Tabula Rasa really looked the part through the development cycle but sadly, as with many MMOs these days, has had a dissapointing start with player numbers not as high as NCSoft would have liked. Perhaps they thought tagging the 'Richard Garriot' name onto the game title was enough? Who know.

To clear up some of the stories that have been flying around the past few weeks regarding the game's future, Producer Starr Long posted a public message and status update. In the post he clarifies the current development cycle and adds his thoughts on the layoffs following the game's release:

I would be remiss if I don’t clarify the matter of rumored “massive layoffs” within NCsoft North America and the Tabula Rasa team. While the game has not taken off as quickly as we had hoped, we also launched in an insanely competitive time frame, with several well-known intellectual properties launching follow up products at the same time. However, the fact of the matter is that we are transitioning from a pre-launch crunch-mode development team to a live service team. This is standard in our industry—you ramp up to launch a game and then ramp down once it’s live. This is what we are doing over the next several weeks, and it only affects the Tabula Rasa team. Once all is said and done, we will still have a substantial live team for industry standards. As you can see by the new features we’re working on, we’re still planning on lots of great content and updates all year long.

There has been a lot of talk about Tabula Rasa lately which doesn’t match the reality of the situation. I hope I’ve been able to shed some light on what is really going on. We have become a more flexible team and have put procedures in place in order to deliver more focused, timely content and fixes much faster than before. This has given us the ability to support our players in a much more timely fashion, which they seem to appreciate and we plan to continue.

The development team have been adding new content since release and Starr points out some of the new content players can look forward to:

NCsoft has committed a lot of money and resources into continuing post-launch development of Tabula Rasa. We have been putting new content into the game every few weeks, and we will continue doing just that. We have already added more upper level content and new features like Hybrids, and we’re working on tons of exciting content, such as Personal Armor Units (mechs and mini-vehicles that players can use and will grant them new abilities). Other features we are planning include Command Opportunity, where players will get the ability to summon entire squads of upgradeable NPCs to fight for them. Clans will be able to battle over control points, which we are building specifically for clan versus clan gameplay. Another addition we’re working on is Flashpoints, which are missions that start dynamically in a region for a number of players, whenever certain criteria are met.

Here at IncGamers we're not entirely convinced Tabula Rasa will be around for many years to come. One comment in the post realy stood out, "we also launched in an insanely competitive time frame , with several well-known intellectual properties launching follow up products at the same time". This just about sums up the problem with MMO developers, the rushing out the door factor instead of actually getting the game to a really polished state or waiting for the right release window. Are MMO developers not learning anything from Blizzard?  

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