Voodoo Extreme recently sat down with Richard Garriott ("Lord British") at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas and talked, in detail, about Tabula Rasa. The interview is spread across three pages of text (originally posted in two parts).
Here's an excerpt from part one:
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.
Here's an excerpt from part two:
VE3D: Of those features you talked about in Tabula Rasa, which do you think will stand the test of time?
Richard Garriott: I would say it is related to the combat and user-interface approach. The sense of how to keep a game as an RPG, where my character's growth is important to facing the challenges I move through, but then to layer with that a sense of urgency and strategy…the fact the AIs are sophisticated enough to engage in tactics and behaviors that affect they way I individually consider them in real time, and yet not become an arcade game. That I think is really compelling for the next generation of MMOs. And I believe that will be the place where we do our particularly strong innovation and will be the place where most other MMOs will innovate also.