Richard Garriott talks about Spacetime Studios in Gamasutra Interview
GS: Tell me, what is Spacetime Studios working on for NCSoft? [The company has signed a deal with NCSoft for an MMO, but almost no information has been released on it.] What can we know?
RG: Well, one thing I can say is that they’re in Austin, Texas. And most other companies in Austin, I would say two-thirds or more, are ex-Origin companies. And the founding members of Spacetime, most of their previous work was with games like Star Wars Galaxies for Sony, and most of that group’s previous work was on the Wing Commander team back at Origin.
So it’s a team we know the members of very well. We know their skillsets very well. I think they’re one of the premier development groups in the world, generally doing things associated with sci-fi and space travel. And those guys are working in the general area of their comfort zone, and embracing the next generation of sci-fi games. So I have really high confidence in the team, but the details of the game are still secret.
GS: Besides that it’s sci-fi!
RG: [laughs] And I think we actually haven’t made that official before, but that’s okay! But yeah, these guys are a really experienced development team. A lot of the principles of their design philosophy they can repeat easily. And they’ve done some really innovative stuff already.
GS: Let’s get a little design-philosophical, if you don’t mind, regarding the concept of an MMO in space. What can we do beyond what we’ve seen historically, beyond running around grass and hitting guys with swords and magic? How do you get beyond those standards and create an experience that is still an MMO, that takes advantage of space and sci-fi?
RG: I think one of the biggest challenges of space-based MMOs, or even something like Auto Assault, which used cars [is that] vehicles of any kind represent a whole other tier of challenge. Because then you have to have not only interact personally, but then you have to also get in a vehicle. And the vehicle presents movements issues, and now different combat issues. And I want to make sure that my personal character comes through in vehicular combat, in a way that seems consistent and relevant with the hand-to-hand game.
It’s almost like taking two whole games and marrying them. In fact, I don’t know how familiar you are with Ultima, but even then I used to have 2D outdoors, 3D dungeons, and sometimes 3D towns. All these different modes of operation that were really different games, that multiplied the complexity. So that, actually is the biggest challenge, is how to marry them and not either A) double the work, or B) fail on one side or the other, make one of them the one you invest your time and effort into and the other one superfluous.
I think the Spacetime guys are the right people for this challenge, in that this is the same problem they’ve been facing for twenty years. And I think they have some really outstanding ideas, especially now that the team’s unbridled from previous intellectual property that had its own rules. They can create a game purely based on what the gameplay should be, and not based on needing to include components that support a particular IP.
GS: So the space sci-fi MMO that Spacetime is working on is an original IP.
RG: Pretty much everything that NCSoft does is new IP. Which brings me to another interesting story that you might enjoy! Origin was also about new IP, almost never licensed IP, and we think that that’s important on a couple of levels. When a new genre or new platform exists, and there’s no competition, in my mind there’s no reason not to have new IP.
If you’re the only cool fantasy role-playing game, people will buy it. And you now become the original IP. And so you’ve now created a sequelable intellectual property that you own, that you can then resell, you can license…you become the hub of the value.
However, later in the cycle, when you’ve already got your Ultima and your Might & Magic and you’re going to do yet another Ultima game, you need Dungeons & Dragons or Lord of the Rings to separate you from the now hundreds of competitors.
The downside of that is, if you don’t own the IP, you can’t sequel it, you can’t license it, you can’t do anything else. So it’s a one-shot deal that you can hopefully make some money off of. For example, going to Sony with their experience on, say, Star Wars Galaxies. They’ll go, ‘Well, it was cool to use it,’ but they can’t sequel it. And they split the profits, and so I think at that point they start thinking that original IPs are a better idea.
Read the entire interview here.