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Richard Garriott On Tabula Rasa

Posted by simoniker on from the amo-amas-aminibus dept.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a RPGDot interview with Richard Garriott on his forthcoming MMO title Tabula Rasa. You may know Garriott from his creation of the Ultima series, but he's now hooked up with Korean MMO behemoth NCSoft, and the interview discusses how Tabula Rasa may differ from expectations: "Tabula Rasa is not a 'virtual world' like Ultima Online or Everquest. TR is a compact social hub of activity but game play focuses on instantiated adventures for a party of players. In those instances, scripted quests a la solo-player Ultimas will be the norm."

2 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. So... by CableModemSniper · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Its a single - player RPG crossed with a chat room?

    --
    Why not fork?
  2. Re:Another Neverwinter Nights? by Shanoyu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Indeed, this is an exciting concept. The main innovation that this format allows is for the average player to become the badass in an online game that he has always wanted to be, something akin to Neo in The Matrix. This simply isn't possible in current MMORPG's because there isn't anyway to maintain gameplay balance and make everyone feel unique without an impossible millions upon millions of development hours.

    However I am slightly disturbed by his comment regarding PVP. It is more successful in the Asian market but despite that there is still a large core of people who love PVP in the North American market, just look at warcraft. The primary difference is that most people who play role playing games in the United States are steeped in the traditions of Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop RPG's where Player versus Player combat simply didn't make a great deal of sense. Come to think of it, Player versus Player combat doesn't work very well with true role playing because death has to be permanent to give the characters meaningful motivations to not go about killing each other all the time.

    Thus in competitive MMORPG's (as seen most recently in that dissertation regarding the behavior of Everquest players.) roleplaying simply does not exist, and RPG has become something of a catchall for "Playing a single character who gains statistics and power over a gameplay carrer."