Tabula Rasa is Richard Garriott's return to the MMORPG space, ten years after practically creating it with Ultima Online. When he talks about the changes that have taken place in the market since his last title, he's certainly impressed by the commercial success. He's full of praise for WoW, up to a point, describing it as a "wonderful product" and noting Blizzard's talent for "polish" - but on a very basic level, Garriott almost seems disappointed at how little the genre has evolved since UO.
"Ultima Online was frankly a stab in the dark," he explained. "There were no giant, successful, massively multiplayer games prior to Ultima Online. So the features we put into the game were basically first attempts at what might work in an MMO space."
"Similarly, EverQuest, which was developed at about the same time - it really had quite a few differences to Ultima Online, but those two games basically established the original feature set that you now see in most MMOs."
Let nostalgia take you back to the lands you once roamed until they were cruelly taken offline and away from us. MMOGames list the top 10 MMOs that died and left us with a hole in our hearts.
I agree when it comes to The Sims Online. That game was really fun and nothing has even come close to it. I still crave a new Sims with online multiplayer. Blows my mind they haven't done anything like that since The Sims Online or even The Sims Bustin' Out on PS2.
GamesRadar - You probably think online worlds shut down because no one's playing. Actually that's rarely true. Often, when servers finally wink out, there's a thriving community patiently waiting for the end and making sad faces at the sky. Most recently it was PlayStation Home, a game that no-one apparently played but which still managed to have millions of inhabitants waiting out their own personal apocalypse on the last day.
MMO-Play gathered a list of the most disappointing MMO's in the history of gaming.
