Tabula Rasa
One of the earliest genres of computer games was role-playing games, and one of the trailblazers of RPGs back in the day was Richard Garriott, aka Lord British, creator of the famed Ultima fantasy RPG franchise.
Since then, RPGs have evolved to become massively multiplayer online RPGs, allowing thousands of players to inhabit the same virtual world at the same time. MMOs let players socialize, fight together, fight against one another, and more. Garriott was one of the pioneers of this genre as well, with 1997’s Ultima Online.
Now Garriott, his studio Destination Games, and NCsoft are launching Tabula Rasa, a science fiction-themed MMO that will let you play as a human soldier caught up in a large, intergalactic war. You’ll be able to join thousands of other players online as you explore strange new worlds and battle enemy races. The emphasis in Tabula Rasa is as much on action as it is on role playing. With Tabula Rasa launching this week, we caught up with producer Starr Long, a longtime Garriott collaborator and one of the driving forces behind Ultima Online, to find out what Destination Games has planned for the game.
GameSpot: Now that development on Tabula Rasa’s launch content is winding down, what would you say was the most challenging part of the game’s development?
Starr Long: The most difficult part now is balancing three core needs: fixing stuff, improving the game experience, and adding new features. We’re improving the game experience by adding to existing features, like loadout trays for weapons. We have them for abilities now and want to add them for weapons. And we’re adding new game features, like new classes, personal armor units, and a bunch of stuff we’ve not really talked about yet!
The thing is they all have equal priority in our minds, but we still have to prioritize them. Keeping the pace of adding new content while fixing stuff–that’s difficult!
GS: Tabula Rasa is known for being a game with a lot of unique features and quite a bit of depth. How will the game make sure new players don’t get confused while they experiment with all this brand new stuff?
SL: We spent a lot of time trying to make it so you won’t be confused from the beginning of the game. For instance, take character creation. We make that easy by starting everyone off as a recruit. You don’t have to tweak any stats or anything like that without the knowledge of how you like to play or how the classes work. You focus on what you want to look like and jump in the game.
You don’t make your first character class selection until level five–after you have more exposure to the game. I think we do a really good job of not assaulting players with too many choices in the beginning when they can’t make informed decisions. Later in the game, though, there are tons of choices and decisions the players will make.
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