I see you have a boxing match coming up inside Tabula Rasa this Friday night.
RG: We do, it's funny, there's a regular event now in TR called Friday Night Fights, that was started by the players. We noticed that a lot of the players would get together on a regular basis and have these bare-fisted matches, where often they would start new characters so they'd all be fairly low-level characters, and they'd shed all their equipment and just have a bare-knuckle fight. We thought that since this emergent behavior was so interesting, we started to support it in more and more ways. So we just began to show up, as developers, just to watch because we were enjoying it. Then we began to help the organizers keep it going and growing by giving them the ability to give out prizes. We then built some larger components for them, like boxing shorts and boxing gloves to make it look a little more professionally sanctioned, and then we ultimately built an actual boxing ring which players can access that has both spectator areas as well as places for your corner crew and the fighters themselves.
So since we've now got it we thought it would be fun to throw a boxing match that might help announce the existence of these tools we've made for the Friday Night Fights. And it just so happens that I'm good friend with two time world featherweight champion Jesus Chavez, who lives here in Austin, Texas. I've been his corner man and photographer throughout his career, and he has kindly agreed to come into the ring with me on Friday night. Whereas in the real world on the rare occasion that I've had the guts to step in the ring with him, he can truly flatten me with one shot, literally, no problem, that's all it would ever take him, in the digital playground I think I have a better chance. Not only will we be more physically matched in the avatar sense, but my mouse and keyboard skills are probably better than his, and it's my game (laughs), so we'll see. Just to be fair we've been letting him practice and, although I play a lot of TR, I haven't been spending a lot of time boxing.
We went through the discussion of whether we wanted a pre-determined outcome or play it straight up, and we decided to play it straight up. So both of us, just for bragging rights - you know, I can't possibly allow him to beat me but he'll be doing his darnest to flatten me just so that he can say he did, just like I would do to him in the physical world. He's often my trainer at the gym, and one time while doing mits, which means he's not fighting and I'm throwing punches into his mits, sometimes for the last 30 seconds of a round, he'll drop his hands and say, "Just try to hit me." And I'll swing and miss and swing and miss for the rest of round, but one time a couple years ago I actually caught him with a good body shot and dropped him. So I've taken him down once in the ring, and he was, of course, not fighting back, but it did happen. So I made up some posters and put them up in the gym, and they are there to this day as a reminder of my moment of glory in the physical ring. You know he's going to be trying to the same thing here on my turf.
(As it turns out, General British, Richard Garriott's character in TR, did win the fight. Congratulations!)
The developer blog speaks of upcoming Clan Owned Control Points. How will these work?
RG: That's one of the features coming down the pipe that I'm most excited about. Already some of the most popular battles in the game are over Control Points, which allow the human faction or the computer-controlled aliens to take over swaths of territory, and when the aliens take over a point the shopkeepers and mission-givers in that area disappear, as well as the automatic defences switching sides. This makes it difficult for players to advance in that particular area until they recapture the outpost.
Even from the beginning we've wanted to implement another fun feature and that is Clan Owned Control Points. This is a way to allow what I call the next step of depth in the PvP aspects of TR, where now, as opposed to just being human owned or Bane owned, when the humans own an outpost, it will actually remember which clan took the outpost, and provide that clan long term benefits in the form of buffs and things to their group. At periodic times, the ownership of those outposts can be contested by various clans.
Fictionally, this is like many of the world conflicts, say WWII as an example, there were lots people allied against the common enemy of Germany, however a lot those allies didn't necessarily get along so well, and as soon as Germany fell, East and West quickly began to draw lines in the sand and fight over everything from the physical turf, to the scientists that might be available, to a variety of other assets and ways to manage the future of those conquered territories. I think it's reasonable that in the fiction of TR the same thing would be true. Here we have humans from all over Earth allied against the Bane, but also we have other alien species, like the Foreans and Bran, who have their own ideas about what the world should be like after or even during the Bane occupations. That gives us a fictional justification for Clan Owned Control Points.
