Tabula Rasa Interviews

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Written by BuckGB on November 2nd, 2007

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(I've been doing medieval fantasy for 25 years in a row, and it was just time to do something new,) Mr. Garriott, in his customary uniform of denim shirt, jeans, white tube socks and sneakers, said here at the offices of NCsoft, the South Korean company publishing the game. (The first element we wanted to focus on was fast-paced tactical combat. No. 2 was creating a dynamic battlefield where the player feels there is action going on around them all the time. And third was creating a story line that includes ethical parables and problems.)

Gaming Heaven: Player versus Enemy/Environment - NCsoft is largely a Korean-MMO style MMO company. What this means is that there is a lot of emphasis on hardcore grinding to advance your character. There is very little detail also about how characters will advance in the game be it killing aliens (grinding) or questing or perhaps alternate advancement (ie advancement via PvP). How is Tabula Rasa implementing character development, group vs solo play, and end game content? Will there be the issue that every MMO has faced when it comes to gear gaps a la risk vs reward balancing for casual players versus hardcore players?

Christofer: Grinding is something that we have tried to keep at a minumum with Tabula Rasa. Having enough content to achieve this is a Hurculean task at times. Interestingly enough though, some of the most successful games in the market are those that do have some aspect of grinding but handle it in such a way that the player never really notices since it's core mechanics are fun (Diablo is one such title that comes to mind).

Before we even approached content creation, we wanted to ensure that the player progression itself was rewarding. Much of this is attributed to the combat system. The designers of that system did a fantastic job of making it engaging with the different weapon styles, abilities and cover system. It makes the simple task of taking down an enemy that much more enjoyable and I've found myself more often than not having fun just killing enemies and leveling without even realizing it.

With that said, we have tried some new approaches towards making character progression more enjoyable for the player. In addition to our missions that run throughout the course of the game, players are able to participate in capturing and defending Control Points. These territories are constantly in flux with ownership changing between the Bane and AFS. Ownership provides new mission availability as well as experience gain while participating in these large scale battles.

We also have a concept of kill streaks which really makes the battles that much more rewarding. The more enemies you kill in succession, the higher your rate of experience gain. It's a nice balance of risk versus reward since you can gain a good deal of experience in this way, but you do have to be careful not to put yourself in a compromising situation where you're surrounded by enemies with only a sliver of health.

Finally, we've focused on providing skill diversity the further you progress rather than solely on character creation. This allows players to really experiment as they level up and see what the different classes feel like. We encourage exploration of these classes through a cloning system we have which essentially serves as 'Save Points' for your character. Not happy with your path down the soldier tier? No problem just load up one of your clones and try focusing on a the specialist instead.

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