Well it appears that Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa, an Sci-Fi MMORPG that was pushed out and had some original concepts for merging a magic system with a High Technology Sci-fi environment, has finally closed its doors. This is a sad day to me because while I think the game itself hit a stonewall regarding playability, it was definitely not something outside the realm of fixing.
The game had a crafting system that desperately needed retooling. Perhaps turning it into a crafting/modding system for equipment. That would have gone a long way with the Sci-Fi theme and made for potentially interesting equipment mods as well. But added to that was just storyline limitations and the general hurdle you run into on any PlayNC game. There isn’t a lot of diversity in what you do. Grind, grind, grind. The game would have done well to have some more puzzles and played more on the exploration of the worlds you were on. Not to mention they had a great base from a PVP system, they should have considered opening up access to the Bane side and given us the ability to fight back and forth on that end.
Either way, the final decision they came to appears to have been to shut the servers down. Hopefully we’ll see some more Sci-Fi MMOs in the future and they will be implemented in a way to helps them stick around.
