Tabula Rasa beta a "mistake"

By Robert Purchese Published 6 December, 2007

Garriott talks marketing.

Tablua Rasa creator Richard Garriott believes offering a large open beta so early on was a mistake, a bit like his haircut.

The problem lay with allowing legions of fans to "burn out" on an unfinished game, one crucially lacking the final fun polish, a bit like his haircut.

"I actually think the biggest mistake was made not by the marketing department, but by the development team," Richard Garriott told Gamasutra. "We invited too many people into the beta when the game was still too broken; we burned out some quantity of our beta-testers when the game wasn't yet fun."

"As we've begun to sell the game, the people who hadn't participated in the beta became our fast early-adopters. And the people who did participate in the beta, we've had to go back to and say 'look, look, we promise: we know it wasn't fun two months ago, but we fixed all that. Really, come try it again.'"

A better example of how to do things can be taken from other NCsoft title Guild Wars, apparently, which invited small clusters of "friends and family" to give the game a once over, before opening to the masses in the two or three weeks leading up to launch.

Shame, really, because Tabula Rasa is actually rather good; boasting high levels of polish and low levels of grinding, making it fast, fun and unique.

There is still work to do, mind you, but for an MMOG to show such potential so early on is a thumbs-up from us.

Pop over to our Tabula Rasa review to find out more.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (17) Latest comment 4 years ago

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  • mkreku #1 4 years ago

    Yeah, the beta did NOT work for me. Brown/grey and dull environments, pointless combat (where player skill was NEEDED but never a decisive factor) and a really crappy storyline with boring FedEx-quests.

  • jaxon58 #2 4 years ago

    I'm sure he must know that people don't beta test to TEST, they just want to play the game early. Shirley??

  • quantumsheep #3 4 years ago

    Yep. makes sense.

    Though the kind of feedback friends and family can give would be limited, surely?

  • kallenai #4 4 years ago

    I think the majority of the testers like myself made it pretty evident during the testing phase that TR seriously lacked depth and long term appeal on the forums. The majority of the game was soloable and often felt more like a single player game than a mmo. I got the impression after a month of testing that I'd pretty much seen and experienced the scope of the game and soon lost interest, never a good sign for an mmo.

    For Garriot to now come out looking to place blame is a tad rich when it was evident during the beta stage that the game lacked a clear direction and had some seriously broken game play themes.

    I suspect the experience and word of mouth from those who played during the testing phase has put off a lot of gamers bothering with TR. I understand and expect beta testing to be a buggy experience and therefore the bugs didn't put me off going retail. I just came away from testing with a sense that TR as a product lacked development of ideas, content and had relentlessly dull gameplay. In that sense I'd like to thank Mr Garriot for saving me wasting my money on a monthly subscription.
    Edited by 1 at 06/12/07 @ 10:41

  • Agent_Llama #5 4 years ago

    Oops. Oh well. Interesting that the huge ads at the top and side of this page are for Tabula Rasa... ;o)

  • Flub #6 4 years ago

    I tried this during the beta and I just didn't get on with it. This week I got given a free trial and liked it so much I now have a subscription. It's nothing deep or Ultima Online revolutionary but so far it's good solid fun for me. I hit level 15 the other day and got my first taste of high damage, high armour play. It actually does the main Hellgate style of play much better than Hellgate although it does have some fairly major lag problems that force you to jump to another instance to avoid them (Not a game killer. Just annoying)

  • Chauncy #7 4 years ago

    The Beta was quite the kick in the crotch indeed, and I'd totally dismissed the game until I read the review here and decided to give it a second chance. And I have to say I'm glad I did.

    Some of the defense and assault stuff reminds me a lot of Planetside, and although there's a lot less depth involved, its equally as fun.

  • space_ace #8 4 years ago

    origin: we create mistakes

  • Gurgeh #9 4 years ago

    There's still no end game. You level up so that you can level up some more, after whch you can level up. Claiming there is no "grind" is misleading especially for the higher levels.

    The patching process is still bugged AFAIK (there was a rollback of characters last week) and one of the first quests in the game crashes it.

    Here's a list of issues from the FoH boards. These are a week or two old, so while they were in release, some might be fixed - one guy has submitted 50 bug reports over the last 2 weeks.

    - Instances have many quests inside. If someone in group is too many meters away they don't get the update and have to reset the instance and do it all over.
    - If you fail an objective because you have no clue what you are doing you have to reset the instance and start all over.
    - If you crash in the middle of an instance your mission is failed and you have to start all over.
    - If a spy uses polymorph inside an instance and crashes because there is some retarded bug with polymorph you have to start all over.
    - If your mission indicators inside the instance arent showing up on the map then you have to relog to fix it, fail the mission, then start all over. OR you can just do without the indicators and figure out where the hell you are going.
    - The "you are here" indicator likes to bug out and not show where you are on the map, the fix is logging out. THUS making you fail the mission and start all over.
    - If a mob gets bugged in an instance, or the crap you are suppose to blow up, OR BY CHANCE some retarded dev didn't put the correct amount of an item you are suppose to collect (hai2u Incline Robot Instance) then you have to zone out and start all over again.

    Start to see a pattern yet?

  • Olemak #10 4 years ago

    Huh. I had the same experience in beta; I did not have a lot of fun, I kept wondering why this was an online game (seemed like a single-player dressed up as a MMO merely in order to cash in on subscription fees). Besides, I thought it was just a rehashing of old, establihed fantasy MMO gameplay features. And very little in the way of community features. So yeah, the beta did ruin it for me.

    Then again - if a month of playing the game is insufficient to reveal how the game is actually fun, then it is not for me.

    One more thing about Tabula Rasa: it is so old school, it almost becomes controversial. PVP and community featuers, like player cities etc. (SWG was great at that stuff before the game got fubared), I just don't see the point. garriot was always against "PK'ers", I bet he feels that it was the PK'ers that destoryed Ultima, and not the other way around. Even so - conflict and collaboration between players is really what make MMO's special, and it seem to me that Tabula Rasa works hard to erase that aspect - at least the conflict side.

    In my opinion, Tabula Rasa is not the future - it is the past, given a hefty visual makeover and some new themes, but it's still basically a type of game I got bored with years ago. Hell, I'd actually rather go back in time an play Neocron again when it was still viable, than waddle around in the sanitized playground that is Tabula Rasa.

    But hey, maybe the actually game is indeed radically different from the beta. That would be a suprise tho - for me, the game was not simply lacking some "fun polish", it was fundamentally lacking.

  • Max_Powers #11 4 years ago

    I do not care for Tabula Rasa but I do care for funny haircut jokes. Keep 'em coming.

  • Shanucore #12 4 years ago

    Richard Garriott offered me his haircut? :D

    Fair criticism, anyway, and it does reassure me that he has said it. I was less than impressed by the first beta.

  • Nallen #13 4 years ago

    Not many PC games totally pass me by, but I have not the first idea what Tabula Rasa is.

  • Lim-Dul #14 4 years ago

    Low levels of grinding? Ha, ha, ha! What are high levels of grinding then? Playing Progress Quest manually?

  • Rook #15 4 years ago

    ------------
    A better example of how to do things can be taken from other NCsoft title Guild Wars, apparently, which invited small clusters of "friends and family" to give the game a once over, before opening to the masses in the two or three weeks leading up to launch
    ------------

    That was not how Guild Wars did their beta. They had beta weekends once a month for about 6-7 months where people who pre-ordered or got keys could log in for 48 hours. With a reset coming somewhere in the middle, and gradually opening up a few new areas, this prevented burn out syndrome, and also let the areas that were unveiled be polished to a fairly high standard.

  • Feanor #16 4 years ago

    GLOL at the first line.

  • Jigglybean #17 4 years ago

    All MMOs are the same essentially - grind fests. Until developers move away from the ultra crap World of Warcraft formula, i cant see the genre moving on.

    Although panned, Star Wars Galaxies had a superb skill tree system that was excellent but was subject to alot of balance issues. However, content is king and people are just not interested in 'run out to the woods and bring me bag 15 ball sacks from a bear' missions like they have in warcraft. Where is the adventure?!!