"Game design has not changed over 10 years. Fundamentally the gameplay is unchanged" says Tabula Rasa executive producer Richard Garriot. Nothing new, he says, since the release of Ultima Online in 1997. Heavy words for a veteran in the MMORPG industry.

Garriot himself was behind Ultima, and for him to criticize the industry so is nothing short of a pull for change in the MMORPG line of gaming. In fact, that's what he sets out to do when he spoke at the Develop Conference in Brighton. In his speech he criticizes the industry for "underselling" the genre, relying the too much on the fundamentals that EverQuest and Ultima introduced, and not contributing anything new.

In an interview by Develop, Garriot explains how Tabula Rasa is to change all that, bringing new levels to the genre. First is the introduction of a new type of AI in TR. The world will be constantly changing, NPCs having their own objectives and dominating different areas of the in the game, depending on the situation. This will certainly change the whole idea of farming where you just wait and kill creatures as they respawn.

Second is the environment of gaming, where players will have to pay attention to their surroundings as well as their opponent; it won't be as simple as duking it out. Also, developers have integrated a different way of growing characters. Instead of being zapped back to level 1 when players decide to change classes, now they can save/clone their character at a certain time in their growth which they can just load when they decide they don't like the result of the previous choice in moving up their class.

Lastly, TR will be centered on stories, an element most MMORPGs have taken for granted. Says Garriot:

Solo player games do a great job, relatively, of letting the players become the lead actor in an epic story, while most MMOs settle for letting no one ever really 'win' and the level grind becomes the point of life. [...] In Tabula Rasa we use instanced spaces as party based story telling centers, where you and your friends truly become the stars of the story and complete epic puzzle and story crafted spaces that culminate in grand cataclysms and profound success! It feels more like a Party based solo-player game than a 'traditional' MMO.