Famed game designer Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa launches this week. Is it truly the "blank slate" that the game's title implies?

The expectations around Tabula Rasa are understandably high. Garriott is a forefather of the MMO movement, being creator of Ultima and the subsequent Ultima Online. The sci-fi MMO Tabula Rasa is his latest work, coming out of the NCsoft Austin studio, where he is executive producer. Here, Next-Gen speaks with Garriott about his latest work and more general design challenges in MMOs.

Next-Gen: What was the best design decision you ever made?

Garriott: Unquestionably the decision to focus on what I nowadays call ethical parables; starting way back in Ultima 4.  Doing things like that really anchored my place in the industry.

What was the worst design decision you ever made?

Again I can answer this one unquestionably. During the development in Ultima 8 I became a temporary believer in the idea that shipping a game during a specific retail window was more important than filling out the laundry list of content that I believed the game should have.  This was a major tactical error on my part.

What features of Tabula Rasa do you think “push the genre”?

There are at least three major areas of noteworthy innovation in Tabula Rasa:

Fast paced tactical RPG combat. The 3D environment is taken into account in the hit and damage calculations.

And the dynamic battlefields. While in most MMOs creatures respawn where you killed them last, our creatures all have agendas which include attempting to take and hold strategic territory. There will be whole outposts which can fall under their control depending on the player’s actions.  This is necessary for a truly living world.

How we include story in an MMO.  Story is not well done in games in general and it’s specifically hard to do in an MMO.  We tie ethical parables to strong audio visual payoffs to try to push the genre in that area.

What do you think or hope we’ll see from MMOs in the next five years?

I’m actually somewhat disappointed that in the last 10 years the MMOs that have come out have been a refinement of the EverQuest model.  I really do believe Tabula Rasa will at least push that forward.  I hope over the next five years developers will try and push the envelope even further.  This segment of the industry still has enormous growth potential.

As for specifics, I think there’s a lot of room for growth in AI and physics.  Good AI is critical in making a compelling virtual world to play in.  And now that our (the user’s) hardware is more capable of dealing with physics we can experiment a lot more with making intuitive gameplay based on physical principles.

No game ships with everything the designers want.  What feature was hardest to let go?

Player controlled vehicles. We have NPC controlled vehicles; we just didn’t have time to finish polishing the player controlled system.

Also, an auction house. There are lots of ways to play with the loot drops but to really make that feature sing really requires trade between players.

Might these features come back in future iterations of Tabula Rasa?

Certainly. Ongoing updates will be going on constantly. Every few months we’re going to take bigger features like the ones just mentioned and add them to the game. Also, every year we plan to put in a big marketing push and add an entirely new planet. Mycon, the third planet will probably be available next year.

Tell us a little bit about your process.

We’ll sit down with a few primary over-arching goals.  A blend of major over-arching aspirations that we want to add or fix from the genre.  We then start to cull those ideas down to which of those ideas would work within one game.  When we have one group of ideas that reaches a high enough peak that’s when we know we have a game ready.

Then we start assigning design teams to suss out the specific mechanics.

It’s very difficult to put a design on paper and say that’ll be “fun." It’s only through implementation and iteration that you can determine what is fun.  

Then you have to know when to stop. You have to avoid feature creep. It’s easy to believe that your game needs an infinitely long list of things to make it as cool as possible. You need to build on the kernel of the idea.

Where did you get the idea for Tabula Rasa?

We’re ex-Ultima folks, we didn’t want to do a medieval fantasy or even a Star Wars or a Harry Potter. Almost any idea that you can think of off the top of your head is going to be poor. Really great ideas require expensive amounts of research and experimentation.

Give me an example of such an idea that made it into Tabula Rasa.

Symbolic language. I needed to solve two problems fundamentally. I’m a Tolkien-style believer in a fully-constructed language because it adds to the authenticity and the immersiveness of the alien culture. Of course, for gameplay reasons, I wanted this language to be easy to read, but clearly it’s hard to invent a language at all, much less one that’s easy for anyone to read, so I started to pour through books on linguistics and symbolic languages. I studied everything from hieroglyphics to Chinese pictograms. Through this journey I realized that I could create an entire language pictographically, then I spent two or three months trying to do that and do it well.  

Most of the best ideas in our games were hard fought like that.  I’d like to think that most of the best ideas are.

What are the ethical questions behind Tabula Rasa?

Tabula Rasa was very different from how I approached Ultima. In Ultima I came up with a series of virtues and tried to explore those. I wasn’t aiming for a system that was “the truth” or the truth of ultimate reality (though I think they make pretty good guides to live by) but they allowed for exploration and that was the key.

So (when making Tabula Rasa) I took a step back and said to myself, 'what was the point of that system, why did I do it in the first place?'. It provokes thought. In most MMOs we boil down quests to “kill three orc” or something of that nature. I wanted players to think of both sides of the issue. It’s to highlight the diversity of the reality of our world and the parties making decisions in it.

Each of our planets has a story thread. Foreas has an environmental thread to it. On Arieki the question is more 'what does it mean to be a criminal'.

Why should people care about Tabula Rasa, beyond the standard bullet points?

At least one reason is the team. This is the team that has regularly provided some real milestones. We were right there at the start of RPGs and MMOs, we brought in the ethical parables and now with Tabula Rasa were hoping to make a lasting impact again.  

Tabula Rasa is really different to other MMOs. In a decade of refinement I really hope that people will take a look at Tabula Rasa and at least see that it is something new.