No-one can really say, hand on heart, that this was a surprise.

While the games media was very quick to pile in whenever Tabula Rasa looked shakey, and perhaps over-zealous in their declarations of its impending death, the truth is the game was never in that good shape subscriber wise. It never did as badly as Auto Assault (which had problems beyond the game itself), but it was never called a ‘hit’ internally. At least, not with a straight face.

For me, personally, it was symbolic of the last attempt by NCsoft to do something a little bit different. At least, it was when I joined the company in 2004 – when it was still ‘unicorns in space’, and before it became Starship Troopers. Having said that, a year after the reboot, I really liked what I played in 2005 (and still maintain that if by some miracle it could have been released then, it would have been a hit) but by 2007 it was never, ever going to be serious competition to… well, anything really.

I know some people will use this as an opportunity to spout craziness like “Sci-fi MMOs don’t work!” but in reality, the truth is the same as it’s always been: not-so-great games don’t work. They can do okay, for a while, but they’ll never be hits at launch.

Nope, you need to give those not-so-great games some time; whether it’s in development (assuming you know what you’re doing and just need more time) or in public release (assuming you listen to your community and know what you’re doing).

Sadly, Tabula Rasa didn’t get it.

We have blast-off. The first ever games designer… in spaaace… etc.

No, the date wasn’t ringed on my calendar. I vaguely remember being told he was going up in mid-October, but I never paid much attention to the exact date even at NCsoft, so thanks BBC. I hope he has a safe and successful flight, and that he feels it’s worth the THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS (approximately) that he paid for the privilege.

That’s a heck of a lot of money to follow in Dad’s footsteps. If he wanted to save money, he could have gone Virgin Galactic, who’ll be charging a lot less – but then Richard’s going to be up for ten days, not ten minutes.

In case you’re wondering, that eye-popping budget was never bandied around much at NCsoft when I was there – but not for the reason you might be thinking. See, it’s all Richard’s money. (Nope. I didn’t think Ultima was that big either.) Not a penny came from NCsoft. Which is good. Because otherwise right now you’d probably be wondering just what else that cash could have been spent on.

Instead of just thinking: “So how is this supposed to help Tabula Rasa, exactly?”

Got someone to throw a glass of water over a colleague today – and caught it all on film. Boy, some days… more on what that’s about soon enough.

Working hard on everything Leipzig. Pay attention to Twitter, if you’re that way inclined (or if you’re not, the most recent updates are on the front page here) and you’ll get a minute-by-minute.

Okay, you won’t, that would be stupid, but you’ll get occasional random updates when I’m too busy to sit and type here. Tonight my brain isn’t functioning enough to do anything more creative, so you see me here, rambling.

Let’s see.

We’ve now seen whizzo 3D mockups of the booth for Leipzig/GC. They look fantastic. I was tempted to ask if I could put them up here, and might still do. I always love looking at those sort of things – photo realistic fantasy architecture. The scale of the stand is just colossal, too. We were looking at one view and someone said “We’re thinking of replacing those TVs, as they might be too small.” Without being sarcastic* I had to say “What TVs?” as I couldn’t even see them.

Some pointing revealed them – three 42in widescreen TVs… which looked like matchboxes on the side of this stand. It’s… big.

We’re recording material for episode no. 4 of the podcast tomorrow; going to try and make the whole thing a lot faster this time out, more bite-sized. Speaking of podcasts if you haven’t listened to TabulaCast recently go have a listen – John and Matt did an excellent interview with TR’s Lead Designer, Tom Potter. Tom strikes me as a really good guy (not met him yet), and I was impressed with the questions, and with the interview style. Well done guys!

Speaking of interviews, you’ll like this (although I suspect, not a lot). Martin ‘Amboss’ Rabl asked me to answer a few questions on ‘getting into the games business’ recently, and I finally got around to answering them. Honestly, I pretty much dashed off my answers because I was in a hurry. I have no way of knowing if he edited what I wrote… because naturally he translated it into German and posted it on his (official) Aion blog. So if you read German, then…

By the way, have you seen the Aion site now? It’s beautiful. Like the game. Trust me on the latter; been editing video of it all afternoon.

Uhhh… yeah, that’ll be it for now I think. Lots of video editing right now, casting should conclude next week, more Leipzig stuff is coming… and more I can’t even think through or process. G’night zzzzzzzz.

* Which most people I work with would agree, is an unusual occurrence.

I almost forgot! This went live on Friday after a few delays. If you’re fed up of listening to the sound of my voice, then this is the episode to download; I’m hardly in it!

Yep, this time out I hand over the MIC to Avatea, who talks for quite a while with Starr Long, Tom Potter and Victor Meinert – all of Destination Games, who in case you didn’t guess from the title are responsible for Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa. If you’re a TR fan you should give it a listen – and even if you aren’t, quite frankly… I mean otherwise why am I making all this effort??

As always you can listen to the podcast via a live stream, subscribe to it, or download the MP3 and do whatever you like with it in the comfort of your own home. There’s even a transcript! So enjoy.

Oh, and I’d love to hear (as always) what you’d like to see in upcoming episodes.

Hey, as I said I’d mention it – you can now subscribe to (deep breath) The Official NCsoft Europe Podcast. Just click here and Feedburner will do the rest.

Even if you’ve already listened to the first two episodes do me a favour and subscribe anyway – we can keep track of subscriber numbers that way. And of course you get the latest episodes conveniently delivered to you, in digital format, like a special delivery by a postman of the future.

Also, while I have you here: how cool was this? (No, I don’t do birthday parties. Except in person. And then I dress like a clown. And charge by the second.)

If you’d like to hear all manner of NCsoft staff talking up a storm (plus Draw the World Together artists like David Nakayama and Andrew Wildman, to boot) then Split Infinity Radio and MusicWorldRadio have you covered, baby.

I had the pleasure of talking over the weekend with Riff, AKA Scarlet Shocker, of MusicWorldRadio, and also with Simon, AKA DJ Villain, of Split Infinity. Both had plenty of questions to ask and I hope I answered ‘em well. I’d like to thank them both for taking the time out to come down to the event and do the interviews – I hope you had a good time guys, and we’ll definitely see you next year!

Keep reading for all the links and information you need….

Split Infinity Radio presents…

First of all, Split Infinity have a bunch of different interviews live. You can get to an index of all of them from this news story, but if you prefer you can download the MP3s directly. The links below are all separate MP3 downloads, so you can get each one easily. The interviews include all of the following peeps:

From NCsoft Europe

• Avatea – One-woman community commando for Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa
• The entire City of Heroes/Villains community team (that’ll be GhostRaptor, Kerensky and Palladium)
• Martin ‘Snowstorm’ Kerstein, Guild Wars guru
• Martin ‘Amboss’ Rabl, Aion authority
• .. and me, some ligger who got involved somehow…

From NCNorCal

• Melissa ‘War Witch’ Bianco, our guest of honour for the weekend and game designer for City of Heroes/Villains

From Draw the World Together

• David Nakayama, artist on the City of Heroes comic (and also now kicking ass on Marvel Adventures)
• Andrew Wildman, legendary pencil behind Transformers for many years… and of course the founder of Draw the World Together

MusicWorldRadio presents…

Not wanting to be left out of the party… Riff of MusicWorldRadio also got loads of material, including the entire Q&A session that Melissa ‘War Witch’ Bianco did on Saturday (including my ‘standing too close to the microphone causing feedback’ gaffs at the start – watch your ears folks!).

He also recorded an entirely separate chat with Melissa that’s over an hour long. If you want value for your listening download Riff’s your man, although I assure you Split Infinity packs loads into their interviews as well (If you listen to one SI chat, make it Melissa’s – good stuff).

Anyway, when Riff first put his interviews live, the traffic to his site was so great it overloaded his bandwidth, so we offered to host the interviews on the EU COH site servers. That’s where you’ll find them in two convenient ZIPs:

MusicWorldRadio Interview Set One includes chats with Martin ‘Amboss’ Rabl about Aion (28m19s), GhostRaptor (24m45s), Kerensky (18m25s), myself (30m32s – spot the blowhard) and Martin ‘Snowstorm’ Kerstein about Guild Wars (15m10s).

There’s also a short retrospective piece from Riff talking about the entire convention experience, which is a great round-up of the whole thing (thanks Riff – and by the way, August Bank Holiday? Are you INSANE, man??). Six files folks, two hours of chatter! Get it on your iPod and enjoy on your commute or in the gym.

MusicWorldRadio Interview Set Two is a back-to-back MelissaFest, including her Q&A on Saturday (Again – watch out for those ear-splitting screeches near the start…!) and a one-to-one interview with Melissa herself. Bear in mind the first part of the Q&A was done using presentation slides, so occasionally, you might not quite understand what’s being referred to (yeah, I’m going to try and get those up somewhere). However, the recording includes the extensive Q&A we had afterwards, which should make sense.

On top of that you also get over an hour (boy, can she talk!) between Riff and Melissa herself, which I’ve listened to, and is a really great chat with exclusive information in it right from the start. Face it, you’ve just gotta download ‘em all!

Again – thanks to all of you guys who interviewed us, we appreciate it – and I hope all of you who listen to ‘em, enjoy them!

Just listening to Shawn and John in Tabula Cast Episode 16, which went live today. John gives a really good rundown on the MiniCon and his experience of it – I’m very glad he managed to attend, but still kicking myself that I didn’t get to chat to him. It’s worth downloading just for that if you missed the event.

I think I’ve listened to three or four episodes of Tabula Cast today,  and I’m really starting to like it. Shawn (who I believe used to produce Guildcast, a Guild Wars podcast; he’s obviously as good at naming things as we are) has a good, easy rapport with John, and the fact that one is distinctly English and one is American really helps the flow of the audio.

Ultimately we want to have a co-host on the NCE podcast, we’ve just got to figure out if it’ll extend things unnecessarily; we also want to keep our podcasts until 30 minutes, so… we’ll see.

Anyway, go listen, you’ll enjoy I think.

This is pretty darn cool; a helpful guide to socialising when you’re not shooting bug-eyes. Found via our very own site, so it’s not like I’m telling any TR players anything new.

I feel dumb I didn’t know / hadn’t heard of this ‘GAX’ thing. Must check it out. Other note to self: start listening to more MMO podcasts… I’m behind. There’s just not enough hours in the damn day. (Having a five minute commute and a busted iPod doesn’t help.)