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If you aren’t yet aware of the boring background story, here’s a brief summation: Richard Garriott, video game developer for three decades, is the son of an actual astronaut, scientist Owen Garriott, who accompanied NASA missions to Skylab in 1973 and Spacelab in 1983. Like all youngsters, Richard wanted to be an astronaut, as well. However, it wasn’t to be so due to poor vision (as in eyesight; a problem which has since been surgically corrected) and instead became a computer game developer. While I really don’t want to rehash his entire career here, suffice it to say he was very adequate at what he did, and met with great success. Skip ahead many years and this success translates into the younger Garriott having invested in private space exploration opportunities and finally being able to buy his way into astronautics (well, space tourism) by purchasing himself a $30M USD ride aboard a Russian Federal Space Agency Soyuz rocket, resulting in a stay of 12 days on the International Space Station.

It was perhaps inevitable that Richard Garriott’s simmering space fetish would result in him spearheading the development of a game with science fiction leanings, though the game leans more toward being Battlestar Galactica… on land… without usable spacecraft… and less like a decent Privateer/Freespace/X-2/Eve Online space epic one might presume. Inspired by years of festering astronaut-wannabe rejection and likely fueled by the bitter sale of his development house, Origin Systems, to EA, being able to afford the prohibitively expensive trip to space as a private citizen became a reality, and Richard Garriott left for Russia shortly after the release of Tabula Rasa to begin his spaceflight training. The personal reasons for the undertaking and the circumstances which led him to it are blandly detailed for your reading enjoyment on the website created especially for the momentous journey.

As the time passes, Richard Garriott would seem to be out of touch with his Destination Games people despite comments to the contrary but improvements in Tabula Rasa’s functionality and playability proceed steadily, though unceremoniously, in his absence, and it is soon asserted by the remaining development team survivors that the game would follow a strong, frequent incremental release format as opposed to holding back development in favour of a long period release format or even an eventual expansion pack. They remain remarkably faithful to this scheme, and monthly updates are issued like clockwork that deliver additional features, bug fixes, and an overall better gaming experience. Despite the appreciable efforts of the designers and impressive attention paid to community demands, the game seems to lose more players than it gains. Everytime I log in the population seems more and more sparse, and in higher level areas I can play for hours and never see another player, much less find a single person with whom to group. Despite the dreary daily turnout, the designers continue to add features that draw me to play the game, pursue character advancement, and just generally stroll around and enjoy the amazing worldscapes whilst slaughtering the antagonist horde.

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Tags: EPIC FAIL, FAIL, MMORPG, NC SOFT, OVERVIEW EFFECT, POSTMORTEM, RANT, RICHARD GARRIOTT, SPACE, TABULA RASA, TL;DNR, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 4:41 AM and is filed under Entertainment, Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.