NCsoft Europe's ex-CTO Adam Martin commented on his T=Machine blog about his close-up experience as a NCsoft insider with Tabula Rasa's prolonged development, and giving an excellent analysis on the reasons that led to the eventual demise:
In the online games industry, if we keep quiet about the causes, the hopes, the fears, the successes, and the failures of the best part of $100million burnt on a single project, then what hope is there for us to avoid making the same mistakes again?
Unlike Scott, I actually (superficially speaking) agree with this statement as to why Tabula Rasa, Age of Conan, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and Hellgate:London failed (TR, AoC, PotBS, and HL from now now...)
"No, these games failed because their developers let it happen."
-Funcom *should have* learned enough lessons with Anarchy Online not to make the mistakes they did with AoC; not the precise same mistakes, but the same "class" of mistakes were made, suggesting that they tried to fix only the symptoms and failed to understand the causes.
-Destination Games knew a long long time before TR went to beta that it wasn't (going to be) ready even for beta, let alone launch. IMHO NCsoft collectively knew very well that TR wasn't ready for launch, but went ahead and launched it anyway.
-Bill Roper went on record to say that no-one understood their sales/revenue model, from the start. As I've mentioned before, that pretty much guarantees failure, and it's not rocket-science to understand why!
-Pirates ... I have no idea, actually. It's the one that I have never played (although I really wanted to) nor even *seen* (which is unusual). I'm not going to talk about PotBS any more, since I really know nothing about it.NB: I don't happen to agree with anything else in that post. I've got nothing against it, I just didn't find anything interesting or new about the games themselves in the post, and IMHO the list of "why this happened" is too shallow and derivative to be worth saying in 2009 - the same has been said many times over the last ten years by many people, and ain't particularly insightful in the first place. Sorry, dude.
Martin's personal post-mortem generated waves with another ex-NCsoft employee, Scott "Lum the Mad" Jennings, who had the following to say:
Well, Adam's a bit safer in that he's on a whole other continent. Here in Austin game development, it's hard to find someone who isn't, at a maximum, one degree removed from someone who was involved, at one point or another, with TR. It was a massive project, it employed a great many people over its lifetime, and at least half of the resumes currently sitting in my email are from people involved, at one point or another, with TR. Combine that with Midway's long-running explosion and you have most of the Austin game development community polishing resumes.
So what happened?
My take is pretty similar to Adam's, actually. I was considerably closer geographically, but not that much closer from a development perspective. To mirror Adam's "who is this guy and why is he pontificating, again?" bona fides, I...
[list]1. ...was a designer on another, smaller project at NCsoft Austin's office (hired as system designer, eventually promoted to lead designer)
2. ...wasn't on the TR dev team
3. ...am not much for FPS games, am pretty sad at them, and usually die horribly in Team Fortress 2
4. ...used that as an excuse for staying as far away from TR discussions as possible
5. ...it was a pretty weak excuse, yeah.
6. ...was on the same mailing lists Adam was (save the cool management ones he was privy to, which was probably for the best) and heard much the same angst, cheerleading, and general "holy crap what now" gestalt.
Jennings explained further, in detail, Tabula Rasa's pre-release rushed timeline:
Gathering Feedback, Putting It Into A Box, Never Speaking Of It Again
As TR moved closer to release, company wide, we were *ordered* to start particpating in weekly playtests. As I mentioned, I wasn't really fond of shooters, and clung to that Get Out Of Jail Free card fiercely. I mean, being one of the most obnoxiously opinionated persons on internal email lists, along with the whole ranting on the web for a decade thing, having an excuse *not* to have an opinion on That Thing Looming Over All Of Us was pretty sweet.
But closer to release, we were told to play the game and give feedback. Which I did. I think my overall feedback was "it wasn't THAT bad" (for those at Mythic who remember the blistering we-should-probably-fire-your-ass-right-now-for-that-very-unhelpful-email feedback I fired off about Imperator prior to its final E3, that may raise an eyebrow or three). It *wasn't* that bad. The tutorial was kind of meh, then got kind of cool, then you wandered around and shot things. It wasn't World of Warcraft, which I considered a plus. I didn't really enjoy playing it, but it wasn't for me.
(I'm sure my somewhat constant resentment over Tabula Rasa being the twelve thousand pound gorilla which had dozens of programmers and a floor full of artists while our project was flailing about wildly for just one concept artist and maybe a server programmer or two had nothing to do with it. But I digress. For now, We'll get back to that somewhat constant resentment in a bit.)
The calendar moved forward inexorably, and TR went into marketing beta - you know, where anyone can play it so they get ALL excited and make guilds and get ready for release and... yeah, that didn't happen. People downloaded the game, had varying degrees of the "it's not THAT bad" reaction, and didn't play it again.
This was noted. One of the mantras that went around production discussions after Auto Assault's launch square into the pavement was that if you can't get people to play the beta for free, you have serious, serious issues. Tabula Rasa had those issues. Not as bad as Auto Assault - there were people doggedly playing every night and presumably enjoying themselves, and metrics were duly assembled to measure every movement those testers took. But it was pretty clear, at least from my completely disassociated and busy with my own thing viewpoint, that there wasn't a lot of excitement.
So, as Adam mentioned, a survey was sent out shortly before the game was scheduled to release, anonymously asking, among other things, if the game should be delayed. I put that it should, based on the Auto Assault beta-not-lit-on-fire thing and the general principle that if you have to ask if it should be delayed, it probably should be. But I didn't feel very passionately about it one way or the other. (I'm told later that most of the team DID feel pretty passionately about it and made it known so.)
The survey's results weren't announced. Internal rumors swept pretty widely (I know, because if they got to my end of the building, they were pretty wide) that the results were almost unanimously for a delay.
There was no delay.
Whoops.
There is more in Jennings' well-known Broken Toys blog, documenting the post-release disappointment and denial of failure by corporate heads.
I applaud Martin and Jennings for speaking out about Tabula Rasa, its shortcomings, and the lessons learned throughout this experience. Martin's final conclusion said it all:
But as one of my friends said at the time: what's it got to do with hurting people? we just want to use the experience to learn to make better games. And how the hell are we going to do that when you people won't even admit we were wrong?
