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Garriott Blames Long Beta for Tabula Rasa Woes
by Nick Breckon, Dec 05, 2007 1:42pm PSTNCsoft is having trouble finding an audience for its newest MMO Tabula Rasa, the pet project of famed developer Richard Garriott. Now the Ultima Online creator is pointing to a protracted beta testing period as the reason why.
"We invited too many people into the beta when the game was still too broken," Garriott said at the 2007 Independent Game Conference, according to Gamasutra.
"We burned out some quantity of our beta-testers when the game wasnÂ’t yet fun," he added. "As we've begun to sell the game, the people who hadn't participated in the beta became our fast early-adopters."
Garriott isn't the only one blaming Tabula Rasa's lukewarm reception on a long beta test.
"While every developer says that betas arenÂ’t the finished product and shouldn't be judged as such, they've increasingly found themselves used primarily as a marketing tool," writes Rock Paper Shotgun contributor Kieron Gillen, who named Tabula Rasa as his favorite MMO of the year.
"By having an open beta, anyone who cares about MMOs will have already played it," continues Gillen. "And when they compare their experience to a reviewer, they tap the side of the head knowingly. Because they've played it, and it was a bit nob."
"But Tabula Rasa turned out pretty neat and now it's got a large number of people who've played the game who'll roll their eyes at its existence if mentioned," he concludes.
Having given Tabula Rasa a relatively unenthusiastic preview prior to its release, Shacknews is rolling its eyes.
Comments
Snappy headline, but lacks humour. Probably because it's true.
The fact that they had SO many people in beta only enlarged this problem.
I play Tabula Rasa now - I waited 2 weeks after it launched - read the forums and opinions of players and saw that 99% of the issues I had with in beta were fixed - now the game isnt bug free but the Dev team is working fast and hard to keep up with the issues.
Also its a damn fun game so far IMO.
MMO Devs are between a rock and a hard place - you have to have a beta to find bugs as MMOs simply have too much content for a small in house group to do it - but a bad beta will stain you no matter how good the final game is - much like in the days of game demos what actually came out before the game hit the shelves was was based off of non finalized code - many a PC game suffer for this.
Of course people like to use WoW as a reverse example of this - buggy beta, horrible launch for many people - but still super successful. Lets face it though - thats cause its Blizzard and Wacraft - if could be Blizzards Bag of Steaming Tauren Shit and it would fly off the shelves.
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Eh?
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Great games stand on their own, regardless of crappy betas.
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If you're talking about people who last played the beta six months ago and are judging the release based on those old impressions, then maybe you have a point. But I think a lot of people were probably playing the beta right up until it closed--because hey, free game, right?
I like to think I'm a sophisticated enough consumer of games to form an informed opinion of a game based on its beta. There may be a certain amount of graphical and stability improvements, even additional content, added over time, but it's rare that the core nature of the game will change much. Even Everquest 2, which has gone through extensive design revisions since its release, still feels like it was designed to be hard, i.e. more like Everquest (1) than World of Warcraft. Grind-tastic, in other words.
So basically I'm saying, if I try your game, I am going to gain some insight into the designers' heads. I may not like what I see. I'll only go back later (much later) and try the game again if there is a lot of information pointing me in that direction. And I mean a lot. Not just the developer's say-so.
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not to mention that you're fucking stupid if you think you're going to get me to pay a monthly fee for it.
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I'm not really a noob with MMOs, I played WoW for 2 years and SWG before that, so I generally knew how things worked. But Tabula's quest system - to me - didn't make sense. When you accept a quest it will put a marker on your map, which is pretty much where/who you need to goto, but I started to find that some quests didn't give you a marker at all - or any directions - for that matter.
Some were in instances, but they said that in the quest log, but I remember picking up quests which had no marker or directions at all. I was told to kill (insert name here) to get back (insert item name here) but it didn't give me any fucking directions or markers, how the hell was I supposed to know where to go or who to kill, for that matter!
Also, I remember picking up a certain quest where I had to kill a monster to get back an item, the log item for the quest indicated - from what I could gather - that it was solo-able. My arse was it, I was two levels under it and it ripped me a new one. Lame.
There were a few other things about it that didn't make sense, but I've typed too much already. Non the less, I un-installed it and canceled my account.
Go back to the old model of restricted technical beta's with a smaller number of testers and have a free week event as the final stress test before the game goes live. You get the old beta usefulness back, get some great feedback, and you get the marketing of the polished game too.
It's such a breath of freshair compared to WoW which was getting a bit stale for me - but yeah I can recommend it to anyone wanting to try something new