Garriott skirts PS3 online games in Brighton

By Patrick Garratt Published 25 July, 2007

Details "hopefully" this year.

NCSoft MMO dev legend Richard Garriott keynoted Brighton's Develop Conference this morning, talking loosely about upcoming sci-fi title Tabula Rasa, but failing to add detail to the E3 announcement that the publisher is to create PS3-exclusive online games.

"Hopefully by the end of the year we're going to be able to announce what they're going to be," he told Eurogamer after the speech.

Garriot showed a single slide during his presentation containing the NCSoft, Sony Online Entertainment and PS3 logos, saying only that the time was right to move MMOs onto consoles with the current generation of hardware.

"Up until the latest generation there have been a lot of hurdles to get past," he said, talking of the complexity of business models involved in the previous cycle of console hardware.

Garriott's history in the MMO industry and innovations in Tabula Rasa took up the bulk of the presentation, with the "one of the oldest developers in the world" (at 46) detailing unique combat, battlefield and narrative-telling systems for the game.

He also talked about "unifying all the chat systems in all of our products" before the end of the year, whereby players across the full NCSoft suite of MMOs - such as Lineage II, City of Heroes and Guild Wars - will be able to find players involved online in other games. Garriott mentioned a provisional "star" system, which will allow players to affect the game experiences of other players in other games. He didn't go into detail.

Develop runs all week in Brighton, UK.

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