The Four Shortest Lived MMORPGs

MMORPG.com has profiled and analyzed four of the “shortest lived” massively multiplayer titles to ever reach the retail market. As expected, Tabula Rasa made the cut:

How does a single game go from taking place in a light and mystical fantasy setting full of unicorns and ninja elves to a dark and gritty space war adventure game? That’s the shift Tabula Rasa managed to make during its long and controversial development. About two years into the development a decision was made to radically change the design and even concept of the game. It was the space game that tanked, though, so let’s concentrate on that.

Tabula Rasa launched in November of 2007 and ran for 484 days before NCsoft finally put this one out of its misery on February 1st, 2009.

Aliens, guns, Richard Garriott, fast paced combat, ethical parables, a new language called Logos that allowed humans to tap into a kind of powerful magic, an innovative cloning system that negated the need to start characters over… This game had a lot of unique features and a lot of going for it on paper. With the Ultima Online icon at the helm, players had high hopes for NCsoft’s sci-fi game that promised to combine the pacing, strategy and combat styles of an FPS with RPG elements like mission decisions that altered the course of each character.