Chapter I: The Abnormally Blank Slate
(December 2007 - April 2008)

"The nay-sayers (I guess that includes me) aren't looking for reasons to bash this game. I like TR. I think it could have been great. I still think it could be, if the developers address it's problems in a timely fashion. I don't flame the game because I want to see it destroyed; I would be a very happy gamer if they managed to "fix" TR. However. You've been playing 6 weeks, which is a mere blip in the life-span of a genre where people can play the same game for years and years at a time, and longevity is TR's main failing. I won't list all of the problems again; the same points have been raised ad nauseum on this forum already, but I would counsel any TR player who is currently still in the "honeymoon" period not to set their hopes too high for the game."
-Teflon Eddie, MMORPG.com User

Although the Golden Shields had gained a respectable number of new members through OGame and Guild Wars during our time playing those games it was our merger with the Alchemist clan which had contributed the majority of our core members who had the greatest infulence on the opinions and desires of our guild as a whole. One of the Alchemist members named Bthorne had been talking about a perticular MMO ever since our departure from Zelderex many years previously. At the time the MMO he was talking about was not released and not going to be released any time soon, so we choose at that time to go into Guild Wars instead which was a wise choice. However Bthorne never gave up on that MMO he had talked about. That MMO was Tabula Rasa, a game whose name meant "Blank Slate" in an acient dead language. The game was getting a lot of hype due to the fact that it was the pet project of Richard Garriot the famous creator of the Ultima Series of games as well as Ultima Online, one of the very first and greatest MMORPGs ever made.

Although Richard Garriot was busy using his personal fortune to purcahse a trip into outer space while Tabula Rasa was in development, his fans were stuck down here on earth which gave them a lot of time to hype his game for him. Bthorne had spent years talking about the game to the Golden Shields and so when the game was finally released in late 2007 he instantly began a campaign to make it the next official game for our guild. I said before that the merger of the Alchemist clan into the Guild had a great impact on the Guild and this was where we began to see it. And it did not bode well. In some ways Guild Wars, OGame and Zelderex had spoiled the Alchemist members because all three games were free to play. Although not totally free due to Zelderex and OGame selling in-game advantages and Guild Wars only asking people to buy the software to play the game, all of the games we had played over the past few years had lacked one thing: Monthly Fees. When the push began to make Tabula Rasa the next official game for our guild many balked at the idea, refusing to pay a monthly fee for a game.

And another theme that had been passed on from the Alchemist clan was the concept of browser games. Like many of the people who play browser games, many of the Alchemist members played browser games because their computers were too outdated to play newer games. Some of these members had been unable to play Guild Wars with the guild, but had been able to continue with the Guild due to our participation in OGame. When the push for Tabula Rasa came these same people again said they were unable to take part because of their outdated computers. Between people who refused to play because of monthly fees and those unable to play because of their computers it was an uphill battle to get enough people onboard to make Tabula Rasa an official game for our guild. It was obvious even then that this would not be the last time this battle would have to be fought.

But Bthorne would not back down. He declared that he would play Tabula Rasa even if nobody else would and somehow that attitude alone won enough people over to get the ball rolling. Even Laat, our Guild Wars leader and the biggest Guild Wars fan among us, signed up for Tabula Rasa and other Guild Wars players soon followed him. It also helped that Tabula Rasa allowed everyone with a subscription to the game to give out up to five free trials to the game to anyone else they choose. These free trials allowed the members who had already signed up for the game to give those who weren't willing to pay the subscription fee a chance to try out the game without spending any money which took away any excuse they may have had for not trying it. Some became hooked and ended up paying the subscription fee after all. The battle was won and Tabula Rasa was an official game of our Guild now.

But not all was well... as we were about to discover...

The thing about Tabula Rasa was that it was much like Auto Assault, if you have ever played that game (which was also published by NCsoft...). It was very fun and fast paced at first due to the way the combat functioned. Although it still invovled a lot of dice rolls and random chance like any RPG, it appeared to play like an action game in that you had to control the movement of your character and aim your attacks in a manual fashion. So at first it felt like you were playing an action game rather than a traditional RPG... until you got used to it and realized that from a mathematical point of view it was exactly like every other MMORPG. You point your character in the direction of the bad guys and wait for the random dice rolls to do their job. Wash, rinse, repeat.

If you haven't actually played the game then perhaps you don't really understand what I'm saying. The best explanation I've seen was when a MMORPG.com user under the name of "Teflon Eddie" used an analogy to explain the problem with Tabula Rasa. His analogy was that the early part of the game was like a "honeymoon period" when you first started playing but that after you had been playing awhile and the novelty of the combat wore off, you discovered that Tabula Rasa was completely lacking in every other way that an MMORPG mattered: The crafting system was terrible, updates to the game didn't add enough new content, the guild support was minimal, PvP was wildly unbalanced, PvE was boring, leveling was an unbearable grind at the higher levels and there was a total lack of anything that resembled end game content. Once you hit level 50 (which took way too much grinding to accomplish) the game was pretty much over because there was nothing left to do, which was the biggest complaint everyone had with the game. Thus the "honeymoon" analogy. At the lower levels the game was fast paced and exciting. But the higher in level you got, the slower and more boring the game became. Until you hit the maximum level and it was literally over.

As the members of the Golden Shields who had been convinced to play Tabula Rasa began to get higher and higher in level, we began to notice these problems with the game. I hardly ever play more than one character in a game and as a result I was the one who actually reached the highest level out of anyone in our guild. When I hit about level 40 was when I knew this game would never work for us, because from level 40 I could see the content that would be available to me at level 50 and I knew that the next ten levels of my character's development would use up the last of the instanced missions in the game and once I was level 50 I would have nothing to do. Laat made it to level 30 and got bored with his character so he began playing another one of his "cloned" characters with a different class. When that character reached level 30 he became bored with it and started another with another class. This process continued until Laat had one level 30 character for every class in the game. But none of them made it very far past level 30 due to the fact that level 30 was the point where the game became totally boring. The other members of the guild didn't play as often as Laat or myself so hardly any of them reached even as far as level 30 but people quickly caught on that the game was boring and stopped playing before reaching that point.

At first we tried to give the developers a chance to improve the game. Although many people were flocking away from the game the developers kept assuring everyone they were working on adding end game content and addressing the other issues. We held onto the game from late December until late April, but very little improvement had been made. The developers kept promising more content in the form of vehicles and PvP battles over control points but even all these months later we had seen no sign that these improvements were any closer to being added to the game than when it was first released.

Finally, we had no choice but to turn our backs on the game...

So what happened to Tabula Rasa? Personally I think that Richard Garriot neglected the game because he was too busy with his space travel non-sense. With him out of the picture the same thing happened that seems to be happening to all MMORPGS these days: The publisher took over creative control of the project. Now the people at NCsoft may be saints when compared to some of the other MMO publishers out there (*cough*SOE*cough*) but at the end of the day they are still a publisher and publishers only care acout one thing, MONEY. NCsoft pushed the developers to get the game "finished" and out the door as fast as possible so that they could start turning a profit on it. The developers did "finish" the game in the sense that when it was released it was mostly bug free and ran without crashing every two minutes, which is a hell of a lot more than most MMORPGs can say for themselves. But that fact alone didn't actually make the game fun to play. They designed it like a single player game where you played through a linear storyline and by the time you were done you had reached the maximum level. But that meant once you did reach the maximum level there was nothing else to do, the game was just over.

And thus Tabula Rasa lacked what an MMO needed most: Longevity.

Continue to Chapter II: A Brief Revival