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GDC: Designing Tabula Rasa
An overview of Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa Lecture
After reviewing other NCSoft games such as Lineage 2, it became clear to Richard this would not be the case for future MMOs. Richard and the Tabula Rasa development team set off to fix these issues in order to save the project.
After nearly a year of redesign Richard noted that nearly 20% of the original staff was let go, and nearly 75% of the games code and art assists were cut from the game.
The result of this redesign lead to the Tabula Rasa that we now know today that places users in a time of war against the evil Bane.
Instead of using large instanced missions as the main combat game space, users now join hundreds of other players on large battlefields. The game also had a major graphical upgrade with a much more western look and feel.
"His goal was to create a language that could be used throughout the world and understood by all players no matter what language the speak. "
Richard ended his lecture by going into more detail on the symbolic language that he created for Tabula Rasa. His goal was to create a language that could be used throughout the world and understood by all players no matter what language the speak.
Richard explained that using symbolic characters such as an up-ward arrow point with a line at the top to explain distance would make it easy for users who wish to dig deeper into the games rich lore.
While it is yet to be clear if this new language will really take hold within the games community, it is still an amazing achievement.
While Tabula Rasa is still a few months off, we look forward to seeing Richards great game come alive.
--Sean Neubert
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Tabula Rasa.
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