Sci-fi Epic From NCsoft Due in Fall

By Cho Jin-seo

Staff Reporter

After six years of trial and error, NCsoft and Richard Garriott are finally satisfied with the quality of their ``Tabula Rasa'' project. The company opened the closed beta testing of the new sci-fi online computer game in the United States last week, with a plan to launch the final product around this fall.

The start of closed beta marks the game's final development stages and NCsoft isn't hiding its high expectation on it. NC has been running out of fresh ideas after the success of the ``Lineage'' and ``Guild Wars'' series. Its ``Lineage 3'' project also looks dubious at this point after the whole developing team left the firm earlier this year amid conflict with the management.

Garriott, who oversees the ``Tabula Rasa'' project from Austin, Texas, is one of the greatest pioneers of the role-playing game genre. He is best known for creating the legendary ``Ultima'' game series, including the first commercially successful massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, ``Ultima Online.

A son of a NASA pilot, Garriott also showed special interest in the fledgling industry of zero-gravity traveling and operates his own space traveling agency, Space Adventures. Reflecting on such experiences, he tries to place players of ``Tabula Rasa'' in an epic sci-fi story where they will be challenged by dynamic and fast-paced adventures on alien worlds. Garriott even created the new language system of Logos for the game, introducing a whole set of new symbols and grammas.

In an e-mail interview with The Korea Times, Garriott said that such new ideas will be ``staples in MMOGs of the future.'' The game should be launched in the United States and Europe in fall. NC is yet to decide whether to release it in Korea.