Tabula Rasa

In a sense, this is another example of the disconnect between Tabula Rasa's ideal audience and its actual audience. Action gamers probably wouldn't care about having no crafting system at all - but the MMO gamers who have actually formed the bulk of players for TR do care, and once again they have been disappointed.

One thing we can praise TR for in the weeks and months since launch is the pace of improvement. The speed at which the team at Destination Games works was already well-established by launch, when the polish and quality of the game compared to its messy, ill-considered beta took many players (and writers) by surprise.

The pace at which updates have rolled out since then is equally impressive. While end-game content has been slow in arriving, in the months since launch we've seen a vast overhaul of the technical performance of the game, the introduction of the hybrid races and the auction house, tons of new content - and, indeed, what amounts to almost a complete rebuilding of the whole Specialist class tree (50 per cent of the game's classes) from top to bottom.

This has not been an entirely smooth process, however. Perhaps due to the low player population of the game, Destination seems to have had trouble with fully testing patches before they are rolled out - resulting in numerous bugs, crashes and in-game problems with several of the major patches.

Time of Death

But then, that's Tabula Rasa in a nutshell - full of good stuff, but always with enough caveats to seriously annoy an appreciable number of players. Everything seems to come with a "but". There is PVP, but... There is crafting, but... The biggest "but" of all is that this is a game clearly designed with the dream of luring action gamers to a persistent world - but instead it was marketed and sold to MMO gamers, and has ended up disappointing them severely.

Power-gamers who have hit level 50 and found nothing to do are leaving the game, and making their discontent known. While we're not exactly enamoured of the "rush to the level cap" style of play, we can't blame those players for their decision - these people exist, they're influential, and Destination Games should have realised and allowed for that. Crafters, raiders and PVP players - TR falls short of all their expectations. It provides new experiences that no MMO has even attempted before, but in the absence of the familiar depth of other games, that just isn't enough for the established MMO audience.

So there you have it; cooling on the slab, one of the most innovative games in the MMO space in years, and also one of the most mis-handled. Cause of death? We'd argue that it lay in the misplaced belief that TR could attract action, sci fi gamers, and that its failure to satisfy traditional MMO gamers wouldn't matter.