Tabula Rasa GDC presentation
Friday, May 18th, 2007 - 8:05am
Full, unedited version of Richard Garriot's GDC demo of Tabula Rasa:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/gasp/TR_UNCUT.mp4
It's a big file, but it's by far the best look at Tabula Rasa that I've seen so far.
Remember: this conversation is just between you and me ... and the NSA.
MaverickDago wrote:
Only commies pee "urine" or the devils cocktail as we call it, real Americans exude cold crisp light beer.
Awesome find!
Ton of info in there...
Garriot is a genius:
culminating quests that different quest givers can give conflicting goals
quests that spawn sidekicks to assist with the goals
logos = pictograph science based language for "spells" that will be incorporated into the world art
lazy auto target locking
enemies with multiple tactical target points
various types of cover!
This game has now moved solidly into a must purchase for me.
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
You can tell just by the way he talks that he has been spending a lot of time playing MMOs. Then in turn taking that experience creating something a bit different and with some nice improvements to the genre overall.
On an off topic side note, one of my most memorable Halloweens was getting to attend Lord British's haunted house that he hosted along the Society of Creative Anachronists(sp?) at his house here in Austin. Makes any carnival fun house, Disney ride, &c. pale miserably in comparison.
Wow I cant believe that we have more interest in revisiting SWG than in this...
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
I'm actually very excited about Tabula Rasa. This and Age of Conan, because they seem to me that they are the only upcoming MMOs that are trying to do something different. I played an alpha version of Tabula in 2005's E3 and I had a lot of fun playing one of the stages with couple devs. The action was fast paced and it's a Sci-Fi themed game! I really need my Sci-Fi fix after playing Anarchy Online for so long and being disappointed with SWG.
XBL/PSN Gamertag: KillTrash
This looks like the greatest thing since sliced bread. Action-based tactical shooting combat. The "sticky targeting" won't please folks like Danjo, but I'm just fine with it. The only problem I saw was that the combat didn't reflect the kind of decisions Garriot mentioned, flanking, ducking behind cover and all that. It looked like they charged forward without much thought to what they were doing. I hope that's just a side-effect from the demo.
Looking forward to this, I will be in the open beta!
We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all.
I've read through the thread, and I don't get that at all. I just think that TR is an unknown at this point.
Coldstream wrote:
Agreed. People don't really remember Ultima these days. They know the name but have forgotten Ultima's (and Richard Garriott's) place in gaming history. This game doesn't generate the excitement it should.
EDIT: Ah, I think I understand what you said now. Tabula Rasa is a promising MMO for a number of reasons (listed in the video, btw):
Unified class system - basically, you can explore ALL the classes in the game with a single character. That's a huge leap for an MMO, I've only seen that in Matrix Online.
Dynamic world - from the video, I'm more excited about TB's "Battlefields" than ever before. A world which lives and breathes on its own, with objectives that affect the rest of the world and constantly change. Every time you log in the world is different. This is in sharp contrast to something like WoW, where the world is basically unchanged, only added to.
Instanced main storyline - This was -very- successful in Guild Wars, and combined with Garriott's history with Ultima, I am excited at what I might find.
Action-based combat - it could work, it could work. I love the action moments in WoW, and it kinda worked in Auto Assault. I like the idea of a sci-fi ranged-base MMO, so I'm hoping for the best here.
Garriott, Garriot, Garriott. He's the Mozart of RPGs. I hope the ol' boy's still "got it" because I grew up on his games. I'd love to see his take on ethics now that he's had another 10-15 years of real life hardship and experience.
We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all.
It looks pretty good.. certainly the added time in development makes the game seem very polished from that demo footage..
Aint nothing new about the world order..it's been playing since the day they put George Washington on a quarter
85's face the truth you're too dumb.
http://www.myspace.com/armyofthepharaohs
First, I think it's interesting that as I'm reading comments, I find myself replacing 'Garriot', 'Richard', and 'Richard Garriot' with 'Lord British'. For me, that's who he'll always be.
As to Tabula Rasa, it's something I've been looking forward to for quite a while, pretty much since I first heard anything about it. While the video was pretty low quality, what I could see looked absolutely outstanding. Here's hoping to get into the beta.
@soul: FFXI and I suppose SWG in its original incarnation also had a 'unified class system'. I had a single main character that had access to every job that was in the game when I quit playing a couple years ago. I"m a huge, huge fan of this, mainly because I don't like having to reroll characters to try different jobs/classes.
Coldstream wrote:
Oh, cool. Nevermind about the classes, then. Actually, the bullet points for the game don't interest me that much. They aren't as ground breaking as I'd hope. Lord British finally making another RPG, that is groundbreaking enough.
We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all.
Well, it may not be entirely groundbreaking, but then again, what really is at this point? Most of the stuff that hasn't been done in an MMO hasn't been done because it's rather hard to do. While I'd certainly love to see them do something new and exciting, I could deal with a better, prettier rehash of everything that's come before too.
Coldstream wrote:
I was also concerned about this. Despite what he said, it looked very similar to a WoW group moving through an instance - the only thing that really mattered was what range you were at. There was one section, when the group crosses the front lines, where people did in fact seem to be using cover and maneuvering. It's possible that this was a bunch of higher-level characters running through a lower-level mission just to show it - LB's surprise at the guy dying in the demo was evident, and he did say that if you were higher level you could, in fact, just bull your way in.
I'm excited about this because it moves in the direction I think MMO's should go - dynamic enemies, dynamic worlds, away from the static mob-respawning pools that they are now. I'd love to know what their server architecture looks like.
Remember: this conversation is just between you and me ... and the NSA.
MaverickDago wrote: