Tabula Rasa = Halo

So I've never really understood what it is about TR that I find so crappy. The graphics are good, say what you want about the combat, but it is at least OK - there are of course numerous "problems" with the game that everyone has gone over a thousand times here and other forums - but there has always been some indefinable quality about the game that made me almost instantly go "bleh" when I started playing. Meaning that even if TR had none of its other problems I probably still would not have liked it that much.

But I finally figured it out: TR is a MMO clone of Halo.

I've never been a big Halo fan (though I don't dislike it either), so that is probably why I didn't make the connection until my girlfriend's son installed Halo 1 on the PC we got him this past weekend. As he was playing it, I was thinking to myself "hmmm this looks familiar to me beyond any Halo-related ads I've seen." Then it hit me - it looked just like TR.

So I'm glad I finally solved this little puzzle and it helps explain partly why TR failed and why the devs made some of the design decisions they did.

1. They probably thought this would be a WoW competitor simply because of the popularity of Halo - think about it, an MMO (the game industry's darling new genre) combined with one of the most successful FPS of all time. To them it must have seemed like a can't-miss.

But of course, if that is the case, they marketed it all wrong. I would wager that the lion's share of MMORPG players could care less about any FPS, let alone the patron saint FPS of ADHD pre-teens everywhere. They should have marketed this as a hook to get those kids into the MMO -sphere rather than simply try to get MMO players into a bastardized version of a game they wouldn't play anyway.

2. It also explains to me why the game was so shallow - MMO players - even the casuals (like myself) want deep and complex gameplay with a preponderance of minutiae to keep exploration alive (even after the world has been completely run-through) and to use as achievements to show off your mastery of the game to other players.

I would wager that for the most part Halo players don't care about those things - perhaps advertisable achievements, but I doubt they would be jazzed about any of the other typical components of an RPG let alone an MMORPG.

So does this explain why TR failed so (relatively) quickly considering it had A LOT of hype going into it's release? What I'm getting at here is that it was hyped by and marketed to MMORPG players, who once they logged in and realized it had none of what is expected in an MMORPG - namely auction houses, a mail system, (real not wannabe) crafting, etc. - subsequently left the game in droves and then (like the typical MMORPG players we all are) vocalized their disgruntlement quite loudly (guilty-as-charged here).

Perhaps if TR, like Hellgate before it, had been marketed properly to the correct audience then it would have merely been a bastard step-child to the MMORPG market, but a relatively successful one, nonetheless. Or perhaps TR (and Hellgate) only serve to illustrate that attempting to combine FPS with MMORPG is destined to failure.

Personally I don't believe that - think about how wonderful an Oblivion or Fallout 3 Online would be. One of my favorite aspects of Vanguard, in fact, was that you could play it in FPS mode. I suppose in the end it might have meant the difference between being a solid niche title and being a failure if TR had merged the UI and graphics of an FPS with the design of an RPG, instead of the other way around.