Tabula Rasa - Looking Back

RPS looks back at Tabula Rasa, the MMO Richard Garriott worked on before the MMO/MP/No-SP game he is working on now.

Tabula Rasa cost NCSoft a fortune, so sure were they that combination of a legendary developer and spaceguns in a World of Warcraft structure would be the MMO to end all MMOs. It didn’t exactly work out like that (and we’d see remarkably similar folly from them half a decade later, with WildStar). Which is a shame, as the fault was less with the game and more with impossible expectations – both from the people behind the game and from the millions of people they spent a couple of years convincing it would be the answer to their every prayer.

What a strange time 2006-2008 was. So many of us were so desperate for a World of Warcraft alternative, specifically because we spent our every waking hour for months playing World of Warcraft, loving it to bits, then burning out of it. How could any game using the same approximate structure somehow achieve that? We had all seen Oz behind his curtain by that point, and no self-proclaimed WoW-killer stood a chance.