Company: NCSoft / Destination Games
Status: Canceled
Release Date: November 2, 2007
System: PC
Lifespan: 15 months
May 16, 2004:
Destination Games announces Tabula Rasa with a press released based around describing the world and fiction surround it with such things as "A heroic task awaits you. Just beyond your galaxy, an ancient malevolence has embarked upon a covetous rampage. This demonic juggernaut seeks nothing less than the total enslavement of every world it encounters. Your world could be next." A feature list is also given citing such things as "Your very own customizable home set within a private landscaped estate", "Change your character's career path at any time without losing items, currency, housing, or reputation", "Travel to distant worlds and join your friends instantly through universally implemented teleportation systems" and more.
May 21, 2005:
A year after announcement and a trailer is shown of a redesigned Tabula Rasa. Changing from a fantasy / Sci-fi setting with original weapons and setting to a FPS paced RPG / Sci-fi setting. Richard Garriott cited the reason for the change being that "after showing the game at E3 and reaching a critical mass of content we realized the game was not going to be as compelling and accessible as we wanted it to be. The art style, the unusual weapons, the static instanced spaces, and the combat mechanics all failed to excite people, including ourselves."[1]
May 4, 2007:
Tabula Rasa enters closed beta and estimates the game will be launched in Q3 of the same year.
October 2, 2007:
Despite having announced the game having gone gold the month prior, Starr Long posts to the Tabula Rasa website announcing that Tabula Rasa will be delayed until the first week of November to a "address several issues including stability and balance", among other things.[2]
November 2, 2007:
Tabula Rasa launches. Most issues regarding launch are contained to NCSoft / Destination Games not preparing for the amount of customers they got. Server queues plague the single Europe server, causing most to move to the North American servers. Despite the large amount of players trying to play Tabula Rasa, the sales figures, roughly $5 million US[3][4], aren't as large as expected with company predictions being modest at best.
December 5, 2007:
Richard Garriott speaks at the Independent Games Conference about, in his opinion, what was done right and wrong in regards to Tabula Rasa and its launch. He stated that the biggest problem was “We burned out some quantity of our beta-testers when the game wasn’t yet fun, and as we’ve begun to sell the game, the people who hadn’t participated in the beta became our fast early-adopters.” Going on to say “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.’ We’ve had to go out and develop free programs to invite those people back for free before they go buy it. So the beta process, which we used to think of as a QA process, is really a marketing process.”[5]
June 11, 2008
MMOGChart reports that Tabula Rasa, only 7 months past launch, only retained 75,000 subscribers[6]. NCSoft is quick to denounce these claims and states that Tabula Rasa is even growing on a month to month basis[7], despite their quarterly report showing the game only making ~$500,000 over a 3 month period.[8]
November 12, 2008
Richard Garriot, having returned from space, announces that he will "pursue new interests" and be leaving NCSoft / Destination Games.[9]
November 21, 2008
Only 9 days after Richard Garriott leaves NCSoft, the company announces that it will be shutting down Tabula Rasa on February 28, 2009 witht he game being free to play from January 10 up until its impending closure. NCSoft states to their existing player that "We can assure you that through the next couple of months we'll be doing some really fun things in Tabula Rasa, and we plan to make staying on a little longer worth your while"[10] and also promise, as a reward for being faithful to Tabula Rasa, that all subscribers still active from the announcement onward would be given access to the upcoming Aion beta and some other perks.[11]
December 1, 2008
NCSoft clarifies why the decision was made to shut down Tabula Rasa boiling it down to the fact that Tabula Rasa wasn't meeting expectation or contributing to the companies bottom line.[12]
February 28, 2009
Tabula Rasa's final day of operation. The live team plans a large event where alien NPCs attack in large unending waves. A message was sent out the day before from "High Command" to warn players of the impending invasion and to prepare. The end of this message reads "If enemy troop movements are as large as we fear, and the Neph are truly prepared to lead all out war against us, this may be our last stand. Penumbra has been informed of the situation and is standing by on the use of their last resort weapon. We can not afford to be complacent or uncertain, but if it is truly our destiny to be destroyed, we are taking them all with us."[13] The final seconds were marked with a countdown at the end of which the servers were shutdown.[14]