Garriott Brothers Q&A, Part Two

GameDaily BIZ has released the second portion of their interview with long-time game developers Richard and Robert Garriott. Here’s a bit to get you started:

Q: One of the common complaints I hear about MMOs is, “Oh I just don’t have the time,” or “When I leave the world for a bit and come back it’s all changed.” You know, these people don’t want to be like that Korean person who sat in front of his PC playing for days until he keeled over.

Richard: Yeah, totally right. What I left out [before] was the 30-minute play cycle. If you think about it, U.S. gamers unlike Asian gamers who are willing to sit in a chair for three days, American gamers want to be able to sit down, find something to do, accomplish it, feel good about it and get out of the game. And if you look at most MMOs to even get into the game, to find a friend, to then start on a mission takes an hour. Then to just do something together and coordinate it amongst you takes multiple hours, and any one session is guaranteed to be hours in length. And then the worst part of the level grind in my mind is that any creature more than two levels farther than you is usually death to you; anything that’s two levels or less than you is valueless to you. And so if you’re not grinding at the same rate of dedication as your friends, you can’t even play with them after a couple days because you get outside of each other’s level brackets.

And going back to the solo-player games, like I used to do in the Ultima series there are a lot of other games that were much better balanced than Ultimas have been historically, but in a well told story it’s not your level that lets you go past this point on the map; like with most MMOs, there’s this “fence” called monsters two levels higher than you that you cannot penetrate, and that’s the way they meter new content to use through that “fence” known as levels. And the way I did it in Ultima and the way we’re doing it in Tabula Rasa is you still want to feel like you’ve accomplished something before you can move on to new content; that’s your reward, the new content. But the reward should be having solved the problem or discovered the key or gotten a special clue that you need, a secret word to give to the black knight to get past him; it’s not your level.

And so we’ve created a game where level is much more irrelevant, that as you explore the world it’s also full of waypoints… if I log on to a game an hour after Robert, he’s wandered an hour away and so it takes an hour just for us to get to each other to start playing. Tabula Rasa for example is set up with all these waypoints so that anywhere you’ve already been you can get to [quickly]. And that way for us to get in and to get to the game we can just teleport basically.