The development process of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games is long and intensive, taking years of production until launch before the on-going support and sustained new content kicks in. Tabula Rasa, from NCsoft and Destination Games, has had a more tumultuous development than most, and by the time it's finally released towards the end of 2007, the game will have been in production for six years - in one form or another. Two years into the development cycle, it was decided by Destination's upper echelons (including Starr Long and Richard "Lord British" Garriott) that Tabula Rasa wasn't heading in the direction that it should. The solution proved to be quite a drastic one: over 75% of the code written up to that point was scrapped, and a majority of the team was replaced. Four years on, and the Sci-Fi set MMO is now in the Closed Beta stage of production...at last.

TVG recently spoke with Richard Garriott, self-proclaimed Lord British and ninth inductee into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame, about his latest creation - beginning with the most important one of all...

TVG: It's been something of a difficult development for Tabula Rasa, taking six years including the 'reboot' two years in; as the release date nears, do you feel a sense of relief?

Yes, as with any launch, but especially with this one. There're a wide variety of emotions here towards the end, but one of them for sure is relief on a number of levels. One, that we're nearing the end, and two, because we have a very high level of confidence about the game. At the time of the reboot, we had a particularly low level of confidence about the game. We're really very happy and excited, but of course as with every product release, it's not until we get some external eyes looking at the product and get consumers' reviews. Fortunately, the early prognosis even from outsiders is pretty good, so we're happy.

TVG: Excellent. At the moment, the game is undergoing a Closed Beta Test; how's that going, and has it thrown anything up that you and team hadn't expected?

Well the Closed Beta Test is going marvellously so far; in fact, I would say that it was probably one of the best markers of how well we think it's going. People write back with their comments, which they were making right from the first day. Some of our favourite comments, and I'm paraphrasing here, were from people who had gone out of a few missions and had come back to town to refit their character like you would in most MMOs. But then there'd be air raid sirens going off, and they'd look up and see the Bane knocking down the front gate of the outpost they were at, and streaming in and starting to wipe out all of the NPCs that were giving them [the player] missions and interacting with them. The players have jumped up and helped defend the outpost and then when all is done, they've sat back down again, and only then do they realise that "Hey, I've got Experience Points for that, and I really wasn't caring. I was caring about defending the people that have been helping me with all these missions and that I've grown to care about."

The fact that players are responding to the story and the dynamic battlefields in this way is exactly what were hoping we'd see. That's what has been an early success in watching the player feedback. I would say that our biggest challenges, I wouldn't necessarily say that they were surprising but part of this phase is that every week we ratchet up the number of players allowed in the game. Every time we do this, we find some new reason why the servers need tweaking before they can manage the next scale of activity, but we consider this par for the course.

TVG: That's fair enough; I guess that's all part of the stress testing during the Beta.

Exactly right, and as you can imagine with the stress tests, we have a number of goals. One is physically can the servers really perform as we hope. We also have to make sure that the game is selling itself properly. Finally on the one hand we want people to get as far into the game as they can to help give feedback, but we also don't want everybody to get to the end of the game because when it finally does ship you might have given away thousands of hours [of gameplay] away that you'd hoped to charge for. So to balance all of those goals is tricky.

TVG: Back in February you spoke in one interview about how World in Wacraft was the last of the first generation of MMOs, specifically regarding its feature set. Would you say that Tabula Rasa is the beginning of the second generation for the genre, and what do you think are the components that make up that generation?

I absolutely stand by what I said in the statement. I may be repeating what I said back in February, but the way I look at it is, if you look back to ten years ago when Ultima Online and EverQuest came out as the first big MMOs, pretty much every other MMO has been a derivative of those feature sets. If you even go up to World of Warcraft, which is an extremely beautiful and refined version of the feature sets. So I think that it is a fantastic example of what can be done with that first generation feature set - by no means am I knocking Warcraft, I've actually played a bit of it myself to see what I could learn about the quality of what the Blizzard folks put into their products.

That said, one of the reasons why we called Tabula Rasa, "Tabula Rasa", was to lend weight to our design philosophy, which was "This team believes that we are uniquely suited to innovate in the games business." A significant percentage of the Tabula Rasa team has worked with me throughout the Ultima series and Ultima Online, and if you look at my twenty-five year history in the business, I'd like to be able to claim that we've made a good number of important innovations down through the three decades that we've been doing this. That was our primary objective in Tabula Rasa.

I think that there's a handful of three to five key elements that prove that point and are really essential features of Tabula Rasa. The first one is combat; we have what I refer to is a tactical combat system. Compared to most MMOs, when you run around a 3D world, you come up to an opponent, you click on the opponent to make him your primary target and then you and the opponent take turns to shoot each other or whack each other with a sword or a stick in what's really a very turn-based game mechanic. In fact, the server is usually running a timing tick, where combat is effectively done. Players no longer worry about the 3D environment where you and your opponent are basically standing toe-to-toe trading shots. Instead, people focus on a mathematical concept referred to as "damage over time".

In fact, damage over time is calculated for you in games like World of Warcraft to where your whole gameplay is all about slowly beefing up your weaponry and armour to be able to inflict the most damage over time - and you play your User Interface once you're engaged in combat more than you pay any attention to what your opponent is doing. In Tabula Rasa, we set out to create a game that felt much more real-time, much more immediate, where you'd be paying more attention to what was happening in the 3D world all of the time. The way we did was by creating a game where by clicking the left mouse button fires your weapon, and when you click the right button it fires one of your abilities. The physical environment in which you're fighting an opponent is relevant; for example, cover makes a big difference to the damage calculations. If I'm standing behind some sandbags and my opponent is fully exposed, he's not going to like that so he might go and find his own cover, or find an angle where my cover isn't effective. So if he makes that move, I have to be prepared to counter with a relevant strategic result. That's just one example, but there are many more involved in how the AI of the creatures work and how environment takes effect. In our combat system, damage over time isn't nearly as important as paying attention to what's happening on the battlefield, and responding tactically to the changing states around you. I think that makes our game far more exciting and far tenser during the battles itself than in other MMOs. That's feature 'one'.

Feature 'two' I would probably point to our dynamic battlefield. In most MMOs, when you get a level one mission you go to a level one hunting ground where you basically farm level one monsters for their treasure. Then you get to level two, and you go to the west of town where the level two monsters are, and you just wash and repeat. In fact, when I've killed that monster, I can just step out of the area and that monster will fade right back in where it was so other players who were on that mission can have their chance. Personally, I find that counter-productive game design. In Tabula Rasa, we create a play space where creatures and friendly NPCs don't just re-spawn on the battlefield, they have tactical objectives that they are working to acquire and hold. For example, there are outposts all across the map and the Bane - your enemy - are working to try to take control of those outposts. With those outposts under the Bane's control, it means that the waypoint system is offline for the players, the hospitals are offline for the players, the automatic defences for that area, the force fields, the automatic turrets, the crafting stations are offline. All of the NPCs are scattered or have been killed, and so if the player does lose control of that region it dramatically affects gameplay in that area. Until players work together to retake some of those outposts, that area of gameplay will be accessible, and vice verse so both human and Bane faction NPCs continue to fight for the turf with or without a player being there or not.

TVG: So it's very persistent gameplay...

Yeah, that's right. Factor three on the list would be instance spaces as storytelling. As you know, I'm a big storyteller with the Ultima series, and I'm a big believer of strong, deep, fiction. But if you look at MMOs, their fictional depth is fairly thin, and as a player you don't actually accomplish much story wise, level-grinding is pretty much your life in an MMO, and I don't think that's great game design. So we set off in Tabula Rasa where you the player can still have very compelling story-arcs where you'd really feel that you'd had accomplished these great and glorious goals, and be rewarded in the same way that you'd feel rewarded in a solo player game, where you were the one that got to save the entire universe.

In a solo-player game, you don't really care that your next-door neighbours had bought and are playing the same game, and that they too have saved the universe because they're not in your face in an MMO space, running across the finishing line in front of you. The way that we address that in Tabula Rasa is to use our instant spaces, our private spaces, to do very detailed and complex mission structures and culminating experiences. So when you finish your instant spaces, they often end in great cataclysms like buildings being destroyed, or nuclear power plants exploding - things that make you feel like "Woah, I've done something really important". As it's in a private space, there aren't other people right in front of you or right behind you to take away from your feeling of glory. Compared to other MMOs where all private spaces are used for is as a private opportunity for additional combat areas.

Those are the three big ones, there are two more that I'd like to mention, but those three are the ones that define the second generation of MMO. One are 'Ethical Parables' - in most MMOs you do exactly what you're told because you're given missions by the good guys, and you do them so the story will continue. In Tabula Rasa, we've created a story with quite a few factions with quite a few different objectives, some of which aren't compatible with another faction's objectives. So as you receive missions, you are actually forced to pay attention to which you're favouring if you complete a particular mission. Conversely, there'll be missions where you quickly realise you'll only be able to finish a mission for one or the other of these two individuals or factions, and based on how of if you finish one of those missions, the game responds accordingly and those individuals or factions begin to show you favour or disfavour to you in the game. We think that this creates a much more compelling story, which is missing in other MMOs.

Finally, the way that our Class Tree works, along with our Load, Save, and Clone Your Character System. In most MMOs you can't load and save your game, and when you make a decision in the game to become a Fighter, then you're a Fighter for life. If you ever want to see what it's like to be a Wizard, then you have to start all over again from level one, and repeat a huge swath of content in order to level up your wizard to get to the missions that are cool. We think that every time somebody decides to start over, there's an opportunity to exit the game and try something that's totally new rather than retread through the same ground again. In addition, we also think that means that most people aren't going to try each character model because you have to re-grind from scratch every time. We've created a game where every player starts off as a recruit. Five levels later you can decide whether you want to be a Soldier or a Specialist; ten levels later if you've chosen to be a Soldier you can decide to be a Commando or a Ranger; if you've chosen to be a Ranger then fifteen levels later you can choose to be a Spy or a Sniper. But I've decided to be a Sniper and then I decide to be a Spy, I can then just reload my character when I saved it at that branching point at level thirty-five at the lowest, that he can go on and explore the other side of that tree. So everyone is exploring forward through our branching Class Tree, and we think that this makes it much less painful to try all of the character classes and the content that we've created. We think that not only will that keep players interested for longer, but frankly it means that they appreciate all of the content that we've created and so it's a win/win situation.

TVG: I guess that's half of the problem with a lot of MMOs, especially where there are two rival factions - unless you begin to grind again with a second character from the 'other side'.

That's exactly right, and that's what we set out to try and fix. So those five are the ones that I consider the biggest feature changes, but I think you'd agree that those are pretty unique for MMOs. That's really just the beginning, we've carried that same philosophical viewpoint deep down into the game. If nothing else, I believe that Tabula Rasa is not in the mould of the ten years of MMOs that have come before, and that it's striking out in a whole new direction. I think that's pretty incontrovertible even after playing the game for just five minutes.

Then the next big question is whether the new direction really work? That's the stage that we're at now, allowing players to come in and play it. We think that they'd agree that, not only are these systems new but that they're working quite powerfully together.

TVG continues our chat with Richard "Lord British" Garriott later in the week, where the Destination Games boss continues his thoughts on the future of MMOs, the upcoming Tabula Rasa, and his recent trip on the Vomit Comet with UK astrophysicist, Prof. Stephen Hawking.