Tabula Rasa Interview

Develop Magazine has posted a quick interview with NCsoft’s Richard Garriott about the Ultima creator’s latest MMORPG project, Tabula Rasa.

Q: What can you tell us about Tabula Rasa’s design philosophy and how that plays into those online changes?

A: Tabula Rasa makes major forward leaps in MMO design in four essential areas I can mention here.

Firstly there’s combat Tabula Rasa has fast paced, tactical, RPG combat. While the combat is fundamentally based on characters’ attributes and equipment, players must also consider environmental conditions. Hiding behind cover is a massive aid in survival, as is crouching to assist in targeting accuracy. In most MMO’s you just stand toe to toe and trade blows with your opponent and ignore what is happening in real time around you. In Tabula Rasa, players and creatures will continue to jockey for optimal positioning in real time, adding greatly to the excitement

Secondly, dynamic world. The creatures and NPCs in Tabula Rasa have clear military objectives and move to take and hold strategic areas of the map. Making the world different each time you return. Whole outposts with all their NPCs, missions, shops, hospitals, waypoints etc, will come and go depending upon player control of the battlefield. Tabula Rasa is unlike the typical MMO, where you go ‘farm’ in the level one hunting grounds and creatures respawn right back where you last killed them for the next XP farmer to get in their level grind.

The third is real stories. Solo player games do a great job, relatively, of letting the players become the lead actor in an epic story, while most MMOs settle for letting no one ever really ‘win’ and the level grind becomes the point of life. Tabula Rasa again has a new and I believe better approach. In Tabula Rasa we use instanced spaces as party based story telling centers, where you and your friends truly become the stars of the story and complete epic puzzle and story crafted spaces that culminate in grand cataclysms and profound success! It feels more like a Party based solo-player game than a ‘traditional’ MMO.

Lastly, class trees with Load/Save/Clone. In most MMO’s your class choice is permanently made at the beginning of the game, so if you decide to try a different class, you must start over again at level 1. I think this is bad for players and the developers. In TR everyone starts as a recruit and grows their character through a branching class tree. When we couple this with the ability to save and clone your character anytime along the way, you can always explore new classes by just loading up a save of your character before the branch and going down the new path.