Tabula Rasa burial ground, behind EB Games
by Shawn Schuster 
Jan 5th 2009 at 3:00PM
Filed under: Sci-fi, Culture, MMO industry, Opinion, Tabula Rasa, Free-to-play
In this Kotaku post, we see two reader-submitted photos of said dumpster, and it really makes me sad to think about where those games could have gone instead. I wonder if they first tried to give them away for free, or perhaps the EB Games upper management told them that it's not even worth the shelf space, considering their PC shelf space is shrinking every day anyway. Would you have taken a free copy of Tabula Rasa, just to play it out completely free these last six weeks? Am I being a complete fanboy? Yes, but I know I've never had a stronger compulsion to dumpster dive in my life.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Colin Brennan said on 3:45PM 1-05-2009
The collector's edition copy in that box makes me want to drive to Canada just to grab it. XD
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Kinjiru said on 5:00PM 1-05-2009
It's sad. I have one of those boxed sets...
PhantomJ said on 3:45PM 1-05-2009
Lawlz, I forsee that dumpster being empty by tonight.
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Adam said on 4:09PM 1-05-2009
I would have taken a free copy to play. I almost bought one a few months back at at nearby Target. It was already in their "bargain" pile for around $5. It was still requiring a subscription at the time, though, so I didn't. I wish I had. I thought it looked good.
It is a shame, really. I would have preferred to see this go the micro-transaction model and remain operational. Which begs the question: Why didn't it?
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Graill said on 5:12PM 1-05-2009
Abyssmal customer service or total lack of it, 57 ( not a random number) unanswered tickets by me alone. mediocre content, enough to get the game running, devs trying for months to put in fill in content to span hundreds of broken quests. Content added to try and span those gaps broke even more quests and the story line many times.
And the author said this wasnt a bad game? Spurts of great playability do not make a game rate well, you need the total package, customer service, quests that work, a submersive storyline, and action.
When a gm tells you to grind the last 2 levels something is wrong.
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Bossy said on 5:58PM 1-05-2009
First the good news:
Tabula RAsa will not be the only game coming down in 2009.
A LOT of others - published and unpublished - will find their way to the servers unplug status in future months.
That's very good news for the innocent players who still forge out 40 to 50 dollars for badly developped and sometimes even unplayable games.
Then the bad news:
2009 will again be filled by hyped up and broken MMORPG's prematurely launched with the sole purpose of getting some dollars of some players in which I would call the "on line player scam".
The sad thing is that there ARE players with such bad taste they don't see it coming.
We all know and see these guys: jumping and hyping from Hellgate to TR, from AoC to the terrible War. I wonder what's is up with these guys, perhaps they deserve these games...
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rhys said on 6:27PM 1-05-2009
You don't need the box to play for free, you can just e-mail TR support and they will send you a retail code. Then you can download the game from them yourself. I did it myself. While there is an antiquated attachment to boxes, ultimately they are just wasteful. I say this as someone who used to work in bookstores and also advocates moving to digital books because the mass production of books in modern times is very wasteful as well.
As for TR, I played it in Beta and have been playing it lately. The environments and story elements are very good. However, the gameplay itself is very repetitive. After playing for a while the sound of my machine gun follows me in my sleep. You really just figure out the combat tactic that works best and use it over and over again. The repetitiveness limits the replayability as well because having to redo anything is that much more tedious. The content is very linear and really feels more like a single-player RPG with multiplayer mode than an actual MMO. It probably would've been more profitable and even successful to craft it as such, or to have created a different server model that was more sustainable. I feel there is a market for small scale MMOs (Not-So-Massively Multiplayer) but so far haven't seen anyone willing to pursue it.
Ultimately, I can see how people would get bored with this game pretty quickly and leave. The linear nature and the repetitiveness really give a sense of running out of interesting things to do quickly.
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Caldruid said on 9:48PM 1-05-2009
How about recycling the plastic from the frickin boxes? Epitomy of waste. Good job EB.
I went back and played TR last week, and it was better than I remembered it. Visually stunning at times. It's shame because the grounds for a great game are there with a little more tweaking.
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Jack said on 9:51PM 1-05-2009
I still think all this Tabula Rasa crap is just a way to get more people in the game and after all this in Feb they just go like sorry guys we change or mind and TR will stay! Oh and the best part you got to enter your credit card details to even can play the damn game for free...
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Hardy said on 1:30AM 1-06-2009
I enjoyed this game while I played it.
It is a shame, but I predict a company will buy the game and make it a F2P game. Like Aria games or something.
Also, to call this MMO repetitive is retarded cause every MMO is repetitive, however this one wasn't really that bad. The quests were quite interesting.
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Evi said on 10:53AM 1-06-2009
No, I wouldn't play it. It would just make me sad, because it's going away soon.
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BaronJuJu said on 12:10PM 1-06-2009
Whats really sad is that it is still being sold at the US military BX/PX here after I told one of the managers last weekend it was shutting down in February.
Selling at original launch day full price no less.
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