While maintaining a decent sized following, NCSoft’s relatively new MMORPG, Tabula Rasa, hasn’t garnered the overwhelming response the studio was looking for.
During the 2007 Independent Game Conference in Austin, Tabula Rasa creator Richard Garriott gave his opinion on what was right and wrong about his MMORPG.
First, Garriott admitted that there were too many beta testers, which may have hurt the game’s potential since there wasn’t enough implemented content to entertain them at the time.
"We invited too many people into the beta when the game was still too broken. We burned out some quantity of our beta-testers when the game wasn’t yet fun. As we’ve begun to sell the game, the people who hadn’t participated in the beta became our fast early-adopters."
Garriott went to praise the Guild Wars team for handling a proper beta testing system. Instead of a large beta test group, the GW team only allowed close friends and family to test the game throughout its development.
"Only about two or three weeks before launch did they do the ‘open it up for pretty much anybody to play,’ when the game was basically done."
But not all things are so bad; Garriott praised the game’s marketing for attracting perspective players to the MMORPG.
"I think the formal marketing did fine. They let people know the game existed, and was coming out."
[Via Gamasutra]
