Richard Garriott interview

The creator of Ultima and the RPG genre itself speaks about the state of the RPG gaming world and his new epic Tabula Rasa.

atomic Your new company, Destination Games, is geared specifically towards MMO development. Given that the genre is so competitive, what do you think MMOs need to
be successful?

Richard Garriott That’s a good question. I think there are a number of factors – the MMO space is still in its infancy, and I think the rules that make a ‘good’ game are not very well understood or explored. But I think there’s plenty of ways to fail in MMOs, and a handful of ways to succeed. But they’re similar to any other game in that a surefire way to fail is to be derivative.

When Ultima Online and EverQuest came out, you could be derivative or make a game that was almost identical, and do quite well. The market was so radically under-saturated that any high-quality offering got a reasonable amount of play.

These days, though, if you do something remotely derivative, you’re pretty doomed unless you do what WoW did, which was to do it better than anyone else. In general the best way to succeed is to identify new gameplay mechanics and new ways to devise these games.


atomic What is Tabula Rasa, your upcoming MMO, doing that innovates on traditional MMO design?

Richard Garriott One of the biggest things is wanting the player to feel special; to feel like the hero in a singleplayer game. The greatest feature of online games is that you can go on adventures with your friends; you don’t have to do it alone. However, it’s come at a hefty price: Your life has become, frankly, statistically pretty average in every way. Half the people playing are of a higher level than you, and the other half are of a lower level than you.

If a new feature’s been added overnight, when you log on, half the people will have seen it before you. You basically never win; you never get to be the hero. Instead, it becomes a level grind, where you’re level 10, and then your friend goes up to level 11, so you have to grind to keep up with him, and you just repeatedly farm creatures for experience points.



atomic How are you remedying this?

Richard Garriott The main thing is instances. Lots of MMOs have instanced spaces nowadays, but in most games, the way instances are used is to give you a private space to go and beat up the high-level monsters and get the high-level drops. You don’t have to fight with the general public over who gets to kill the big dragon, basically.

In Tabula Rasa, we use instanced spaces to replicate the kinds of experiences you have in a singleplayer game. They’re storytelling spaces. You get to solve big puzzles, and complete sets of activities that result in some major success for you, and because your friends aren’t in front of you, saying, ‘I did it first,’ you still feel accomplished and rewarded as an individual.


atomic Does the player’s success in these instances have any overarching effect on his character, and, indeed, the non-instanced world?

Richard Garriott Yes, they do. There’s a number of ways that when you finish an instance, they can affect the outlying world. One I was playing earlier was set in what’s called the Province Research Center. The plot is that you’ve been seeing the dead bodies of your comrades taken off by the Bane, your alien enemies, to God knows where. And it turns out they’ve been taken to this facility, which you have to infiltrate and destroy.

If you’re successful, you’ll take the factory offline for some time, and NPCs in the world will say things like, ‘Oh, wow, what a relief! It’s good to see our fallen friends avenged, plus, strategically, there’s a lower drop of those reanimated bad guys.’


atomic You’ve said in the past that you’re not a fan of the way players have to ‘grind levels’ in order to get ahead in most MMOs. What does TR do differently in this area?

Richard Garriott Well, we do have character levels – they start at one and go up indefinitely, although one to fifty is probably the range you’ll have to begin with. But you know how in most MMOs, the first decision is what race and class you want to be? And that combination is what you have for the rest of your character’s life? So if you choose to be a fighter, and halfway through the game you want to know what it’s like to be a mage, you have to start from the beginning as a mage.

And I think that is a point where MMOs lose a lot of players. So in TR, what happens is you start by only choosing your name and gender. You start as a recruit, and after your first five levels, you make a decision about which side of the tree you want to take – for example, do you want to be a frontline soldier or a support specialist? And there are further branches from there. What’s great, though, is that you can save your character anywhere up and down this tree whenever you want.

So, for example, if you’ve chosen to go from being a soldier to a commando, and then you want to try being a ranger, you load up the clone of your character you saved before becoming a commando, and this time become a ranger.



atomic Ultima Online is obviously now what you’d call a ‘conventional’ MMORPG, but do you still think working on it has helped with
TR’s development?

Richard Garriott Oh, yes. Over the years, what I’ve become through working on the Ultima series and then Ultima Online, is what I call a ‘World crafter’. I’m someone who pays a lot of attention to detail, the world’s history, and the reality that makes it believable and compelling. And that skill has definitely helped and carried over into the new game.


atomic Finally, what are your thoughts regarding what EA is doing with Ultima Online?

Richard Garriott Umm, to be perfectly honest, I’ve only paid cursory attention to it. For a good while, they used to contact me to discuss changes. We had an agreement that if the original premises of the game were affected, we could at least consult on it, to try to keep the game in the same vein as the original. In the last few years, we’ve not done that so much, so I’m not even sure where they’ve taken it.