GameSpy Gives Tabula Rasa A Tough Look (April 11, 2006)

[ChrisReid]

Hurleybird tipped us off about a recent GameSpy article on Tabula Rasa. We've covered a variety of recent Richard Garriott interviews and revealed the logo last week, and this new piece attempts to really dig down and look at what is really going on these days. It points out that the game has had many talented and distinguished developers involved with it, but the focus has changed and now Tabula Rasa is struggling to find itself. A fifth of the dev team has been laid off and three quarters of the initial game has been scrapped and reworked. On a positive note, the game's lead designer and publishers continue to have a lot of faith in the product, and sooner or later they'll hammer out something. We'll just have to wait to see how that something turns out.

The team was comprised of numerous game development veterans, including, among others, Garriott himself and NCSoft's star programmer Jake Song. Collectively, the team had hundreds of years of development experience under its belt, not to mention some very distinguished titles: Ultima Online, Lineage, Wing Commander, and others.

It was a recipe for disaster.

Not quite what anyone was expecting, but to hear Garriott tell it, it sounds like the most logical thing in the world. The famed game designer gave a very candid lecture on the MMO's turbulent development history...

Garriott unabashedly stated that, once upon a time, Tabula Rasa was intended to be the be-all, end-all MMO. It was to be the one that unified the then-disparate Eastern and Western audiences, and it would marry the expansiveness of the MMO with the sense of individual empowerment that the single-player RPG grants to users. The means by which the team hoped to achieve all this seem quaint at this point, because it's all been realized already; Asians and Westerners play together in games like Guild Wars and Final Fantasy XI, and, to varying degrees, it can be said that a multitude of games are approaching single-player RPGs in terms of narrative immersion.

You can check out the full article here.

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Original update published on April 11, 2006

 

[floundericious]

Online MMO games

Looks delicious, even though it has identity issues!

I'd always hoped for something like Freelancer, but MUCH much better developed in that sense. That is, I'd hoped that you could fly for factions, engage in seek and destroy missions, but actually SEE the impact on the real world. So, if you flew for the LSF against the Liberty Rogues and managed to destroy some bases and kill lots of rogue fighters...you would see less and less Rogue activity until they were eradicated from a system. They would have a home system where they'd not be able to be eradicated, but that way you could obliterate them and see few or no pirate attacks from Rogues.

It'd be cool if that real world effect was seen in prices...such as the cost of shield boosters and nanobots...so if you were in perilous areas where Corsairs and Outcasts and such were rampant...things would cost a lot, but if you whittled down the pirate forces, prices would decrease over time.

Anyways...just figured I'd drop in and ramble

 

[Lt.Death100]

Looks delicious, even though it has identity issues!

I'd always hoped for something like Freelancer, but MUCH much better developed in that sense. That is, I'd hoped that you could fly for factions, engage in seek and destroy missions, but actually SEE the impact on the real world. So, if you flew for the LSF against the Liberty Rogues and managed to destroy some bases and kill lots of rogue fighters...you would see less and less Rogue activity until they were eradicated from a system. They would have a home system where they'd not be able to be eradicated, but that way you could obliterate them and see few or no pirate attacks from Rogues.

It'd be cool if that real world effect was seen in prices...such as the cost of shield boosters and nanobots...so if you were in perilous areas where Corsairs and Outcasts and such were rampant...things would cost a lot, but if you whittled down the pirate forces, prices would decrease over time.

Anyways...just figured I'd drop in and ramble

Or you could have supply and demand. If you're in a system with lots of pirates, weapons would be few, far between and VERY expensive. Then if you kill off the pirates, there's no demand and supply is easy, as such weapons would be cheap.

 

[floundericious]

exactly

That's exactly the kind of living-world idea I was going for! It just seemed like the post-Nomads freelancer open ended part was WOEFULLY underdeveloped...just kinda left me with a "so...what now?" feeling