Tabula Rasa: Garriott: "MMO Design Has Not Changed in a Decade"

Our fearless leader, Richard (insert applicable a.k.a.here) Garriott delivered the keynote speech at the Develop Conference and Expo in Brighton, UK, where Develop reports he had this to say:

"Game design has not changed over 10 years. Fundamentally the gameplay is unchanged."

"Worse yet," he added was that many of those fundamentals borrowed from Ultima Online and contemporaries such as EverQuest have become standards that "undersell" the potential of the genre to consumers.

"We owe it to consumers to provide new kinds of gameplay," he added.

Combat systems, character leveling that caused players to obsesses over 'grinding' and the misassumption that AI can be replace by player-controlled characters were the features he dismantled and accused MMO developers of being overly reliant on.

Garriott added that his upcoming game, Tabula Rasa, was being designed to address these category staples, updating the genre's combat mechanics and adding dynamic battlegrounds and compelling story to the mix.

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