This MMO is the latest brainchild of veterans Starr Long and Richard Garriott of Ultima Online notoriety. We caught up with them and discussed how the game is progressing!
Like the blank slate of its translation, Tabula Rasa
has felt a conceptual Etch-a-Sketch shaking and has come out entirely different
from what was debuted at E3 in 2004. The story is now a sci-fi war epic with
solid style and engaging symbolism. After reading the website I was still a bit
confused on some of the details. Fortunately Starr Long was willing to take a
few minutes with me to sharpen the image of Tabula Rasa.
GWN: Compared to video's I saw in 2004 to
recent videos on-line, Tabula Rasa has seen cataclysmic
stylistic changes. What prompted them?
Long: A couple of years ago we took the product
to E3 in 2004 and we showed the product with its original style and the average
reaction was that they didn't really understand it. With that in mind we only
really want to make successful games, we had to re-evaluate what we had done and
that it wasn't right for the market or the success we had envisioned. We kept
some of the back story, the different alien races, and the symbolic language
that Richard had created, but then we gave the gameplay more of a shooter feel.
The weapons are more traditional, though you still have powers, but their more
intelligible than using drumsticks to kill things. Much more straight-up sci-fi.
GWN: You know I�d be really impressed if you
found a way to do the ultimate in sci-fi combat drumming.
Long: Well we tried. We spent two years trying
to make it work, and it's really different and unique, but it would have been
successful to a very limited audience. The analogy that one of us threw around
was that we were making a David Lynch film with a Steven Spielberg budget.
GWN: I recently read that once you aim at the
enemy, the games will auto-target for you. Could you elaborate on that?
Long: The front end and the pacing of the game
are very shooter oriented, you have the WASD controls and the crosshair in the
middle and it feels and plays very much like a shooter, but it's still an RPG at
heart. Your character builds up skills over time, picks up different kinds of
weapons and powers and those are the large determinants of how much damage your
doing to anything you're hitting. At one point it affected accuracy causing you
to miss, but we took that out. There are some real-time elements that affect it
too, though, like if you're moving, crouching or standing still, and different
weapons are more or less susceptible to movement penalties. It's kind of a blend
of a shooter and an RPG. It's not just relying on your reflexes like in certain
console shooters where the crosshairs will pop over to a target if you're aiming
close enough.
(NOTE: FPS purists are raising their eyebrows at this point, but I urge them to
lower those brows slowly. Tabula Rasa may not be the twitch shooter of your
dreams, but it sounds like the focus is on tactics, which would work in an
MMORPG environment. Planetside tried to make the MMOFPS and failed because they
aimed at the pure FPS, and that just isn't feasible with current latency
standards. Tabula Rasa just might be the game that gets RPG and FPS fans to hold
hands around a tree, wearing flowery crowns, and singing Come on people now,
Smile on your brother, Everybody get together, Try and love one another..
right... okay maybe not. Still, the target audience is broader by taking the
focus off both twitch AND turn-based combat and shooting for somewhere in the
middle.)
GWN: An important feature to players of
Massive Online games is character customization. How much character
customization is available on a Tabula Rasa character?
Long: Character customization is set to the
current industry standard of real-time outfits. The idea being that as you find
jackets and helmets they will change your characters look based on that armor
much like Ultima Online or World of
Warcraft. However, they will be hue-able so that you can change the color
of every single piece of armor in the game. Depending on the armor, for example
one piece might just be the trim, etc.
GWN: How is Tabula Rasa
going to handle level disparity between players who wish to group with each
other?
Long: We don�t have an answer for that yet, but
we see it as an exit opportunity for a lot of players and we're definately
mindful of solving that problem.
GWN: Here's a quote: "Players will go
behind enemy
Long: Basically we want to give players access
to variables in the game that affect other battle variables in real time. If,
for instance, you go on a mission and get the maintenance code for the shock
towers which are base defenses for the bad guys and they're out on the
battlefield assaulting that base they can run up to the shock towers and enter
the maintenance code which will deactivate the towers temporarily which can turn
the tide of battle. They might also rescue NPC soldiers from prison that they
can later bring into battle.
There are also control points scattered throughout the battlefield and the NPC's,
both good and bad, are programmed to try to seek and hold those control points
because whoever owns those control points determines things like where you
respawn when you die, base facilities you have access to, and what missions and
NPC's are available. Hopefully all these variables combines will make it so that
every time you're on one of these battlefields you�re making an impact or seeing
other players having an impact in the battle.
We also didn't want NPC's standing around just waiting for you to kill them. We
wanted to make a game about war, so the NPC's are constantly fighting each
other.
GWN: So if you're standing off to the side
they're not just sitting there, they'e really going at it.
Long: Exactly, NPC's are going on patrol,
engaging in front-line battles, they�re always doing something. The only things
that are just going to be standing around are things like birds and rabbits and
things like that are not part of the main game.
GWN: But I'm sure we can still blow them up.
Long: Oh yeah.
GWN: So we won't be going on pointless missions
like, for example, killing five warthogs to make some stew for an NPC that's
entirely vestigial to the war effort?
Long: While I can't promise there won�t be ANY
missions like that, we're trying to make it so that at every certain amount of
time in your gameplay experience there are going to be things that you do that
you can see influencing the nature of the battle.
(NOTE: Obviously we're taking a page from
World of
GWN: What happens if you take all of the
control points? In short, can you
win the war on any significant level?
Long: The answer is yes, but only temporarily.
If we allowed that (winning
the war) to happen all the time, then any new player that comes on to that map
sees it in a winning state that never changes. What we want is for the map to,
hopefully, always seem different. The game is programmed to reach a sort of
equilibrium, but not instantly. You can take every single control point on a
map, but the game is programmed to react to that by sending more units and
increasing the difficulty of holding all of the control points for a prolonged
length of time.
GWN: Phat lewt, how's that handled?
Long: Standard. Kill a guy, run over to his
body, loot anything from armor to guns, to modifications for your guns, to
crafting items, etc.
GWN: What would we be crafting?
Long: Well you're not going to be crafting any
thing like chairs, unless they're going to be exploding chairs that you throw at
people.
GWN: I want to craft an exploding chair.
Long: Sorry, you'll mostly be crafting guns,
armor, and modifications.
GWN: Will we have to go out foraging in the
bushes, or mining to get components?
Long: No, all your components will be obtained
though enemies you kill.
(NOTE: Sweet.)
GWN: What kind of computer specs are you
shooting for?
Long: The best technology available to human
kind. Running the game on lower end machines will require turning down settings
for compatibility.
(NOTE: This is my only point for concern on Tabula Rasa.
A factor of World of Warcraft's success is its compatibility level. They lowered
the level of graphic complexity and focused on art to keep the game visually
pleasing. How good can Tabula Rasa look if we have to
lower the settings just to play it?)
Now that we have a better picture of Tabula Rasa, we
can officially get excited about it. I think Tabula Rasa
has the best opportunity to make an exciting MMORPG that isn't a monotonous
level-grinding time-sink, but instead is a fast paced and exciting game. Only
time, and the beta, will tell.
Interview by Christopher Means.
Jul 6, 2006