The Failure of Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa is shutting down.

One time I started to write a blog entry about the things that you do and do not want to hear MMOG developers say. It was a little too much work, but the Tabula Rasa devs were definitely going to have an entry in the "do not want to hear" column. In interviews, Richard Garriot or other Tabula Rasa developers would talk about how they were rethinking many of the assumptions of the genre.

This is a big red flag. A big red flag that is on fire in a room full of dynamite in a museum filled with priceless artifacts.

If you are making an ordinary single-player game with six or ten hours of gameplay you have a lot of leeway to be innovative. You can do something totally new and still make a great game. Even then it's very rare for totally new and innovative games to cross the Good Game Rubicon and really be great.

MMOG's are a different animal. Every mechanic needs to be balanced against every other mechanic and then still remain at least somewhat fun for months or years. A single player game might revolve around two or three simple mechanics. Any MMOG needs probably twenty or thirty specific, complicated mechanics before they can even earn the name.

This is not to say you cannot innovate in an MMOG. You absolutely can and should. But you only innovate on four or five mechanics out of the twenty or thirty you'll need. Nobody is going to have the time, energy, or talent to rethink every standard mechanic in the genre. Even if you could, nobody will play your game because it would be practically impossible to learn.

At one time I was really looking forward to Tabula Rasa but I never ended up playing it. I remember reading about an expansion a few months ago. They were very excited because they were adding Armor Sets to the game. When you try to innovate too much you end up missing these "baseline" features to your game, things that no MMORPG should go without.

Richard Garriott was one of the pioneers of the MMORPG genre but he never found much success after Ultima Online. There's something special about video game pioneers that tends to make them long-term failures. If you've ever read about the development of video games during the 1970's and 1980's, it strikes you that practically none of these people (except for Shigeru Miyamoto) has had much success or longevity in the industry after their "pioneering" days were done.

It shows you that the creation of video games is a complicated thing. You do need your innovators, your "scientists", to pave the way. But the world of the not-new belongs to the engineers, who can take the innovative ideas, refine them, and make them into good games.

WAR, WoW, and the Race To Max

I'm no longer keeping up with other WAR blogs, nor my own, nor WAR itself, so I'll apologize up front if this has been covered ad nauseum.

But has anybody noticed the general relaxed attitude towards leveling? This is a big change from WoW, where people are killing themselves leveling up whenever there are extra levels laying about.

Now, I'm sure some people in WAR were killing themselves to 40 -- and certainly a lot of WoW players take their sweet time hitting 60/70. But as a whole it seems like the goal in WoW is to hit max and the goal in WAR is to take your sweet time.

There are a number of reasons for this, but the biggest is the respective focus on PvE and PvP. In WoW being "ahead of the leveling curve" was a huge advantage. You didn't have to compete for mobs or quests if you were ahead of other players. Faster leveling begets even faster leveling.

In WAR there's not a lot to do if your ahead of the curve. Scenarios won't pop and there won't be a ton of world PvP to enjoy. You might not even be able to play much with your guildies.

Also, if anybody else is playing Left 4 Dead and is similarly in need of FPS co-op buddies, drop me a line. "boatorious" on xfire, "boat" on steam. In a completely unrelated note I expect my glorious return to WAR to be delayed even further. My ... uhh ... my internet is out so I can't play WAR right now. But I'll be back soon.

Where Is Boat

I haven't quit WAR, but I have quit playing it.

Lately I've just really been in the mood for X-COM : Apocalypse, so that's what I've been doing.

There have been a flurry of bloggers quitting lately. That's my understanding, anyway. The first victim claimed in my not-playing-WAR to playing-WAR transition has been my WAR blog reading. Most nights I don't have more that two free hours and I never have more than three, so spending an hour going through blogs every night seems a little ... opulent.

Anyway, I guess I should talk about WAR ...

WAR Auction House == WoW Auction House == PAIN

For every five to ten hours I play the game, it seems like I have to spend an hour at the auction house unloading items. This is pretty similar to WoW, actually. I wish there was an easier way, doing this stuff kills me.

There Are A Lot Of Crafting Mats

The abundance of crafting mats is also a little bothersome. Perhaps I'll devote an entire post to MMORPG crafting at some point, but in the meantime I'll say that I do not dig all the inventory management required for crafting. Especially in WAR where not only will I have like 20 stacks of different kinds of crafting-level-50 apoth ingredients, I'll even have separate stacks of equal-quality, equal-level fixers that literally do the same thing.

PvP Seems Pointless

Once again I'm low in tier (now tier 3) and I don't see much point to PvP as I'm just not that effective.

How Do I Level Up Then?

I don't know. Leveling up with PvE is so bloody slow. Honestly, just as much as X-COM: Apocalypse being awesome, this is why I've quit playing for the moment.

How Long Until I Quit Quitting?

The reason I don't think I'll quit WAR is that I can't think of anything about it that really, really bugs me. I think it will take me another week or two to work the X-COM bug out of my system, then I'll be back, causing trouble and taking names.