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Tabula Rasa: E3 Preview
MMORPG.com Writer Carolyn Koh is attending this year's, modified, E3. Yesterday, Carolyn attended a session with NCsoft that saw her make her way through all of the games that they were displaying. In this article, Carolyn reports on the state of Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, the upcoming Sci-Fi MMO from the creator of Ultima.
I followed a slender gray clad figure with a black beret down the hallway of the hotel. Spurs on his fancy stitched black cowboy boots jingled with each step. "Had to be" I thought. "Who else could this be but our charming, gregarious Mr. Garriott?" I called out. He turned. Indeed, it was.
;)
Tabula Rasa is Latin for "blank slate", and hearkening back to the origins of the game, he asked if any of us were familiar with the game or had seen it previously. I was the only one that had seen it in its pink unicorn incarnation before the slate was wiped clean again for this futuristic shooter build.
This is Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa. It's an MMOG with tactical combat - not your point, acquire target and shoot with self-homing ammo, but targets were only acquired if you were actually "on target" with where you were pointing your weapon. Complete with back-story, world history, language and lore. "In most MMOs today," Richard told his audience of three, "stories are frankly irrelevant. In Tabula Rasa though, it is important to pay attention to the stories you are hearing; to the information you are getting." As he tells us, a player can and will receive contradictory information and to move forward in the storyline, he will have to make a decision, and decisions do matter.
"I believe in the Tolkien style of development. A story to be believable, a world that is immersive, will have to have a history, a language, a culture, a style."
;)
In Tabula Rasa, Richard has created a series of worlds inhabited by the Bane - your adversaries and the Allied Forces, backed by the Eloh - your friendlies. He has also created the pictorial language of the Eloh that he simply called pictographs. "Players collect these pictographs and as they decipher the pictographs, they unlock abilities and skills."
In a 20 minute presentation that also included Q&A, Richard managed to cram in some salient points. He brought our attention the very sparse UI, showing only icons representing the right and left mouse buttons which were your weapon and skill respectively, quite unlike the hotkey bars of many current games.
"The lack of clutter allows players to concentrate on the action," explained Richard, "the design is deliberate. Instead, we impart a lot of information from the target ring. When you are being shot at or are shooting someone, the color tells you whether you are completely exposed or behind some cover." The graphic of your character being hit also shows you the direction of fire.
Players enter the arena of Tabula Rasa like they are dropping into an action movie. The battlefields of Tabula Rasa will be filled with NPCs - both friendlies as well as enemies battling each other. Each has a script and you are one among many. We were shown several different battles, mobs and mini-bosses. I asked about character leveling and experience and if there could be many players as well as friendlies attacking the same enemy. "Kill-stealing is not a factor that will be encountered with our experience sharing formula." Said Richard, and if it were, he assured us it would be taken care of.
;)
One very interesting concept shown was the ability to "clone" your character. You start off as a recruit and make choices to specialize in one form of combat or other along your development. At any time along that path, you can basically save your character stats and "clone" it to a new character with new look, new gender if you so choose, and name. Therefore, if you wish to try another class or specialization, or simply wish to take a different route in the development of your character, you may, without having to restart from ground zero. You may not be able to do it with the exact same character, but you don't start from scratch again either. The number of "clones" available to a player has not yet been determined, but as of E3 2007, there were 16 slots available.
"Instanced spaces are a great way to provide detailed puzzle and storytelling arenas," said Richard, "as you progress along the story arc, you move from the open battlefield into these instances." This was designed to be a natural progression rather than the abrupt "gather outside then zone in" feel.
Another concept is that of "ethical parables" - the choices the game presents players in story arcs and quests. We were run quickly through the "Sacrificial Lamb" quest where we found at the end, that to keep an Eloh device powered up, someone had to be sacrificed, and the player has to make that choice. The goal, said Richard, was to provoke thought and contemplate the ramifications of those choices.
;)
As we rapidly ran out of time, we were shown the home bases where you could equip your character, the medical tent where you respawned if you died; the crafting stations to create weapons and bombs. We also saw battlefield control points which players could attempt to take. If successful, it would turn from enemy controlled to friendly controlled points. As we watched, a player character created detonators then disabled the forcefield doorway of an enemy control point with it to enter it and "flip the switch" so to speak, turning the Bane control point to that of the Allied forces.
Tabula Rasa is currently in closed beta and with a launch date of Fall 2007, most of the content is already complete. It looks good. Really good.
Keep your eye on this space. More information is coming, and soon.
Tell us stuff we dont know.
Tabula Rasa shines in PvE but nothing about PvP except the arena thing.
I hope this one lives up to all I hope it will be..
I have faith in Lord British, if anyone is to make a successful, "new and different' MMO, it's him.
I am conflicted when it comes to this one. I'd like to trust Garriott, who in my opinion is the true father of the MMORPG, but I am also dismayed at all the limitations the original Ultima Online thankfully lacked. But I'll give Garriott the benefit of the doubt, and I do enjoy the idea of a worthy non-medieval MMORPG.
I cant wait till this game comes out. I have been put off by MMO's for a while since playing WOW where the people are rude and alot of first MMO timers. Also i like the fact that you can hide and shoot in real time. Thats awsome. I been looking for a game like this for yearrrrrrssss. BRING IT ON!
Im curious to see how interactive the enemies in TB are. I see that they attack the human bases in a manner which is reactive to human activity. That in and of itself makes people care whats going on. Having a mechanic in place doesn't mean there is a score being kept.
How hards to hard? If the enemies can take back the land they've lost will people grow weary of clean sweep missions to access areas? Will people actually enjoy it perhaps? All in all the game could offer some very interesting opportunities to test out some better pve mechanics.
Nice to be getting a little more information from this game now that we're just a few months from release though the article really doesn't say all that much. But the impression from it seems to be that the game could be worth checking out.
But the first part of the article makes is sound more like Garriot is trying to be a writer with all that focus on story, history and even a new language just for this setting. It's like he wants to be a sci-fi Tolkein or something. This is a game. Gameplay should be first and foremost in EVERYTHING. The idea of providing players with conflicting information and being deliberatley confusing just to keep with the 'story' sounds idiotic. The story should NEVER take precedence over gameplay. We'll just have to see how it's applied in the game.
There could be some worthwhile ideas in this game though, the whole cloning feature sounds particularly attractive.
And is it just me or does it look like they're using City of Heroes art for the interiors? :)
Some people care about using their brains. A pretty polished product is not always paramount. Some people want depth of plot too. He can have both, and just because there is a good story doesn't mean that the gameplay is not first on the list. You assume that the one precludes the other. That doesn't need to be the case. But different gamers want different things.
Auto Assault was also new and different, but look what happened there. A lot of traditional MMO players didn't like it.
When TR releases, i'm wondering if the traditional players will be able to adapt to something different. It's going to be interesting to see the aftermath when both sides collide.
All I can say is that being a Richard Garriot game I expected so much more, hopefully they pull out some awesome stuff before release or I will pretty much lose all faith in MMOs.
You're only half right. In a FPS, story doesn't matter. In an RPG, the story has just as much to do with the game as the gameplay. They are equal in importance.
Great story but bad gameplay? I can read a book.
Bad story, but great gameplay? I'll play checkers.
What do you think made Ultima such a success as a series ( not just online)?
People cared about Lord British and the world of Britannia. The gameplay brought them in, but the richness and beauty of the story, the details of Britannia, her King, and her citizens, kept the people there.
As far as the conflicting info, making players consider consequences and ramifications of doing one thing over another has been one of the backbones of the RPG genre from the beginning. Just because recent game devs have lost sight of that in the search for the "WoW Killer", does not make it any less important.
I played UO about a year after it was released and then up until they cut off it's balls. I can't ever remember caring about Britsh or Britania or anything but making money and killing people. As far as having a storyline, there wasn't one. There was a background story explaining the world, but that was it. Unless of course you are talking about when the Kilrathi crashed in Britania. It was the gameplay that kept it going, along with being the first mainstream MMO.
That's not to say that gameplay is everything, storylines are needed imo. To me WoW's gameplay was quite repitive and bland. You had to play a certain way or you failed. But it had some fun storylines, such as the Onyxia storyline, that kept the game entertaining for me.
Long story short(too late), to me, you really need a good mix of both to be a great game. If you've got only gameplay, it's going to eventually get boring. If you've got only storylines, you're going leave when they've run their course.
I loved UO for the first couple years I played. And I can't put into words how sick and tired I am of WoW clones and the same old Hobbit/UO/EQ/WoW/Vanguard type environment. So I'm dying to play this game and wish they'd send me a beta key already.
I have much respect for Garriott and agree completely with his method, yet I remain casually shocked (if that is not too much of an oxymoron) by the overt action-saturated simplicity of Tabula Rasa. It seems very much like an NCsoft product and very little like a Richard Garriott product. I am not seeing the depth at all. I am sure Garriott has it all very clear in his head, but I am not sure it is coming through to us.
A buddy of mine made a 30 mintue video for me and some friends of him playing BETA. General gameplay is a semi-fps grinder where you go around killing the same respawning mobs constantly. There's some escort missions, and solo and group instances but overall the game doesnt seem very deep. Graphics are great and the drop ship stuff is cool at first but loses its shine after a while. I must agree with some of you, this is definetly not a Garriot like game, but then again maybe Garriot doesn't smell like Garriot anymore :P 2 words, pod people :)
I admit to being a Garriott fanboi from the Apple II Ultima IV days, where Plot, Character, Setting and Storyline mattered, and explorations of "What is Virtue?" were important .
Ultima Online failed because EA destroyed it by putting quick profit before quality gameplay.
If Tabula Rasa sucks it will be for the same reason - meddling by NCSoft suits who care more about making money than they do about Creating a Masterpiece.
i agree with this 100%
Second: all off you guys have a valid point (almost all) ;) the main thing that concerns me is the fact that Mr. Lord British himself, could create Ultima online (besides the single player games that is) and then make both language and history, as he claims, in a sci-fi tolkien style, but in such an almost superficial manner...i mean...sci-fi fps..fair..but sci-fi fps only with little to no real gameplay backbone..hmm doesnt seem like him, i for one, so far, lost quite a bit of my hopes.. just my opinion. no offence intended
Who's your friend so he can get kicked out of Beta for breaking the NDA.
A vid of your friend doing squat doesn't mean anything, I can vid me playing any game doing nothing and claim it's pure grind. Until the NDA's fully lifted, the only people who'll risk the NDA are people who don't care if they get caught i.e. the ones who don't like it.
Atleast they havent wasted any time in development, how many times have this game been to E3 anyway?
Oh glorious hype.... it is never to soon to hype.
I agree with Urmaker's agreement! One more thing...I love Airspell's signature.