Tabula Rasa Interview

GameSpot UK had the opportunity to chat with NCsoft’s Richard Garriott about Tabula Rasa during the recent Develop conference in Brighton, England.

Q: Are you worried that some role-playing fans will see this as too much like a first-person shooter?

A: We’ve given that a lot of thought. I think the worry is reasonable but I don’t think that will occur. I don’t play first-person shooters very much. I admire them to watch, but I can’t be a player of them because my personal dexterity is frankly not good enough. The people whose motor skills are finer than mine constantly ruin me, so to speak.

Also, I think that when you create a skill game, like a shooter, there’s not really room for advancement. The advancement is less important than personal skill. This is not the route that we wanted to go down. So Tabula Rasa is absolutely a role-playing game, it is absolutely a mathematics-based game of “my character and their attributes,” and the environment–which is the new piece–game. And environment is the part which most other MMOs totally don’t consider. And that’s the one place that I think we really shine; taking the environmental conditions into account. But I don’t think it forces you to play any more of an arcade game than other MMOs, it’s just that in other MMOs you generally stare down at your shortcut bar, and in Tabula Rasa you stare at the 3D environment around you. And I think staring at the environment is more interesting than staring at your shortcut bar and watching your reset timers cool down.