Tabu..wait... Richard Garriott back from the dead

[Trippy]

All the Ultima/JRPG stuff has been split off to here:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=10156.0

[schild]

Trippy, to answer the previous question about dodging shots. I couldn't tell. There was so much pew pew pew pew pew that I think it's just based on constant dice rolls and there's so much shit going on that if you actually dodged one shot, you'd get hit by another. So, uhm, yea. Probably no REAL dodging.

[tmp]

Trippy, to answer the previous question about dodging shots. I couldn't tell. There was so much pew pew pew pew pew that I think it's just based on constant dice rolls and there's so much shit going on that if you actually dodged one shot, you'd get hit by another. So, uhm, yea. Probably no REAL dodging.

Not like you can really dodge spray of machine gun bullets anyway so that's hardly odd. From what I understand taking cover behing land obstacles and such renders the character harder to hit and whatnot which seems reasonable, if in more tactical rather than twitch sense.

[Venkman]

Remember all those videos of TR showing players standing in place while they do all of their shooting? 

[SnakeCharmer]

Makes me think one of two things: 

You have to be stationary to fire. 
Or you have to be stationary to have any hope of hitting anything.

[Merusk]

Makes me think one of two things: 

You have to be stationary to fire. 
Or you have to be stationary to have any hope of hitting anything.

Didn't I say that before, a few pages back? I'm pretty sure I did.   I also previously mentioned - not in this thread - that the 'landing ships' and what-not in the vids looked like they were very much on rails.  I know some folks were all  when they saw the vehicles, but I think the reality is far different from their imagination.

Yet another reason the lack of info to us plebs (a game magazine? Really? Who the fuck reads those on a regular basis anymore?) or even the 'non-journalists' at IGN or even X-fire is going to hurt the game.  If everyone's got their own vision building-up in their head about their wonderboy Garriot's 'new vision' and it turns out to be something less than their vision, it's going to get ugly.   You don't want to over-hype the game, but you don't want the fanbase you've got coming up with delusions of their own, either.

Really, I'm thinking the game's going to be hurting in short order.  Too much 'unknown' floating out there, not enough info & time for people to temper their expectations w/ reality.  If you hear "Deus-Ex gameplay" while thinking it's "True FPS" 5 or 6 months before launch, you can come to grips with that.  If you go in thinking "FPS" and get handed dice rolls, you're going to be pissed and not give much of a chance at all.   Doesn't this hold true for you Garriot fans thinking "world" if you were to login and find "Planetside" instead?

[SnakeCharmer]

Makes me think one of two things: 

You have to be stationary to fire. 
Or you have to be stationary to have any hope of hitting anything.

Didn't I say that before, a few pages back? I'm pretty sure I did.   I also previously mentioned - not in this thread - that the 'landing ships' and what-not in the vids looked like they were very much on rails.  I know some folks were all  when they saw the vehicles, but I think the reality is far different from their imagination.

Yet another reason the lack of info to us plebs (a game magazine? Really? Who the fuck reads those on a regular basis anymore?) or even the 'non-journalists' at IGN or even X-fire is going to hurt the game.  If everyone's got their own vision building-up in their head about their wonderboy Garriot's 'new vision' and it turns out to be something less than their vision, it's going to get ugly.   You don't want to over-hype the game, but you don't want the fanbase you've got coming up with delusions of their own, either.

Really, I'm thinking the game's going to be hurting in short order.  Too much 'unknown' floating out there, not enough info & time for people to temper their expectations w/ reality.  If you hear "Deus-Ex gameplay" while thinking it's "True FPS" 5 or 6 months before launch, you can come to grips with that.  If you go in thinking "FPS" and get handed dice rolls, you're going to be pissed and not give much of a chance at all.   Doesn't this hold true for you Garriot fans thinking "world" if you were to login and find "Planetside" instead?

I can't remember if you said it not.  I'm lucky if I can remember where I put my keys 5 minutes ago.

Anyway, as much as I've looked for info about the game, pretty much everything I know can be summed up as:
1)  No elves.
2)  People use guns.
3)  New alphabet / language thing
4)  Legos.  Or loges.  Logos.  Something.
5)  Humans vs Bane.  Gotcha.
6)  Purty graphics (from screenshots, at least)
7)  Click to target.  But not twitch to continue to aim. 
8)  Fire 'normal' shots with left click, specials with right click, movement with WASD (I think)

Not much more.

[Signe]

7)  Click to target.  But not twitch to continue to aim. 

That last is a must for me.  I might be coordinated (lucky?) enough to pull it off once but I'm absolutely not coordinated enough to be twitchy continuously. 

[Venkman]

Edit by Schild: You know why.

[Hoax]

Fuck I missed some  lovin...

Stupid TR, I dont know anyone in the beta IRL to find out info from.   

[Sir Fodder]

Starr Long interview and a new video. Not much new info, but the part about dynamic mob wars sounds interesting. It is encouraging to me that he is clear they are making an RPG and not a twitchy shooter or some please 'em all attempt at a hybrid. Too many quick ADD edits in the video to glean much on gameplay, but it looks like the characters are moving around while fighting. The character graphics look really nice IMO.

[Falconeer]

Gamespy hands-on.

Spiffy: Fast-paced combat system; "cloned" characters and open class system; Logos powers; morality-based missions.

Iffy: Combat system takes some getting used to; how much effect will "ethical" missions have on gameplay?

Earth is dead and Ilyana is a recruit for the Allied Free Sentients. She's raw meat, a fresh body dropped on the lush world of Forean to battle the Bane. She's Logos-sensitive and that marks her as potentially valuable to the campaign to destroy the Bane. Merely being able to harness Logos isn't enough to ensure her survival, though. She'll need to use all kinds of weapons ranging from laser pistols to rocket-propelled grenades to psychically-generated lightning in order to survive. Denzil's Caldera will be her trial by fire and if she fails, humanity is one step closer to extinction. Her first view of her new world is of burned-out bunkers, smoke and the screams of wounded soldiers. Welcome to Tabula Rasa.

This isn't the Tabula Rasa I saw in May of 2004. Back then the game was a bizarre conflation of eastern and western sensibilities that sported weapons shaped like musical instruments, bizarre mathematical pseudo-science and monsters that belonged more on a 1970's black-light poster than in a modern MMO. More recently, I was invited to Austin, Texas to finally go hands-on with Tabula Rasa. After a brief time creating Ilyana, my ALS "Recruit," I was dropped unceremoniously on Foreas. Foreas is a chaotic war-torn world filled with fast-moving monsters, the sound of explosions and lots and lots of gunfire.

I like this better.


"We lost a good two years worth of work." The speaker is Richard Garriott, better-known as Lord British to the legions of gamers who grew up playing his Ultima titles. The place is a cramped conference room in NCSoft's Austin office a few hours before my hands-on time with the game. Garriott and his long-time collaborator Starr Long are giving a briefing on the new game. The original, it seems, suffered from an issue of "too many chefs" and unfocused development priorities. Trying to make a game that appealed to both western and eastern sensibilities, the resulting mishmash pleased no one and the frustration on both sides caused friction among the original team.

In the end, NCSoft did the almost unthinkable -- jettisoned several years' worth of work, nearly 20 percent of the original team and the majority of the game's code base and art assets. The "new" Tabula Rasa is a much more narrowly focused product. Rather than try to redefine the MMO genre as a whole, the team is now merely trying break out of the mold pioneered by Ultima Online, refined by EverQuest and perfected by World of Warcraft.

Whack-A-Bane

"One of the biggest problems MMOs have is that they never immerse you in the world," Garriott said. "You spend most of your time pressing buttons, watching the interface and waiting for a cooldown meter to finish so you can press it again." Long and Garriott refer to this kind of MMO combat as "whack-a-mole" and claim that it's a legacy of a problem faced by the Ultima Online team. Given the connection speeds of the time, it was prohibitively difficult to synch combat in massively multiplayer online space, so the team solved the problem by taking the pacing of the battle out of the hands of players. The result was the traditional "round-based" combat used by most MMOs since.

Tabula Rasa's combat is different. As Ilyana appears on the planet her AFS trainer runs her through the basics. Combat is in real-time, and movement, cover and range are extremely important and battlefield positioning will be critical. Indeed, at first glance, the game looks like a first-person shooter and when I face down my first Bane, I treat it as such. I kneel down behind some rubble to shoot at a Bane soldier and then duck behind a shattered column to avoid its return fire. Then I see the Bane's bullets dodge around the column and nail me anyway. Tabula Rasa is demonstrably not an FPS and playing it as such is guaranteed to get an avatar killed.

At its heart, Tabula Rasa remains an RPG with RPG-style statistics-based combat. That means that when Ilyana fires a rifle at a Bane soldier, the game juggles a whole lot of character skill numbers really fast to determine if the shot hits or misses, how much damage it does and whether it causes any secondary effects. The difference is that the pacing -- the "pulse" of combat -- is placed under the player's control. Players want to keep moving and utilize cover not to mess up an opponent's aim, but because all of these effects are taken into account when the computer rolls its virtual dice. Combat is more about situational awareness and timing than either twitch reflexes or speccing out maximum DPS. Winning a fight means holding fire until various parameters snap into place that maximize the chance to inflict damage. Many of the monsters in the game are built to take advantage of this system. One of the Bane's floating gun platforms (called a "Predator"), for example, is essentially unkillable from the front and will require coordinated effort from a team to hit the platform in its weaker rear armor.

It's these shifting parameters that the Tabula Rasa team hope will make the world far more immersive than the standard MMO. Rather than creating a static universe filled with mobs that wait around for the player to kill them, Garriott and his team are working on what they call "dynamic battlefields." NPCs in the game will have their own agendas and will pursue them whether or not the player is present. AFS and Bane forces will launch assaults on each other's bases and many of these attacks will be successful. This causes the planetary maps to constantly shift. A player may have a quest completed, for example, and be unable to turn it in because the position that held the NPC that made the request has been overrun. Some of the rarer loot in the game won't be rare because of the mobs that guard it, but because the players will have to arrange assaults on strongly held Bane fortifications just to have the quest for it become available.


I saw this in action myself during Ilyana's "Denzil's Caldera" missions. When I had taken her through some of the basic combat maneuvers, the sergeant NPC doing my training told me that the Bane were holding a secured position in some ruins up ahead. A force field guarded the door and several anti-infantry cannons guarded the force field generators. I found myself in the company of a group of computer-controlled howling commandos charging teeth-first into this little nightmare. To my shock, these guys were good. They worked together to open holes for me to slip through so I could fire rocket-propelled grenades at defensive emplacements and set charges to blow open the force field.

When I had taken down the door I found the place inside swarming with Bane. I shot up a couple and the NPC sergeant told me not to worry about killing every Bane I could see. I should just carve my way toward a control point in the center of the ruins. The control point was a glowing red column of energy and once I reached it, it took a few seconds to turn blue. An enormous transport swooped in from nowhere, dropping off fresh combat troops that finished off the remaining Bane. Non-combat personnel including trainers, vendors and quest givers took up positions around the ruins setting up defenses and crafting stations. It was one of those moments when your whole perspective shifts. What had been just a mission location suddenly transformed into the game's first town and quest hub. Apparently this happens a lot in the world of Tabula Rasa.

What's the Word?

When the Caldera had been secured, things calmed down a bit for Ilyana and I was able to explore a bit more about the setting and gameplay structures of Tabula Rasa. It seems that in an unspecified future, humanity is on the verge of mastering its global sandbox and its own penchant for self-destruction when a cosmic monkey wrench in the form of the Bane shows up. The Bane are a peaceful collective in that "submit to us or die" sort of way. After they essentially burn Earth to the ground humanity gets a last-minute save thanks to alien technology that allows them to make a quick escape and join an underground multi-species resistance movement called the Allied Free Sentients.

The good news is that humanity may hold the key to finally defeating the Bane. It seems that certain humans are sensitive to the power of "Logos," a mysterious pictographic language that, when appropriately combined in the minds of an attuned user, can alter the very fabric of space and time. Logos is an actual language devised by Garriott and it's festooned liberally throughout the game on walls, obelisks and in various hidden places. It can be translated (thought it's not necessary to do so in order to play) and Garriott expects big fans of the game to look for and translate the hidden passages in the game to uncover more about the game's back story. For those of us just interested in blowing stuff up, the acquisition of Logos symbols is one of the game's driving dynamics (there are over 130 of them and many will be extremely difficult to acquire). One of the first missions offered to Ilyana was to enter a nearby cave in order to find the Logos symbol for "Power" that will allow her to fire telekinetic lightning bolts.

After acquiring my first Logos power, I take some time to run some one-off missions, working to level up Ilyana. At level five, I'm offered my first specialization choice -- "soldier" or "specialist." Tabula Rasa's class system is designed so that players can tailor their class experience based on the way they like to play the game. This first choice splits the game between those who like being front-line soldiers and those who enjoy taking on more supporting roles. As characters continue to level up, the classes get more specialized through four tiers of differentiation.


According to Garriott this allows the players to make choices about their characters based on their experience in the game rather than at character creation when they don't really know what they'd like to do. Such traditional character development scenarios are filled with what Garriott calls "exit points," moments when players look for a new game rather than working their way up through lower levels again. The game even allows the player to clone an avatar at any point in order to try out other decision branches.

Ethical Dilemmas

Ilyana's first five levels are split between running operations for the AFS proper and making the acquaintance of the Foreans, the indigenous inhabitants of the game's first planet. The Foreans are a generally peaceful, ecologically-minded race that desperately wants to kick the Bane off their world, but aren't willing to destroy their planet in order to save it. According to Garriott, this will cause some conflicts with the human contingent of the AFS who mean to destroy the Bane by any means necessary and open up a serious can of ethical worms for the player.

Garriott, of course, is justly lauded for introducing the ideas of ethics to computer RPGs in Ultima IV. That game made the development of a character's virtues as important a part of the game as level, loot and killing power. Tabula Rasa hopes to take this dynamic to a new level by offering several sub-factions within the game that offer a variety of ethical dilemmas. "Broadly speaking, the AFS are the good guys and the Bane are the bad guys," Garriott says. "Between that black-and-white view of the world, though, there are many shades of gray."

Many of the quests available in Tabula Rasa will be offered by mutually antagonistic groups and will force the player to make decisions that they may feel uncomfortable with. In one example, there is a mission arc within the game in which the player will be tasked with destroying a dam in order to deny the Bane access to a vital area. The problem is that there's an innocent village that will be wiped out by the exploding dam. Does the player follow orders and wipe out the village or do they attempt to warn the village and risk allowing the Bane to get a foothold in the area? According to Garriott, there won't be any "right" or "wrong" answers, just unappetizing choices that the player will have to live with.

In my own case, Ilyana's first ethical dilemma came about as a result of a trip to an AFS prison. It seems the AFS managed to capture a Bane Thrax Soldier -- something extraordinary as most Bane die before submitting to capture. The problem is that in order to keep the Bane alive, the AFS needed Bane food; the prisoner simply couldn't process anything else. Naturally Ilyana drew the short straw when it came to assignments and she was assigned by a medic named Campbell to get this monster's lunch.


The mission to get the food was exciting, if a bit routine. Head out to a Bane base camp, click on glowy food packs and try not get shot. The interesting bit happened after I got back. I suddenly had two options when it came to turning in the food packs. I could turn it in to one Agent Franz who was going to use a combination of drugs and starvation to wrangle some information out of the prisoner. I could also listen to the entreaties of the Bane itself, a conscript Thrax named Thull who promised to repay my kindness if I gave it the food directly without allowing the food packs to be drugged.

I now had a choice to make, neither of which made me feel particularly good. Give in to short-term compassion for an enemy prisoner and miss out on information that might save the lives of other AFS soldiers? Be a good soldier and give the food to Franz knowing I was sanctioning torture? How to know which was the correct course? My one act of compassion might open a door to freeing the Thrax from Bane control. On the other hand, the Thrax might be lying to me to play on my sympathies. According to the members of the development team, there's no real "right" answer in terms of moving the game forward. Picking either choice would provide the same item or monetary reward, but it will open up a different series of missions -- one involving the human intelligence services and one involving service to the Thrax. Both will eventually lead to a satisfying conclusion to the Forean story. The difference will be how the player feels about the Bane, the humans and themselves.

Unfortunately, all that would have to wait. My time with Tabula Rasa was over and I still had a lot of questions left unanswered. Could the Thrax be turned around? How far could I go and not truly betray my people? How much effect would these different missions have on the resolution of each planet's story? Will this matter at all to the power gamers who pride themselves on never reading quest text? Good questions, to be sure, and now that the space harps and cosmic unicorns have been jettisoned in favor of big guns and flesh-eating aliens, I'm much more eager to find the answers during the game's scheduled release this fall.

[Tmon]

I now had a choice to make, neither of which made me feel particularly good. Give in to short-term compassion for an enemy prisoner and miss out on information that might save the lives of other AFS soldiers? Be a good soldier and give the food to Franz knowing I was sanctioning torture? How to know which was the correct course?

Easy you clone yourself and try each choice and take the path that gives the best reward.

[Xanthippe]

Spoken like a true min/maxer.

This sounds very promising.  I'm indeed looking forward to it.

[WindupAtheist]

Gamespy hands-on.

stuff

I just got a boner.

[Vinadil]

I now had a choice to make, neither of which made me feel particularly good. Give in to short-term compassion for an enemy prisoner and miss out on information that might save the lives of other AFS soldiers? Be a good soldier and give the food to Franz knowing I was sanctioning torture? How to know which was the correct course?

Easy you clone yourself and try each choice and take the path that gives the best reward.

I know this was likely sarcastic... but it sounded like the reward was the same (present reward) either way you go, and the only difference was in future missions.

Honestly, though, even the ability to pick different things will stop being "Ethical" to me quickly if it has no effect on the outside world.  The first couple might make me pause to consider what is "right", "wrong", or just "best"... but after a while I will see that regardless of what I choose the storyling goes on about its merry old way.

Hopefully each of these little ethical decisions will shape the face of a server (world) so that different servers actually see different story arcs.  It is well-past time we see a MMO that actually delivers a truly dynamic world/story-line.  That is really at the HEART of the RPG and has never made it into MMO-RPGs yet.

[Sky]

Hopefully each of these little ethical decisions will shape the face of a server (world) so that different servers actually see different story arcs.  It is well-past time we see a MMO that actually delivers a truly dynamic world/story-line.  That is really at the HEART of the RPG and has never made it into MMO-RPGs yet.

You'll never see that in any mainstream mmo. Dynamic worlds like UO are just not going to happen outside niche products like Second Life or AtitD.

The problem with mmoRPg is that nobody wants to RP, they want phat lewtz. Mainstream anything is not going to be RP. Deal.

[Nebu]

Run to camp at xxx, yyy and get 5 food packs.  Return with food packs for your reward. 

AWESOME!

[HaemishM]

Seems like a lot of good IDEAS in that preview, but at the same time, a lot of stinkers. The shots tracking you around objects is going to be one of those things I'm used to with MMOG's and will continually disappoint me. In a game with magic, it doesn't bother me as much. In a game with pewpew lazers, it bugs me a great deal.

But it's all in the execution. I'm highly skeptical.

[Merusk]

Seems like a lot of good IDEAS in that preview, but at the same time, a lot of stinkers. The shots tracking you around objects is going to be one of those things I'm used to with MMOG's and will continually disappoint me. In a game with magic, it doesn't bother me as much. In a game with pewpew lazers, it bugs me a great deal.

But it's all in the execution. I'm highly skeptical.

Meh, it's a roll system.. I'm glad to see they released some info finally, and I'm surprised I was so close on the DeX reference.  But better that it comes out NOW than later, because you could almost hear the 'wtf' in that "writer's" explanation of what happened.

Now if they'd release some info about what ELSE happens, or if it's all just pew pew, next mission.

[Hoax]

MMO's that try to sound like they are full of single player game features almost always fail to deliver on most of those features.  My excitement meter has pretty much redlined on this one after that interview.

[Venkman]

Bleh. NDA. Good writeup though it that it tries to make more real the hands-on version of the game. They didn't get to play very long it seems, which makes sense. Good coverage of the concepts versus what's actually in the game they were able to play.

[Tmon]

Easy you clone yourself and try each choice and take the path that gives the best reward.

I know this was likely sarcastic... but it sounded like the reward was the same (present reward) either way you go, and the only difference was in future missions.

Honestly, though, even the ability to pick different things will stop being "Ethical" to me quickly if it has no effect on the outside world.  The first couple might make me pause to consider what is "right", "wrong", or just "best"... but after a while I will see that regardless of what I choose the storyling goes on about its merry old way.

Hopefully each of these little ethical decisions will shape the face of a server (world) so that different servers actually see different story arcs.  It is well-past time we see a MMO that actually delivers a truly dynamic world/story-line.  That is really at the HEART of the RPG and has never made it into MMO-RPGs yet.

Yeah it was sarcastic, and I agree the "ethics" thing loses its punch if there is no real difference between the outcomes of your choices.   In a single player game I can see these psuedo ethical choices being a useful mechanic but in a mmog they just become another step on the path to ding gratz.  Unless there are some paradigm breaking mechanics in this game I'm pretty sure that if I choose to drown the village it will still be there for someone else to drown or not drown later, so there's no real reason to get all worked up about the decision and aside from the few RPers who still play these games no one will.

[Vinadil]

Where does the difficulty come in programming a dynamic world?  It seems like WAR is trying to do it with their PvP system.  From what I understand you could have a series of instances that occur within a set time, lets say 50 happen in 1 day and then the "score" is counted.  Side A wins 40, Side B wins 10... the bar moves towards Side A.  Once the bar hits a certain level (meaning they win enough games or enough days), all of a sudden the persistent world map experiences a pre-designed stage.  If the other side does not step it up then eventually Side A is knocking on their doors and ready to conquer their city.

Now, in TR's case it seems that Side A will be PCs and Side B will be NPCs... so it is ALREADY partly in the hands of the devs as to how/when/if the storyline progresses.  I don't buy the whole "people don't want to RP" thing... almost all of the people I game with enjoy it.  That does not mean they don't also enjoy the ding/loot... but the two don't have to be mutually exclusive do they?

Is there some huge coding barrier here, or are we just dealing with a game mechanism that nobody thinks will work so they don't even try it?

[Margalis]

It depends on why you mean by "dynamic." Your question is too vague to answer.

Having a set number of pre-fabricated world changes would not seem very dynamic after a while to some people, while to others that might be the bees knees.

[Vinadil]

Ok... well "dynamic" means that once me and my friends go "save the town" from the incoming horde of whatevers... that the next adventurers coming by actually see a town there instead of a quest to "save" the town.

At best it would be Very RTS style where the town would only be a Town Center.  That TC might give quests like we all know and love: 1) Bring me more boars (if you want to have more villagers in the town) 2) Cut me some trees (if you want more buildings) 3) Kill the local animal population (again population or maybe income/trade related).

Basically as the new players come in they can do simple quests to help build up the town... because in a dynamic world there is going to be an attempted Takeover by the "others" at some point in time.  Where the town is on the map might have something to do with that.  The closer it is to the "starter" village then the longer the timer on the take-over.  But, if ever the PCs stop doing the newbie quests then the town will eventually begin to die down (unless it is a REALLY cool system where you have PvP as well as dynamic PvE and the towns-folk become their own quest-doers until other PCs come kill them and burn down the village.)

I don't really care about the whole "If I kill the dragon then nobody else should kill it!" kind of dynamic because that is too single-playerish.  But, just in a few minutes of brain-storming people should be able to come up with repeatable, dynamic quests.  They are repeatable in the sense that a RTS match is repeatable, or a FPS match is repeatable.  You go in, accomplish the directive, "Win", see a result... and then if you keep winning you keep moving... until you start losing.

I guess I see it similar to SB (only game I can compare it to that has an actual player-defined world) but where the Players are competing against some Computer mob (even manned by live devs if need be) instead of or as well as against each other.  Perhaps I only have a year or so to wait and see how it works out... it just amazes me that it has not been implemented yet.

[Calandryll]

Both UO and Asheron’s Call had similar things to this. Asheron’s Call probably had the best ongoing story quests and content of any mmog, even to this day. And you can still go back and play those old stories even though you missed the end result. Now they may not have been as dynamic as you are talking about (I am not sure) but the players had to interact with the story in order to move it forward.

In UO, my team released a bunch of content called the Scenarios. In many of these, players could control the outcome through their actions. In the first one, a group of savage warriors attacked the Orc forts, pushing the Orcs out of their homes and into the human cities. In order to drive the Orcs out of the cities, the players had to both fight the orcs in the cities and fight orcs/savages in the Orc forts. Depending on which side the players killed the most, the other side would eventually control the fort. So on some servers there are savages in the Orc forts and in others there are Orcs. Once the forts were settled, the players had to fight a final battle in the cities. As the players fought, the spawn ramped up and they had to keep a good pace of monster killing to finally drive the Orcs out. If the players didn’t show up or if they let up during the fights, the monsters would never go away. On some shards, it took more than a week to finally free all of the cities.

We did similar things in later scenarios such as requiring players to build magical devices to open a dungeon. We spawned these devices all over the landscape along with NPC guards that players had to kill. Once they killed the guards, they had to open a panel on the device and play a quick puzzle game to disable it. Once enough devices were destroyed, a dungeon was opened (the enemy lair), and the players had to perform a series of steps (some combat, some not) to free the newly created Gargoyle city. The city started out as a place full of monsters, but once the players won the dungeon, it turned into a regular city with NPCs, shops, etc. Saving the city also changed the spawn on the landscape as the evil group responsible for enslaving the gargoyles lost their foothold.

The last scenario actually required the players to defeat “plague” monsters in order to save the town of Yew. If they failed, then Yew remained overtaken by a swamp. If they won, it went back to a forest. On more than a few shards, the players lost and Yew, as far as I know, is still covered in swamp. We caught a lot of flack for that because some players assumed they couldn’t “lose” despite our warnings that they could. :)

The thing is, for all of that story telling and dynamic content, guess what the number one reason was for participation? Loot. The scenarios only lasted a year unfortunately. And despite AC having some of the best ongoing dynamic content of the time, it was also the smallest of the “big 3” mmogs.

[Sky]

The thing is, for all of that story telling and dynamic content, guess what the number one reason was for participation? Loot.

The mmogtards have brought the genre down upon themselves.

That's why I sit on the fringes and occasionally pine for something better, but it's really not going to happen on any big-budget title, because of the need to cater to the LCD, which is happy with phat lewtz and clicking through quest dialogues to get to it faster rather than reading and participating.

The thing I remember most about UO events was people just showing up to kill everything in sight.

[Vinadil]

Hmmm... I could see myself being of the "loot" mind also before I started playing in a guild.  I am not sure, but I think guilds in general have evolved a GOOD bit since the days of UO and AC1.  Guilds tend to play games for bigger reasons than the loot.  I know that for us whether it was SB, WoW, or whatever, we set our own goals and played the game accordingly.

I could see guilds getting behind some of these scenario things in a large way.  Of course you would still have the masses and need to be able to get THEM behind the main Guilds.  I can see it kind of like the average American considers himself a part of some NFL team even though he will NEVER get to see all the content that the players on that team get to see.

So, how do we get people to feel accomplishment from watching other players actually DO the accomplishing?  Hmmm...

PS - wish I had not missed those days of UO/AC... because that scenario style of gaming is right up my alley.  Of course, that is now, some 9 years later... maybe I would have been one of the "where'stheloot" guys back then too.

[Calandryll]

Hmmm... I could see myself being of the "loot" mind also before I started playing in a guild.  I am not sure, but I think guilds in general have evolved a GOOD bit since the days of UO and AC1.  Guilds tend to play games for bigger reasons than the loot.  I know that for us whether it was SB, WoW, or whatever, we set our own goals and played the game accordingly.

I could see guilds getting behind some of these scenario things in a large way.  Of course you would still have the masses and need to be able to get THEM behind the main Guilds.  I can see it kind of like the average American considers himself a part of some NFL team even though he will NEVER get to see all the content that the players on that team get to see.

So, how do we get people to feel accomplishment from watching other players actually DO the accomplishing?  Hmmm...

PS - wish I had not missed those days of UO/AC... because that scenario style of gaming is right up my alley.  Of course, that is now, some 9 years later... maybe I would have been one of the "where'stheloot" guys back then too.

Yea, don't get me wrong, there were a lot of people who enjoyed the stories. We also had guilds that were very organized and took part in the scenarios together. They were a lot of fun and I was very disappointed when they were discontinued after I moved onto UXO.

But for the most part, if the monsters didn't have what was considered good loot, the players left the monsters alone. :)

[Venkman]

Ok, so the primary goal was to collect loot. However, I think this focuses too much on loot, allowing people to think "mmotard loot-whores killed UO". I think the real problem was that players were looking for a reason to participant.

The real problem with this genre in terms of story isn't the quality of the story. It's that the story doesn't matter to one's character abilities. It's the same thing we'd been discussing in the LoTRO Taxi thread. Yes, it's nice that a big selling point of LoTRO is story. However, that story, good though it is, can be completely ignored. Because, again, knowledge of that story does not contribute to you being better or worse at the game. Basically, the story and the game mechanic are mutually exclusive.

That's not a dig on LoTRO, nor any MMO. They all do it. Or, actually, don't do it.

The reason stories don't matter is because there's very little choice to make in MMOGs these days. You are either progressing or you are not. You can't make wrong decisions except those that incur XP debt or a lost shot at a rare loot. That's not choice. That's not getting the pellets.

Real stories fundamentally link to character accountability in the game. And it's not just about reading some solo quest. It's about making choices that affect the world. The last real NPC accountability system I've seen in this genre is EQ1's Faction system.

But there's a reason I said "NPC accountability." Player to player accountability is already here, in Eve, in SB, in any full PvP game where your actions affect the game world and those playing in it. Of course, this also exposes a deeper insight into just how many people want this level of immersion.

So to me we need to flesh out the NPC accountability, to bring Ultima IV back to this genre, to make stories and actions have a noticable impact on the public space, or at least zones in which people can go.

Yes, that means the game will be different three years after launch. So? The tech is there now to let the live team focus more than ever no content. And anyone who thinks MMOGs are the same three years later even now hasn't quit one shortly after launch and returned three years later.

Embrace the change. Then facilitate it. Let old timers be veteran demigods in the game, even if it's just statues named after them.

I think this is what AC1 was trying to do. Why it's only been AC1 since, I'll never understand.

[Hoax]

An eloquently worded post about why I'm always wishing for more sandbox/virtual world player accountability, meaningful pvp and all that jazz.  This post alone almost makes up for all the dumbass slap fights (including the LOTR thread) we've had around here while we're waiting for a game worth talking about to launch.

Bravo sir

/tips virtual hat.

[Slayerik]

Rumor has it, big push of beta invites went out.

Might not be a bad time to check your emails :)

[SnakeCharmer]

 

[schild]

PM OVERLOAD.

We're not doing a private forum for Tabula Rasa. More details on this later.

And for those wondering, I wanted to have one.