One of this year’s highlighted events was Richard Garriott’s “Designing Tabula Rasa”. While loaded with many very interesting peaks into the design process for creating a large scale MMO, the lecture seemed to focus more on the many problems Tabula Rasa was faced with during its development.

While it is not unusual for a developing game to go back many times to correct minor or even major issues with gameplay, it is unusual for a game to go back and almost completely start over with a very different management structure.

In this situation many might be afraid to point out such failures, but not Richard.