Overly Positive

Hot chick on cover fails to deliver.

So, as many folks are reporting, the MMO Tabula Rasa, Richard Garriott’s latest foray into insanity, has officially been declared dead. Lots of reasons from a declining playerbase to game-breaking bugs, to short-sighted development, to Richard’s mental state have all been stated, but the important thing to say, is, another one bites the dust.

Along with Hellgate London, Tabula Rasa joins recent MMO casualties on a pile of what is commonly referred to as “epic fail”.

Not to worry though – there’s always a silver lining. Failed MMOs always bring with it a lot of depression, but isn’t it great to be free of the chains of monthly subscriptions and slogging through of content that is more buggy than under your kitchen sink? And what about all the forum posting? Aren’t you glad that even though all the hysterical people who declared the death of the game are suddenly and definitively correct, that you don’t have to go onto there to listen to them whine all day (or in this case, crow)? Surely your sanity, as a dedicated fanboi, is much better.

Losing an MMO is like losing a significant other. You might feel bad when it happens and you might even cry about it if you think no one else is looking. But eventually, you get over it, logging it into the mental list of “things you’ll never do…at least while sober”, and you can look forward to attaching yourself like a leech to the next big thing, because the next big thing is certainly and most definitely the answer and cure-all to all your problems, right? You can look forward to going to a new forum, or a new community and proving your blind, mad devotion to the game by typing in all caps and flaming the begeezus out of anyone who dares disagree with you.

Alternatively, if you’re the kind of crotchety poster who likes their MMOs with a bit of salt, just a little on the cooked side, with a temperature of 98.6 degrees and anything else is a ruined product and a failure of epic proportions, just replace all the stuff I said above for all the people who defend games with “bash them to hell while reveling in your armchair developer’s throne”.

And life goes on.