Tabula Rasa to move, Dungeon Runners to die

Rumor is going around that NCSoft is going to close its Austin game development studio and lay off all staff there. Tabula Rasa is said to be handed over to Seattle-based Arena.net (Guild Wars) and Dungeon Runners apparently just couldn't run fast enough. This comes as a bit of a surprise overall, because Tabula Rasa got a mention in the Q2 reports - something generally considered a good sign.

Future development of Tabula Rasa will reportedly be handed over to Seattle-based Guild Wars creator Arena.net, with Massively reporting that the title may meet a similar fate as Dungeon Runners if it "fails to turn the tide of subscribers and expectations." It has also learned that any future collaboration between NCsoft and Tabula Rasa principals Richard and Robert Garriot will be "limited in scope," due to a souring of relations with the Korean management team over their title's lackluster performance.

With regard to City of Heroes, a source at NCsoft's Bay Area studio confirmed with us that its development staff will be completely unaffected by the events transpiring in Austin, saying that the title's status is "sound.&

The Arena Net team, which makes the Guild Wars game, has announced their official stance on real money transactions and gold sales.

Real-Money Trading Policy

It is our goal to provide an enjoyable experience to every Guild Wars player. That's why we take the topic of real-money trading (buying and selling gold or in-game items for real-world money) very seriously. Every week, we ban thousands of accounts used by real-money trading companies, because those companies harm the game for other players by running large networks of bots to farm gold and items, spamming chat channels with their advertisements, and even attempting to steal login credentials from unsuspecting players.

How we deal with real-money traders

To help protect the Guild Wars community from the problems caused by real-money trading

As 2007 comes to a close, I think its well worth discussing what a great year it has been for the company, and using that success as a platform for 2008 and beyond. We’ve had many exciting things happen this year, with much of it providing building blocks for even better years ahead of us.

First of course is the release of Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa in November, which is a big event in the history of this company and the fruit of much labor by many current and former employees worldwide...

Also in November we had even more exciting news. We absolutely love City of Heroes and we really wanted greatly to re-invest in the franchise; the question was how to do it in the best way possible...

In August we released Eye of the North, an expansion pack for the extremely popular Guild Wars franchise. Eye of the North was a bit different from our previous Guild Wars releases in that it wasn’t a standalone product; you had to own one of the three Guild Wars titles (Prophecies, Factions, or Nightfall) in order to play,

The future is looking great for NCsoft North America. I’ve mentioned quite a few plans we have for 2008, and in addition we

The early access to the expansion will begin this Friday, August 24th, to coincide with the Penny Arcade Expo. Anyone who has pre-ordered the expansion will be able to check it out for a full 72 hours this weekend, and they'll even be allowed to carry over any items, experience, or heroes they unlock into the full release when it goes live late next week.

When I started in the business in 1994, I was fortunate to have landed in a team at Squaresoft that comprised of some of the best and brightest programmers, artists and game designers in the business. Everyone was so new to games yet so enthusiastic.

Years later, ma