a month before the game shut down. Richard Garriot also left the company a few weeks before the announcement of shutdown.

Inevitably, player count went down sharply, resulting in the game getting the axe for subpar subscriber numbers.

OR WAS IT?

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