Q&A: Richard Garriott, Executive Producer of Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa

1. What do you feel are the key elements in a successful MMO?

MMO’s are long term investments for players and their creators. They are a dance between player interests and developer innovations. To be successful an MMO must succeed at an ever growing list of key features. Some of the basics are: Creating a play space worthy of visitation through the likes of graphics and sound; making a space interesting and diverse enough for long term enjoyment; providing players ownership in the word that they can grow and care about; providing the constant proper level of challenge and reward to sustain motivation for continued play.

2. What do you feel are the aspects of an MMO that might keep someone from playing? In other words, what is “wrong” with MMOs as a genre?

The vast majority of MMO’s are just reworks of the examples set 10+ years ago! Perhaps due to the enormous cost and time investments, most MMO’s have not strayed far form the pattern set by UO and EQ. That is unfortunate, because those games were very clearly hard core gamer games. Even the most contemporary games out today are largely in that mold. Games where you have complex UI’s to learn, that you must level grind in order to feel accomplished, that have nearly turn based combat systems where people focus on DOT (damage over time) , where it takes 30 minutes to an hour just to meet up with your friends to START playing, will never reach the market potential we have yet to meet.

3. Tell us how Tabula Rasa is going to break the mold of current MMOs. How will it address the concerns and complaints that MMO fans have?

Tabula Rasa breaks the mold (that this team helped make) in a number of important ways. Many of its innovations are so important, I believe, that many MMO’s of the future will adopt these standards. For example: Instead of the plodding DOT turn based combat, Tabula Rasa uses a real time fast action and tactical combat system, that remains an RPG (not an FPS) by giving players the immediacy of one click = fire your weapon, coupled with sticky targeting to avoid being an arcade game, coupled with the use of cover and position to modify the RPG probabilities of damage via the attributes and equipment of characters. This creates a real time tactical RPG game play that is fast paced, thoughtful and highly rewarding. TR also has dynamic play environments. NPC’s and players will take and hold territory, such that creature spawning and NPC availability change significantly over the hours and days of game play. TR allows players to Save and Clone their characters at any time, thus players can easily explore all the options of character development without starting over to try new classes and roles. Finally for this brief discussion TR has a far deeper and relevant story line, where decisions players make along their quests are more important and lead to more relevant wins than in previous MMO’s.

4. Many MMOs are seen as being very difficult for new players to join—there’s a learning curve for the genre that many consider too steep. Does Tabula Rasa address those concerns, and if so, how? What about it will appeal to players who don’t normally play MMOs?

I agree! TR starts very gently, and has features like instant travel, and a growing class tree that allow a much more gentle introduction to game play.

5. What did you learn from your previous projects that helped with the development of Tabula Rasa?

Wow, where do I begin? One of the most important lessons is what NOT to do. On UO we simulated a great deal of sand box reality, into the game, and huge swaths of it were never appreciated by the audience and eventually ripped out. Getting players in early, and seeing what works and what falls on deaf ears is an important aspect of developing a reality that we share WITH the players.

6. What do you see for the future of MMOs? How will the games or the audience change?

I believe MMO’s are in their infancy. Most MMO’s are still based on UO or EQ exclusively. While RTS MMO’s and FPS MMO’s have yet to be proven, the RPG MMO is still far from mastered. I believe Tabula Rasa will pave the way for the NEXT generation of MMO’s. But, there will still be plenty of work to be done after that! We are a far cry from the hypothetical Metaverse, with all its detail and diversity. Eventually, MMO’s will become highly immersive hyper real places, that are not just great Virtual Reality Simulations, but more importantly, provide the compelling reasons to escape into them, that are still untouched by the current state of the art.

--Richard Garriott, Executive Producer of Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa™\