Interviews
Richard Garriott discusses Tabula Rasa – Part 2
Legendary game designer talks his next massively multiplayer project
Richard Garriott’s name is the stuff of legends when it comes to the world of massively multiplayer games. He created the game that helped put the genre on tract and even today is still thought of as Lord British. Several months ago, Garriott spoke on the topic of creating intellectual property at the Austin Game Conference, a meeting of developers, and those interested in the profession, to discuss and share ideas about the gaming industry, the problems they face, and the direction the industry is going.
At that time, GameZone was able to talk with Garriott about his take on creating intellectual property. He also talked about his pending project for NCsoft, the massively multiplayer title, Tabula Rasa.
(To see the first part of the talk with Garriott, please see http://www.gamezone.com/news/09_23_04_03_11PM.htm)
During a casual conversation with Richard the night before the Austin event, he spoke about the primary differences between building a game for the Asian market and building one for the North American market. Tabula Rasa was a title that he was trying to create to encompass both markets, but the more he delved into the area between the two styles, the more he realized that it was not a task that was easily accomplished at this stage in the life of the MMO genre.
Tabula Rasa did have, in its original design, a lot of Eastern-style mysticism attached to it. With Garriott’s decision to build the game primarily for the Western market, he was asked if the game would still embrace that mystical side.
“Absolutely,” Garriott stated. “There is the magic system in the game that has always been there. The thing that has fundamentally changed is costuming and some aspect of the principle weapons that you begin the game with – which are much more familiar and aspirational. As your character advances and you become closer to the pinnacle of your powers, and you take on more of the benefactor powers – this first interstellar race from whom a lot of this great technology has come from originally. Their stuff is absolutely still like is has been when we first started the game – it is still very angelic, it will still include a lot of the same pieces but it becomes part of the advanced game, not a part of the beginner game where you are first exposed to these precepts.”
Part of the game play is based on avatar planet-hopping and taking on roles on other worlds. Does this game have the “Star Trek” notion of non-interference in a world?
“We don’t have the Prime Directive,” Garriott said, smiling, “in fact, very much not so. Even the benefactors, part of their back story is that since they were truly the first interstellar race, if they wanted to have other friends to relate to on an equal basis, they had to help them become equals. And so their whole pattern of activity has been to freely give all their science and technology and cultural history so that other people can do with it what they want. You know, adopt the parts they want and ignore the parts they want.
“And the back story was for the majority of the places they contacted, this was a perfectly fine scheme in the sense that the vast majority of the races you encounter … I think that humanity-at-large generally desires to have peace and tranquility and technological advancements, so if an alien culture should appear and show a lot of their advancements it would profoundly positively impact humanity. However, another part of the story for Tabula Rasa is that is not always true.”
Within the spectrum of the influence of the Benefactors, there are always those who would take that pro-offered hand of harmony and usurp it for their own needs of conquering and power. So, too, in Tabula Rasa. There were those that took the technology and bided their time, waiting for the moment to strike out – the result was an intergalactic war that is raging on.
“This more aggressive group is now easily dominating the more pacifist, friendly sharing group,” Garriott said, “and that is when humanity has come into the fray. Basically this celestial war is already lost and this more malevolent group has been slowly, but surely sweeping through the universe and dominating everything, and now they are on humanity’s door.
“The way this story begins is you are brought into this circumstance. We, humanity, are very disadvantaged. We can meet, not only the remaining aspects of the Benefactor history and culture but also some of the characters from other worlds which have effectively been overrun, and helped to build a resistance and kind of turn the tide of the future back into the way of good.”
Because of the changes that have occurred since the title was unveiled at E3, has the time frame for Tabula Rasa slid?
“An unequivocable yes,” Garriott said. “We had been saying Winter 2004/2005 was our target dates. As we have been doing a lot of this thinking over the summer – honestly even when the costumes changed, that does not take that much time, it is an art shuffle. It does take time, but not profoundly. But what has cost us more time than even the stuff I’ve talked about, is one of the things we are doing and this is less of a change and more of what I call the normal due process of refinement, is that Tabula Rasa is a game about compact social hubs of activity where players can get to know each other and form groups and buy, sell and trade, and then party-based instanced activity, where we as a party, for example, can journey together on a series of mission which adds up to what feels more like a solo-player game in the sense that we have a personal story arc, and then as we go through our personal story arc we can see the impact of our successes back in the massively multiplayer space.
“Over the summer as we were thinking about it we were going ‘you know, our game does not yet feel enough like the galactic war we claim we are in the middle of.’ We had these fairly safe enclaves where you could buy and sell and trade, and we had these very dangerous missions but when you were in a mission you were isolated to the specifics of the storyline of the thread of that individual mission, and we didn’t have very many play spaces where you could actually feel the scale and the sense of the battle happening around us, or in spite of us. And that is the other thing we have been building now is these contested areas.
“Instead of the safe enclaves or the missions, there are more of these areas where you can really see … I could go sit on a hilltop and watch and see the galactic conflict taking place, with or without me, and then choose to participate in whatever way I want. It’s that kind of work we have been doing that has been taking us the time. It is not nearly as much of a change, it was never not part of the goals, it is just something that we have doubled down on because it is more important and has been less present in the game than we think it has manifested itself in the game.”
Tabula Rasa is currently set for release in the Fall of 2005.
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