Hardware News

Tabula Rasa Interview

Joe "OuTkAsT-1" Topolnisky

2007-02-19 02:54:22.0


While at this year's D.I.C.E. Summit, Voodoo Extreme caught up with NCsoft's Richard "Lord British" Garriott for a quick Q&A regarding their upcoming massively multiplayer online title, Tabula Rasa. They touch on the game's AI, end-game content and a whole lot more! Here's a taste:

VE3D: So you have things like flanking in the [NPC] AI?
Richard Garriott: Exactly. That's one of the things we've been most pleased with. When you think about most MMOs, once you've determined your best weapon and method of distributing damage, you basically end up doing that repetitively with each opponent you encounter. We've worked very hard to make sure that each creature has an AI associated with it that will change the way you need to engage it. It goes through simple things, like damage types and resistances that will make you change weapon types or abilities you're using; but the more interesting things are those that will require you to change the way you need to engage them.
So, for example, one of the opponents is the Shield Drone. An enemy Shield Drone protects nearly perfectly the enemies protected by it, so they can shoot you, but you can't shoot them. So the only way to disrupt that circumstance is for a member of your party to essentially sacrifice themselves, run inside the Shield Drone area—which now means they're going to be hand-to-hand with every person inside that Shield Drone—and they're going to have to, once inside, take out the shield drone. And so the rest of your group will focus on keeping that person alive for however long it takes for that person to take the Shield Drone down. And so I think it makes the battlefields more interesting.


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